Henrietta Hay's Column

We all seem to be having some trouble with the presidential election this year. Both Republicans and Democrats are muttering into their beer and pretzels about the candidates. I have the answer.

How about a Bush vs. Clinton battle? Only let's make it Barbara Bush vs. Hillary Clinton. To avoid possible physical damage to my body or a flood of nasty letters, let me say that I have tremendous admiration for both of those women and might have a hard time deciding between them if my mythical election were to take place. Maybe it's time for our first female President.

What fascinates me is the fact that together they make the perfect case for modern feminism, two sides of the same coin. We have the housewife and the career woman. Both have chosen to do what they want with their lives and both are successful in their separate fields. Together they validate the belief that women should be able to choose what they want to do with their lives. But the reaction to both of them shows that the feminist movement will be needed until we are all ready to accept other women's choices.

Barbara Bush chose to be a housewife and quit Smith College to get married at 20. She has five children and has devoted her life chiefly to being a wife and mother. In the course of following her husband's career she has made homes out of houses from Maine to Texas, ending up with a house most of us will never see, the White House. She is a very smart woman who learned by experience to be a political wife. Her dog Millie has written an excellent book, which shows Barbara (Millie calls her Bar) as a relaxed, warm lover of dogs and children, perhaps not in that order. What could be more valuable in a political wife than that?

We don't know her personal ideas on public issues because she keeps them to herself, but I am sure she has some strong ones. Even the most politic wife, however, can lose it occasionally. Remember when she referred to Geraldine Ferraro as, "itch with a B in front of it? I deplored what she said, but admired her guts for saying it. Since then she has concentrated on a highly worthwhile cause, Literacy. She works for this with grace and charm and maintains her image as a foxy grandma. Her Secret Service code name is Silver Fox. She would be a formidable candidate in a presidential election.

Hillary Clinton is a woman of a different generation with an entirely different set of choices. By the time she reached college age, many women were making careers outside the home and her choice was to become a lawyer. She graduated from Wellesley and from Yale Law School. She was well on her way to a distinguished career when she decided to move to Arkansas and marry Bill Clinton. The career continued and she has twice been selected one of the top hundred lawyers in the United States. She also manages to get to most of their daughter's soccer games and school plays. She too has had to make compromises. She wanted to keep her maiden name after her marriage, but Arkansas voters resented having a woman living in the Governor's Mansion who refused to use his name. "I gave it up," she says. It meant more to them than it did to me."

But like Barbara, Hillary can be pushed beyond political correctness. On Sixty Minutes she defended the quality of her marriage and said that she was not just "standing by her man like Tammy Wynette." She was, of course, referring to a pretty corny song, but Tammy got bent out of shape. I guess she should know. She has stood by five men in five marriages. More recently when Hillary was pushed beyond her tolerance level, she said that she could have stayed home and made cookies and had teas, and a lot of women chose to be offended. Her point, of course, was that she had as much right to her choice as other women have to theirs. I agree. I don't do cookies either.

These two women have taken different paths to their present positions of eminence and they prove that the paths can and should be parallel. Think what a campaign we could have. We could unleash them both and let them have at it. We know that both of them have strong personalities since in neither case has the private person been completely covered by the public persona. They would probably talk about human issues and how to solve problems. They might even talk about decisions by consensus. They might talk about peace as a national policy. And having done it for years at home, they might talk about how to balance the budget. Who knows what issues they would choose? Anyway, it would be interesting to find out how a househusband handles his White House duties.