Jill Biden's more objectionable honorific

A fight over whether to call her "doctor" is a distraction from the struggle against retrograde expectations attached to the title "First Lady."

No matter how many times you see Laura Bush read to a child on the evening news this year, the traditional political wife is an endangered species. May she rest in peace. Some time, in the not too distant future, we will acknowledge the passing of her role with the same amazement we felt at the fall of the Berlin Wall, crashing down so easily after standing for decades as an unbreachable certainty. Boy, we'll think; that sucker wasn't as strong as it looked.

—Marjorie Williams, “The Pol’s Wife,” Washington Post, September 2000.

The pundits’ donnybrook in recent days over whether Jill Biden should be addressed as “doctor” isn’t really, at bottom, about academic honorifics or credentialism at all. For a lot of the antis, it’s just a convenient venue for misogyny. For the pros, it’s mostly about whether the president’s wife will be recognized as a woman of accomplishment in her own right whose independence from her husband’s political career must be respected. Yet we continue to call Dr. Biden “the incoming First Lady,” in which capacity we plan to saddle her with responsibilities premised on her being Mrs. Joe Biden.

It’s astonishing to me that we continue to require presidents’ wives to perform the retrograde unpaid duties of First Lady. As you can see, my late first wife Marjorie Williams, an observant chronicler of Washington folkways and a dedicated feminist, predicted their imminent collapse 20 years ago. She was wrong. The role of political wife has perhaps diminished somewhat in Congress and in governors’ mansions, but it remains largely unchallenged at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This is especially striking when you remember that corporate wives long ago gave up serving a parallel role. Half a century ago a rising business executive was evaluated based not only on his own abilities and charm, but also on those of his wife, who was obliged to perform a sort of ambassadorial function at company gatherings. The lack of a gracious helpmeet, preferably with a bit of sex appeal and a knack for innocent flirtation with the boss, could be a serious career impediment. This ethos was incorporated into a 1966 NBC sitcom, Occasional Wife, whose ambitious bachelor protagonist paid rent for a hat-check “girl” living two floors above him. In exchange for that favor, she would climb down the fire escape periodically and pretend she was his better half to help him shinny up the corporate greasy pole.

Those days are so long gone that when I describe this TV show to younger friends their first reaction is to think I’m making it up. Nobody cares anymore about the domestic arrangements of corporate executives, to the point where some top businessmen (Warren Buffett, Eric Schmidt) have maintained rather unusual ones without attracting much comment. It doesn’t really matter anymore.

Why didn’t First Ladies vanish along with ambassadorial corporate wives? One reason is that official Washington is, culturally, much more conservative than the business world, with the wives of Democratic presidents in particular in perpetual peril of being damned as unladylike. Another reason (Laura Bush comes to mind) is that First Ladies are often more popular than their husbands. Michelle Obama, in performing the role so extraordinarily well, set back progress on this front for a decade. Melania Trump, by performing it so grudgingly (“Who gives a fuck about Christmas stuff and decoration?”), became a sort of accidental feminist. Amid the many objections leveled against Donald Trump’s presidency, one seldom hears the complaint that his wife failed to demonstrate much interest or skill in First Ladyhood, raising the hope that perhaps that Berlin Wall will crumble in our lifetimes. (Jack Shafer expressed a similar sentiment even before Trump became president.)

Another hopeful sign is that it’s passed almost entirely without comment that Dr. Biden, who when her husband was vice president taught English composition at Northern Virginia Community College, said last summer that she intended to return to work there no matter what the election’s outcome. That would make her the first First Lady ever to hold down a job outside the White House. Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff confirmed this week that he’ll follow Dr. Biden’s example during the Obama administration and work outside the White House as lecturer at Georgetown University Law Center. People scarcely noticed.

Now we need to scale back radically Dr. Biden’s duties as First Lady so she doesn’t end up serving an Arlie Hochschild-style “second shift” in the East Wing. Dismantling that office entirely would be best of all—Melania sliced its payroll by half—but if it must be kept then I propose a new standard for Dr. Biden’s first-wife duties. If it’s something that Emhoff would reasonably be expected to do in support of Harris, then Dr. Biden should do it. If it isn’t, then leave the poor woman alone. She’s got papers to grade.