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One thing we have lost with the passing of Edward Kennedy is a certain generational model of the proper role for the family women in public life—the mother, wife, mistress, and daughter. It’s not a model I will miss.
It starts, of course, with Rose Kennedy, described thus in a review of a book about the Kennedy women:
Rose changed from an ambitious, lively, curious girl to a wife and mother whose emotions were rigidly controlled and whose mechanisms of denial so highly refined that she could accept her husband's lovers—notably Gloria Swanson—into her home. She passed much of that legacy on to her daughters Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Jean.
In the Kennedy family, the women preened and posed, suffered mistresses, got divorced. That iconic video of Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House, recently replayed on Mad Men, is disturbing to watch today. She honestly seems as if she’s being directed by a remote control.
If they were lucky, like Eunice Kennedy Shriver, they managed to install themselves at the head of virtuous nonprofits—“charities,” we used to call them. When it came to the family’s sense of its own mission, the women were not in the picture. Here is Joe Kennedy’s line of succession, which seems medieval today:
It was understood among the children that Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the oldest boy, would someday run for Congress and, his father hoped, the White House. When Joseph Jr. was killed in World War II, it fell to the next oldest son, John, to run. As John said at one point in 1959 while serving in the Senate: “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him.”
Now, thank god (and feminism) we have Maria Shriver and Caroline Kennedy, who are contained by their husbands and children, but still exist as independent women in some recognizable form.
Photograph courtesy of the JFK Library/AFP/Getty Images.
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A guest post from Slate intern Kim Gittleson:
Hanna, I was taken aback by your celebration of the end of the Kennedy women. Not because I thought their model (or the model that was forced on them) was particularly great, but because I remembered the Kennedy women, Jackie in particular, quite differently. For one generation, Jackie and her ilk may have represented the ultimate example of postwar feminine submission, while for another generation (mine), she seemed to represent something a little more positive.
An example: When I was in third grade in 1995, the overachievers in my class were all asked to deliver a book report on their favorite female role model—in costume as her—for a conference at the local Army base. I watched my classmates frantically fight over the biographies on Helen Keller and Anne Frank, but ultimately decided that I wanted to be someone different—someone less depressing, more chic, someone who didn’t wear so much brown. I chose Jackie Kennedy, who represented to my third grade mind the “alternative” choice. I took out an (admittedly whitewashed) biography of her and fell completely in love. Jackie Kennedy spoke French fluently, worked as a photographer for a cool magazine, restored the White House, and impressed heads of state. In the idealized narrative of her life that I was given, Jackie O wasn’t as courageous as Anne Frank or as determined as Helen Keller, but she was someone I could actually aspire to be. So I begged my mom for, and eventually received, a bright pink suit and a pair of large sunglasses, and I strutted into that conference, book report in hand, confident that I was the winner of the unspoken contest to choose the best woman.
Now, 14 years later and in possession of a college degree in American history, I realize that the image of Jackie I was given was completely fabricated. Or, if not fabricated, it left out a few essential details. But maybe that isn’t so terrible. Thanks in part to Jackie’s example, I learned French, attended the Governor’s School of International Studies, and aspired to live in the White House (as president, mind you, but she somehow made it seem possible). So while I see how the demise of the model championed by the Kennedy men is something to celebrate, I can’t help wondering if maybe we should make a distinction between the lives they lived and the lives they changed.
Photograph courtesy of Kennedy Library Archives/Newsmakers.
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Hanna, I hadn't seen your insightful post about the welcome end of the expectations laid on the last generation of Kennedy women when I posted on how not being expected to be president was probably beneficial to Kennedy females. When I think of the Kennedy women who were able to escape the family pathology, I was looking at the current generation: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maria Shriver, Rory Kennedy, etc. This generation of Kennedy females has not suffered from the drug abuse, in particular, that has dogged so many of their male counterparts. But you are absolutely right about saying good riddance to the ethos that women were expected to look good, shoot out endless streams of babies, and silently endure their husband's flagrant infidelities. Kim, I love your girlhood memory of wanting to be Jackie Kennedy. But I bet Jackie was happiest in her life toward the end, when she was working as an editor and living with a nice Jewish guy.
Photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy with her brother-in-law and children in 1992.
