First Ladies Who Cut Ribbons And Bake Cookies - Marrying Power Instead Of Having It, The Retro Ideal Of Young Women Today

Amanda Ott had never had an eye on the board room.  The glass ceiling could remain in place for all she cared - women who wanted to be men clutching and clawing their way to top for what? A denial of their femininity, their God-given gift of pregnancy, and their nurturing, caring nature. 

Ananda came by this persuasion quite naturally,  Her grandmother was a a Fifties housewife who prided herself on her pot roast, her Chairwomanship of the Hospital Auxiliary, her knitting, her housekeeping, and her fidelity.  Her mother was cast in the same mold - or rather followed in the footsteps of her mother until she hit the Seventies, Women's Lib, bra-burning, umbrage, and dissatisfaction.  

Linda Ott was a crotchety old woman at thirty, angry at every imagined slight, a fierce soldier in the fight for women's rights.  She had Amanda in a 'toned down' period, one in which men did not seem so bad and her husband - Amanda's father - was the kind of understanding male that was one in a million. 

The fact was that William Ott was not one in a million.  He was just a canny, sexually ambitious man who saw  easy conquest in Linda - a woman nudging past thirty with nothing but festoons and campaign hats in her bridal chest who wanted someone, anyone, to take her seriously. 

The marriage was Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew to a tee. Linda found a man who could tame her increasingly inchoate anger and hostility, and William found a woman who, when tamed, would be the perfect, complaisant, faithful wife.  

 

And so it was that despite Linda's earlier, defiant years, she became docile - a wife and mother just like her mother, Grandma Felicity.  To her surprise, she fit wonderfully in the role.  While the women around her were getting law degrees and joining Wall Street investment banks, she preferred to stay at home, take care of her three children, and tend to her hardworking husband. 

This seeming volte face was nothing of the kind, since women's genetic code and hormonal predisposition hadn't changed since the paleolithic.  Regardless of the changing times, the new positioning of women on the socio-economic scale, and the new male accommodating space, women still reacted in the same ways as their mothers, grandmothers, and ancestors. It was next to impossible for a woman to deny her ineluctable bio-genetic destiny. 

In the rise to the top, something had to give, and in these days of unstoppable female ambition, it was always husband, home, and children.  Of course there were exceptions, women who deliberately stopped at the middle rung, preferring middle management and family rather than CEO, but often ended up more frustrated than if they had chosen one or the other.  Middle management meant taking orders from often far less qualified women and spending only 'quality time' with children.  Neither fish nor fowl, neither here nor there. 

And so it was that Amanda sought a compromise - wife to a powerful man; and there was no better model for her and all women than the First Lady of the United States, the wife of the President.  These were women who loved their husbands and took special care of them for they as chief executives of the land were indeed special, unique, one of a kind.  Jackie Kennedy loved and supported her husband Jack despite the fact that he used the Presidential bedroom as a bordello.   

Hillary Clinton stuck by her man despite his backdoor time in Arkansas trailer parks and his dalliance with interns and Washington floozies.  Nancy Reagan was fiercely loyal to her husband as were Laura Bush, Barbara Bush, and Lady Bird Johnson. 

All these women were content with ribbon-cutting, ladies teas, and redecorating - except for Hillary who convinced her husband to put her in charge of health care reform which she botched and bungled and consigned her to baking cookies and charming the wives of foreign dignitaries.  She was an outlier, an unlikeable, nasty woman.  No one was surprised as Bill's dalliances as cheap and tawdry as they were. 

Melania Trump was the perfect First Lady - beautiful, elegant, quietly supportive, deferential, and kind. It was her business to take care of the President, not defy him or cut her own path. 

So Amanda set out with her goal clearly in mind - she would be taken care of by a virile, confident, but loving man of means, a pearl in an oyster to be sure, hard to find and harder to win, but doable if one put one's mind to it.  

However, given the sexual dynamics of the day, with many women headed for the boardroom, partnership, and Wall Street billionaire, the field was open, fertile, and wide for likes of Amanda. 

The game of sexual partnership is easier if you know exactly what you want.  Women who simply wanted Mr. Right and assumed they would know him when they saw him were at a competitive disadvantage to women like Amanda who set their sights, took aim, and never once flinched from their target.  

Men were credulous suckers, Amanda knew, sitting at the feet of her lover father who, a gem in a quarry of broken rocks, never once was taken in, seduced, or enchanted.  It was he who did the seduction, he who bagged the prey.  'Take 'em for what they're worth', he said, proud that his daughter had shown the same clear and unalloyed ambition as he. 'Watch any Barbara Stanwyck movie', he added, referring especially to Double Indemnity where the Fred MacMurray character is suckered into murdering her wealthy husband. 

 

In fact the noir genre is nothing but canny seductresses who take advantage of their clueless, dense lovers. 

First there was Harper Stonington, heir to a New England patrician fortune, on his way to partner at Bear Stearns, penthouse duplex on Park Avenue, houses in St. Bart's and Palm Beach, a man hurrying his way to fulfilling his family legacy but not too sure on his feet when it came to women, thanks to an overbearing mother and pusillanimous father.  Fair game in other words, and Amanda set about the hunt. 

Women being what they are, Daddy's girls from the very start, Amanda found Harper diddling and unsure - far from her sexually confident, determined father.  He had been, despite the priority and principle of aristocratic heritage, been feminized and insisted on asking her, 'Is this OK...may I...do you mind...' until she had had enough.  Money and social influence were not enough to keep her. 

She liked the cut of Billings Lodge's jib and assessed his prospects as 'good', but he had a vacancy about him, not quite all there. He had to be called in from pasture and was far from the rutting bull she secretly dreamed of.  He was quick to respond to her loveliness, and her willingness to please, and soon enough he was 'getting serious'; but that vacancy was never far away.  It was hard for Amanda to imagine how he kept his rather imposing job if he drifted off into interstellar space so easily. 

More importantly there was nothing at all to take up any slack in his brain.  He was a tabula rasa at age thirty-three.  He loved her because of her pheromones, some instinctive upwelling of desire, but not because of her.  She could be anyone in that empty, vacuous brain. 

She trolled New York's finest watering holes, showed up at important vernissages and chamber music events, did all the right things and met the right sort of people, but none ever met muster, never made the grade.  She had made herself more than available - at times demurely attractive, at others coquettish, and at others primly expectant - but got nothing but dross.  Glittering on the outside, but impossibly porcine on the inside. What was a girl to do?

Still a young woman, it was too early to give up the ship, but the time and effort spent on finding a man who would take care of her, treat her as a queen, and give her things was getting cost-ineffective.  Maybe it was time for a reset. 

OK, but what? It would be a comedown to join the legions of bullying cunts on their way up the corporate ladder or being the exterminating angels of the courtroom; but it seemed to be an either-or situation, neither of which offered much promise or satisfaction; and marrying a dutiful clothier or pharmacist was not at all in the cards. 

 

So it was back to New Brighton to live in the house where she grew up - a comfortable place, her place, especially since her parents had moved to a retirement home.  She found herself becoming her mother, little aprons, home-baked bread, garden parties, and volunteering.  She was the belle of the ball in such a small town, desired by all the men around but interested in none.  In fact she became exactly like her grandmother, the Fifties wife sans husband and children, but that suited her just fine.