Anderson Cooper recently did a segment called “Stand by Your Man,” in which he pondered the question of why political wives stay with their cheating husbands even after the media has revealed all. But the answer is clear; Silda Wall Spitzer had already made peace with her husband and his extramarital affairs. (Whatever was going on between Eliot Spitzer and Ashley Alexandra Dupre, his wife may very well have known about it). When the media exposed the scandal, she did not leave her husband because she had already decided that she was willing to make the sacrifice. She was willing to accept her husband’s shortcomings and, despite his moral failings, to stick with him. Moreover, she had to stay with him publicly so as to affirm her internal decision to remain loyal.
In the late 1990s, Hillary Clinton faced a similar decision between staying with her husband or leaving him because of the Monica Lewinsky affair (not to mention numerous others). Some feminists feel that political wives like Spitzer and Clinton acted improperly, that they should have left their sleaze-ball husbands and struck out on their own. After all, both first ladies were successful working women before they decided to dedicate their lives to their husbands’ political ambitions. When they decided to go along with their husbands’ career choices, they had to accept that they would be playing the role of the wife in the public eye and that they had sacrificed the relative safety of the private sphere. Feminists might well ask why a woman who has given up so much for her man would want to stick with him when he is revealed to be unfaithful.
But what no one is talking about is that all relationships require sacrifices. Presumably, these couples love, or at least loved each other, and moreover, they grew into each others’ lives and became reliant on one another. We constantly accuse politicians’ wives of staying with disloyal men because of the power and stability they derive from their husbands. But we tend to forget that political men need women just as much as they are needed. They need their wives to appear legitimate, to seem like strong family men, and to appear as though they hold openly accepted values. It is a symbiotic relationship, and one that both sides will attempt to maintain at all costs.
Perhaps we were better off when the media kept their hands off of the sexual fetishes and affairs of political figures. At least, perhaps the wives were. It seems that because of our round-the-clock media, our obsession with exposing the up-to-the-minute truths and our desire as enlightened people to encourage a woman’s independence, we have lost our understanding of the compromise and time required to establish, grow and maintain a relationship. The sacrifices that all couples make in the private space of their relationships become unacceptable when the media exposes them in the public sphere. While the media may certainly be able to shine harsh light on the sex lives of politicians, but it seems incapable of penetrating the bonds that hold these couples together, the ties that made them successful and powerful units in the first place.