Reviewed by: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil Sara Hillin Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 In a thoroughly researched and timely study of women’s participation in American political life, Tammy R. Vigil explores how partners of presidential nominees have navigated the thorny territory of public and private spaces, often battling the media’s representation of their roles as wives, mothers, and public political figures in their own right. The text concerns itself in part with how presidential nominees’ partners offer insights into “the expectations of presidential partners” despite the fact that, as Vigil acknowledges, there are no established guidelines for evaluating the work of [End Page 100] the (almost always) women who fulfill that role (2). Though the book gives special emphasis to the years between 1992 (hailed as the Year of the Woman) and 2016, Vigil begins with a rich historical discussion of presidential wives’ involvement in their husbands’ campaigns, mentioning, for example, how Louisa Adams “used open house receptions to court potential supporters for her husband’s bid for the presidency” (5). Such examples, which involve women facilitating a salon type of discourse, echo suggestions from rhetoricians such as Christine de Pizan, who championed women’s ability to use influence as a rhetorical tool. Vigil’s ethos in this historical and rhetorical analysis is firmly established in the introductory chapter, where she takes readers as far back as 1808, noting that evidence of smear campaigns against presidential candidates’ wives may have begun with women such as Dolley Madison, who was in 1808 “accused of having had an affair with incumbent president Thomas Jefferson” (3). Vigil’s sharp attention to the fact that some sort of media presence has, almost from the beginning, either helped or hampered presidential nominees’ spouses, provides a corrective to any notion that such interference is a more recent phenomenon. Vigil spends much of the introductory and first chapters exploring the evolution of women’s involvement in political life, noting how, although women “were initially conceived of as apolitical beings” (34), they were actively involved in all facets of decision making in certain “public roles customarily closed to them” during men’s absence through the American Revolution (22). Noting the restrictive view of women’s ability to “function outside the home” (17) promulgated by influential writers such as David Hume, Vigil illustrates how women were indeed more than capable of rising to the challenge of political participation as more opportunities became available to them. Vigil also notes how nineteenth-century ideologies about women began to shift and how changing beliefs regarding the necessity of women’s public participation—as evidenced by texts such as John Stuart Mill’s 1869 On the Subjection of Women (23)—allowed women to go to work outside the home and, therefore, move more fluidly between the public and private sphere (24). The first chapter also introduces a concept that anchors much of the discussion of political wives/mothers in the rest of the text: republican motherhood, which Vigil notes was a “rhetorical strategy” (28) to push the notion of an “ideal female patriot” (27). The republican mother, Vigil notes, was a concept that left women “duty-bound to protect and cultivate the home” but also encouraged debates concerning “women’s appropriate concerns and actions outside the home” (28). The essential historical groundwork laid in the introductory and first chapters allows readers to much more fully appreciate both the political opportunities that have opened up for women since and the challenges that those opportunities have presented. The subsequent chapters of Moms in Chief explore more specifically how various presidential nominees’ partners have been seen to either adhere to or deviate from the republican motherhood framework. The second chapter concerns itself with Barbara Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, two seemingly [End Page 101] diametrically opposed figures when discussed from the terministic screen of republican motherhood. If the ideal republican mother was, as Vigil notes, “other-centric, self-sacrificing, primarily concerned with domesticity, and...
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Jan 19, 2022
Feifei Yang + 2
Open Access
