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WOMEN IN POLITICS
MICHELLE OBAMA’S new memoir Becoming is a publishing sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. There are reports of one copy being bought every nine seconds in America.
Having listened to Becoming’s serialisation as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, I am not surprised. Her story is one where hard work and conscientiousness are rewarded — a black, working-class girl from Chicago’s South Side, can go to Princeton, Harvard, and even the White House. It is an inspirational story freighted with hope. And, well, everything currently seems a bit hopeless, doesn’t it?
And so, to Theresa May, the embattled British prime minister. Whatever you think of her, or Brexit, she has stuck at a job that male colleagues have run away from.
There are plenty of male politicians in fiction, more often vain and selfserving than heroic. Where women figure prominently, it is as their helpmate. Curtis Sittenfeld’s fascinating American Wife is a fictionalised memoir of an American first lady.
Provocatively inspired by Laura Bush, it puts a Republican consort centre stage, and investigates her private life. Alice Blackwell, sleepless in her White House bed, wonders, ‘Did I jeopardise my husband’s presidency today?’
Bill and Hillary Clinton were the thinly veiled inspiration for the aspiring first couple, Jack and Susan Stanton, in Joe Klein’s Primary Colors. His motivations often seem more libidinous than ideological. Is she a sap, the book asks, to turn a blind eye to his philandering, or the one with her eyes on the prize?
Most political careers start at a local level. Winifred Holtby’s Thirties-set South Riding has a captivating heroine in the idealistic Sarah Burton, a progressive headmistress determined to improve young people’s outcomes.
In a speech, she urges her female pupils against passivity: ‘Question your government’s policy...This is a great country, and we are proud of it...but questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence . . . do not forget to question.’