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So Maureen Dowd has a slightly caustic column about Elizabeth Edwards' new book, which details her reactions to her husband's affair, online today here. She says that Elizabeth is dragging John out for a public "flogging" and then notes, of Elizabeth's bewilderment about the affair: "She may be smart, but she doesn’t seem to know much about men." It's hard to imagine a man writing this acerbically about another man's savvy about the other gender. But I'm curious: Who agrees with MoDo, and who thinks that she's wrong to describe this book as a public "flogging"? Does John Edwards merit a flogging, in any case?
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So Maureen Dowd has a slightly caustic column about Elizabeth Edwards' new book, which details her reactions to her husband's affair, online today here. She says that Elizabeth is dragging John out for a public "flogging" and then notes, of Elizabeth's bewilderment about the affair: "She may be smart, but she doesn’t seem to know much about men." It's hard to imagine a man writing this acerbically about another man's savvy about the other gender. But I'm curious: Who agrees with MoDo, and who thinks that she's wrong to describe this book as a public "flogging"? Does John Edwards merit a flogging, in any case?
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Meghan, I think Maureen Dowd's column on the Edwards debacle now chronicled in Elizabeth's new book, Resilience, is spot-on to call the media spectacle the book has spawned a wife's public flogging of her errant husband. What I find off about Elizabeth's take on the matter is her seemingly recurrent positioning of her husband as a victim of a wanton woman. After John revealed his affair to her, she called for him to “protect our family from this woman."
"It didn’t occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work,” Elizabeth writes in her book, “he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line ‘You are so hot’ and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.”
Targeted? Rielle lying in wait? Give me a break. When it comes to adultery, women too often posit the other woman as the enemy, their husband as the victim, the affair the two had some kind of sordid transgression that never would have happened were he not coerced by this Jezebel. Too bad that in her attempt to share the truth, Elizabeth got mired in the quagmire of not vilifying her husband for his misdeeds enough.
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Meghan, I think Maureen Dowd's column on the Edwards debacle now chronicled in Elizabeth's new book, Resilience, is spot-on to call the media spectacle the book has spawned a wife's public flogging of her errant husband. What I find off about Elizabeth's take on the matter is her seemingly recurrent positioning of her husband as a victim of a wanton woman. After John revealed his affair to her, she called for him to “protect our family from this woman."
"It didn’t occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work,” Elizabeth writes in her book, “he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line ‘You are so hot’ and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.”
Targeted? Rielle lying in wait? Give me a break. When it comes to adultery, women too often posit the other woman as the enemy, their husband as the victim, the affair the two had some kind of sordid transgression that never would have happened were he not coerced by this Jezebel. Too bad that in her attempt to share the truth, Elizabeth got mired in the quagmire of not vilifying her husband for his misdeeds enough.
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Meghan, Susannah, I think we have to give Elizabeth Edwards some credit for what she does do. That moment where she portrays her husband as the victim of the vixen Rielle is really the only blind spot in an otherwise brutally honest—cringingly honest—account. Whether or not this counts as a public flogging, as Maureen Dowd suggests, is really beside the point. The typical thing for a political wife is to cover for her husband, stand by him on the stage the way Eliot Spitzer's wife, Silda did. And for that we liberated feminist types gave her a public flogging. I suppose Elizabeth did that to some degree, by standing by him during the campaign. But then she undid it, by writing this book which is a tick-tock of the entire affair, including his lies, the cheesy come-on line she has to know will make it to late night TV ("You are so hot") and more lies. And then she goes on Oprah and says she doesn't even know if she loves him anymore. Mixed in with whatever we fault her for is some serious moxie. What other political wife has ever done that?
