I’m not sure it can be called “piling on” to write about Elizabeth Edwards’ private life right now, given that she has little apparent hesitation talking about it either — to Oprah, no less. I don’t want to dwell on it. But one statement she made yesterday is worth looking at for a second. It raises two interesting questions from a feminist, or class-meets-feminist, perspective. Here’s the statement, as reported by the Times:
Mrs. Edwards does not use Ms. [Rielle] Hunter’s name either in the interview or in her 213-page pocketsize book, telling Ms. Winfrey that she doesn’t want to give her any publicity. Ms. Hunter, she says, is “so completely different from anything that, I mean, I don’t know any people like this, I don’t have any friends like this person.”
I find the statement that “I don’t know any people like this, I don’t have any friends like this person” fascinating for two reasons. First, I simply doubt that it is true in any meaningful sense. Edwards is an adult with a wide circle of friends; what can she mean when she says she doesn’t know any people like this? That she has not met any adulterers? That seems unlikely; we all know people with what John Irving called “complicated lives.” That she does not know anyone who has not shied away from power, publicity, or money? That seems rather unlikely too. Really, the tone and tenor of the statement suggests that Edwards is suggesting that she doesn’t know anyone as trampy, or declasse, as Hunter; that she would be beneath notice in her crowd. This can’t help but remind me of the initial response among the Clinton camp to Monica Lewinsky (and others), which was to dehumanize Lewinsky as a slut and opportunist, to treat her as both the solely responsible moral party in the affair and as inconsequential at the same time. Perhaps Edwards thinks she doesn’t know anybody like Hunter. Perhaps she, like most of us, is inclined to treat her own crowd, when they engage in such conduct, as acting for a variety of complicated and potentially forgivable reasons, while relegating the other woman to the status of tramp and outsider. This seems deeply problematic to me, both from a straight feminist perspective and from a combination of feminist and class perspectives, in which it is easy to treat members of the “right” crowd as either uniformly exceptional people or, when they stray, forgivable human beings, but just as easy to treat other women, particularly those from a different background and professional status, as beneath contempt. The second fascinating aspect of the statement is that she does, of course, know someone like this: her husband. Clearly her thoughts toward her husband are not simply warm and loving, and she has used her book tour to exact some very understandable revenge. But if Hunter’s conduct renders her somehow alien to Elizabeth Edwards, what does that make of John Edwards? Again, as with the early responses to Clinton and Lewinsky, why is the husband not made equally foreign and unknowable; why is Hunter the whore, not to put too fine a point on it, and John Edwards simply the person about whom she “questions whether it is fair to judge him by this one ‘terrible’ thing when he has done so many other good things?” It does, after all, take two to tango — or, more precisely, two plus Fred Baron. Does this all not suggest something about the not-so-occasional conflict between feminism and class solidarity?
Posted by Paul Horwitz on May 8, 2009 at 10:36 AM
Comments
Hmm. It seems to me that Ms. Edwards wasn’t calling Ms. Hunter low-class or an adulterer, she was calling her a party girl. I don’t think the comparison was to high-class, old-money people — that’s not who Ms. Edwards is, or, I imagine, thinks she is. I think the comparison is to a middle-class meritocrat who climbs in the class system by hard work and sacrifices for the success of her husband, also a middle-class meritocrat, and her family. Note that the class issues are complicated in this characterization — Ms. Edwards doesn’t see herself as old-money, and she sees Ms. Hunter as hanging with a much more old-money crowd (at least if my memory of the collective works of Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney serves). There are interesting feminist issues with this characterization, too, though I imagine I’d start with the issues regarding the society that pressures women to act like Elizabeth Edwards and sacrifice their careers and outside-the-house fulfillment in favor of the gratfication of the egos and careers of their philandering husbands. Jeez, we haven’t gotten far from the ’70s andd the plot of An Unmarried Woman, have we?
Posted by: Sam Bagenstos | May 8, 2009 11:38:40 PM