Silda Spitzer: The political wife as a prop

We’ve witnessed this “morbidly iconic American tableau” before, said Maureen Callahan in the New York Post. It’s “the wronged political wife, head up, dazed yet ennobled in her suffering, standing beside her disgraced husband.” Last week, it was an ashen-faced Silda Spitzer’s turn to stand silently but dutifully by her man, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, as he announced his resignation following revelations that he frequented high-priced prostitutes. Previous members of this political chapter of the Tammy Wynette Club include Dina McGreevey, Wendy Vitter, Suzanne Craig, and, of course, Hillary Clinton, said Mara Tapp in the Chicago Tribune. For some reason, today’s political wives not only must put up with their powerful husbands’ infidelities. Now, when the men get caught, their wives must also serve as “display spouse,” whose stoic presence at the podium says, If I can forgive him, so can you.

It’s hard to understand why Silda went along with that role, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. She’s a smart, high-powered Harvard Law graduate who gave up a lucrative corporate practice to help her husband’s political career. “A part of her must have wanted to wring his neck.” Why would someone this accomplished, and this betrayed, willingly suffer such public humiliation? Why, to project solidarity and support, of course, said Debra Saunders in the San Francisco Chronicle. So much for the idea that feminism has liberated women from servility to men—even men who betray and shame them in public. “If we have to see the wife, couldn’t it be as she is throwing his suits, socks, and golf clubs on the sidewalk?”

Let’s trust the wives to make that decision, said Deborah Douglas in the Chicago Sun-Times. Who are we, who know nothing of the state of the Spitzers’ union, to call Silda a fool? Sticking by your spouse, for better or worse, is the whole point of marriage, especially when there are children involved; the Spitzers have three. By not cutting and running when things get worse, Silda Spitzer and her sisters in sorrow are doing the honorable thing. “They should be uplifted and supported, not denigrated and second-guessed.” I might go along with that, said Katha Pollitt in The Nation, if a cuckolded man were at that podium for a change, standing by the political wife who had cheated on him. “If the roles were reversed, do you think her husband would stand up there, bravely, nobly, silently? No, he’d be in the corner bar—or down at his lawyer’s.”

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