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Meghan, Susannah, I think we have to give Elizabeth Edwards some credit for what she does do. That moment where she portrays her husband as the victim of the vixen Rielle is really the only blind spot in an otherwise brutally honest—cringingly honest—account. Whether or not this counts as a public flogging, as Maureen Dowd suggests, is really beside the point. The typical thing for a political wife is to cover for her husband, stand by him on the stage the way Eliot Spitzer's wife, Silda did. And for that we liberated feminist types gave her a public flogging. I suppose Elizabeth did that to some degree, by standing by him during the campaign. But then she undid it, by writing this book which is a tick-tock of the entire affair, including his lies, the cheesy come-on line she has to know will make it to late night TV ("You are so hot") and more lies. And then she goes on Oprah and says she doesn't even know if she loves him anymore. Mixed in with whatever we fault her for is some serious moxie. What other political wife has ever done that?
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Meghan, Susannah, I think we have to give Elizabeth Edwards some credit for what she does do. That moment where she portrays her husband as the victim of the vixen Rielle is really the only blind spot in an otherwise brutally honest—cringingly honest—account. Whether or not this counts as a public flogging, as Maureen Dowd suggests, is really beside the point. The typical thing for a political wife is to cover for her husband, stand by him on the stage the way Eliot Spitzer's wife, Silda did. And for that we liberated feminist types gave her a public flogging. I suppose Elizabeth did that to some degree, by standing by him during the campaign. But then she undid it, by writing this book which is a tick-tock of the entire affair, including his lies, the cheesy come-on line she has to know will make it to late night TV ("You are so hot") and more lies. And then she goes on Oprah and says she doesn't even know if she loves him anymore. Mixed in with whatever we fault her for is some serious moxie. What other political wife has ever done that?
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Hanna, I hear what you say about moxie. What interests me about Edwards is that she doesn't fit any clear mold. She seems at once very strong and very vulnerable. One almost feels that in the very fact that she has lived with advanced cancer for such an extraordinary length of time. On the other hand, Susannah's close reading of the passage about Rielle Hunter is spot-on, to my ear. In this description of how the affair began, Edwards uses language that implicitly depicts Rielle as a fierce, amoral hunter (her last name, after all), and John as little more than biological silly putty; if Elizabeth doesn't quite make John out to be an innocent pup, she does suggests he is merely too pliable. The agency is all the Huntress's.
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Hanna, I hear what you say about moxie. What interests me about Edwards is that she doesn't fit any clear mold. She seems at once very strong and very vulnerable. One almost feels that in the very fact that she has lived with advanced cancer for such an extraordinary length of time. On the other hand, Susannah's close reading of the passage about Rielle Hunter is spot-on, to my ear. In this description of how the affair began, Edwards uses language that implicitly depicts Rielle as a fierce, amoral hunter (her last name, after all), and John as little more than biological silly putty; if Elizabeth doesn't quite make John out to be an innocent pup, she does suggests he is merely too pliable. The agency is all the Huntress's.
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Meghan, Susannah, Hanna, I think Maureen Dowd is right when she asks: Why is Elizabeth Edwards dragging this scandal back before the public? It just makes her look naive and foolish, and reminds us what a slimy cad her husband is. Dowd mentions, as have so many others, that Elizabeth herself could have been a successful politician. Her situation now speaks to the dangers of subverting one's entire life to the ambitions of someone else. Anne, I also agree that Margaret Thatcher doesn't get the credit she deserves for being a path-breaker and a role model. But also a model was her husband, Denis. He had been a successful businessman and while he was supportive of her career, he mostly stayed out of the way. Angela Merkel's husband, a scientist, barely ever shows up for her official events. These husbands of successful, ambitious women are perhaps better role models of what we should expect of a political spouse than Elizabeth Edwards' head cheerleader.
And while we're on the subject of ambition and marriage, Dahlia and Hanna have a fascinating look at why so many of the women on the short list for the Supreme Court are single. They raise the point that the pressures of getting to the top of the legal profession may discriminate against women with children. So it's comforting to remember that two women who got to the Supreme Court first, when women in the law were a distinct minority, were both happily married with children.
