Bill Clinton returned to the Governor's office two years later by winning the election of 1982. During her husband's campaign, Rodham began to use the name Hillary Clinton, or sometimes "Mrs. Bill Clinton", in order to have greater appeal to Arkansas voters; she also took a leave of absence from Rose Law in order to campaign for him full-time. As First Lady of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton chaired the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee from 1982 to 1992, where she sought to bring about reform in the state's court-sanctioned public education system.One of the most important initiatives of the entire Clinton governorship, she fought a prolonged but ultimately successful battle against the Arkansas Education Association to put mandatory teacher testing as well as state standards for curriculum and classroom size in place. She introduced Arkansas' Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youth in 1985, a program that helps parents work with their children in preschool preparedness and literacy. She was named Arkansas Woman of the Year in 1983 and Arkansas Mother of the Year in 1984.
Clinton continued to practice law with the Rose Law Firm while she was First Lady of Arkansas. She earned less than all the other partners, due to fewer hours being billed, but still made over $200,000 in her final year there. She continued to rarely do trial work, but was considered a "rainmaker" at the firm for bringing in clients, partly due to the prestige she lent the firm and to her corporate board connections. She was also very influential in the appointment of state judges. Bill Clinton's Republican opponent in his 1986 gubernatorial re-election campaign accused the Clintons of conflict of interest, because Rose Law did state business; the Clintons deflected the charge by saying that state fees were walled off by the firm before her profits were calculated. From 1987 to 1991 she chaired the American Bar Association's Commission on Women in the Profession, which addressed gender bias in the law profession and induced the association to adopt measures to combat it. She was twice named by the National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America, in 1988 and in 1991.When Bill Clinton thought about not running again for governor in 1990, Hillary Clinton considered running herself, but private polls were unfavorable and in the end he ran and was re-elected for the final time.
Clinton served on the boards of the Arkansas Children's Hospital Legal Services (1988–1992) and the Children's Defense Fund (as chair, 1986–1992). In addition to her positions with non-profit organizations, she also held positions on the corporate board of directors of TCBY (1985–1992), Wal-Mart Stores (1986–1992) and Lafarge (1990–1992). TCBY and Wal-Mart were Arkansas-based companies that were also clients of Rose Law. Clinton was the first female member on Wal-Mart's board, added when chairman Sam Walton was pressured to name one; once there, she pushed successfully for the chain to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices, pushed largely unsuccessfully for more women to be added to the company's management, and was silent about the company's famously anti-labor union practices.
Cultural and political image
Observers have consistently characterized Hillary Clinton as a polarizing figure in American politics. By 1992, during her husband's presidential campaign, a reporter asked her, "Some people think of you as an inspiring female attorney mother, and other people think of you as the overbearing yuppie wife from hell. How would you describe yourself?" Political operatives said she could be easily seen as either a positive role model or a nagging "hall monitor" type. The polarized response to Clinton ran along both political and cultural lines. In 1995, after the failure of her health care reform initiative, New York Times reporter Todd Purdum labelled Hillary Clinton "a complex and polarizing figure in public opinion," and "the First Lady as Rorschach test;" the latter assessment was echoed by feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan.
In part, this led from her background and her new role. Colorado State University communication studies professor Karrin Vasby Anderson describes the First Lady position as a "site" for American womanhood, one ready made for the symbolic negotiation of female identity. In particular there has been a cultural bias towards traditional first ladies and a cultural prohibition against modern first ladies; by the time of Clinton, the First Lady position had become a site of heterogeneity and paradox. Nowhere was this paradox more evident than when Clinton achieved her highest approval ratings as First Lady late in 1998, not for any professional or political achievement of her own but for being seen as the victim of her husband's very public infidelity. University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson saw Hillary Clinton as an exemplar of the double bind, who though able to live in a "both-and" world of both career and family, nevertheless "became a surrogate on whom we projected our attitudes about attributes once thought incompatible," leading to her being placed in a variety of no-win situations. The world of political cartoons also played in the symbolic negotiation: University of Indianapolis English professor Charlotte Templin found cartoonists using a variety of stereotypes such as gender reversal, radical feminist as emasculator, and the wife the husband wants to get rid of, to portray Hillary Clinton as violating gender norms.
Over fifty books and scholarly works have been written about Hillary Clinton, from many different angles. There has been a cottage industry in attack books against her, put out by Regnery Publishing and its brethren, with lurid subtitles such as Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House, Hillary's Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House, and Can She Be Stopped? : Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless .... When she ran for Senate in 2000, a number of fundraising groups with dire-sounding names such as Save Our Senate and the Emergency Committee to Stop Hillary Rodham Clinton sprang up. She was a reliable bogeyman of Republican and conservative fundraising letters, on a par with Ted Kennedy and the equivalent of Democratic beggings to fear about Newt Gingrich.
By the 2000s she had escaped the First Lady role for the Senate, but her polarizing status largely remained. In 2006, before her presidential campaign began in earnest, Time magazine's Ana Marie Cox said "she may be the most polarizing figure on the current political landscape," NPR's Daniel Schorr said that, in light of her qualities as a public figure and candidate, her polarizing force made her the "great political paradox of our time," and historian Gil Troy titled his biography of her Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady. A Time magazine cover that year showed a large picture of her, with two checkboxes labeled "Love Her", "Hate Her", while Mother Jones titled its Jack Hitt-written profile of her "Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary". A typical public opinion poll reporting Hillary Clinton's favorability versus unfavorability showed large percentages in both camps, few undecided, and none who did not know who she is. By the time of her presidential campaign for 2008, however, there were a few signs that her polarizing quality be abating. Democratic netroots activists consistently rated Clinton very low in polls of their desired candidates, while some conservative figures such as Bruce Bartlett and Christopher Ruddy were declaring a Hillary Clinton presidency not so bad after all and an October 2007 cover of The American Conservative magazine was titled "The Waning Power of Hillary Hate".
In part, this led from her background and her new role. Colorado State University communication studies professor Karrin Vasby Anderson describes the First Lady position as a "site" for American womanhood, one ready made for the symbolic negotiation of female identity. In particular there has been a cultural bias towards traditional first ladies and a cultural prohibition against modern first ladies; by the time of Clinton, the First Lady position had become a site of heterogeneity and paradox. Nowhere was this paradox more evident than when Clinton achieved her highest approval ratings as First Lady late in 1998, not for any professional or political achievement of her own but for being seen as the victim of her husband's very public infidelity. University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson saw Hillary Clinton as an exemplar of the double bind, who though able to live in a "both-and" world of both career and family, nevertheless "became a surrogate on whom we projected our attitudes about attributes once thought incompatible," leading to her being placed in a variety of no-win situations. The world of political cartoons also played in the symbolic negotiation: University of Indianapolis English professor Charlotte Templin found cartoonists using a variety of stereotypes such as gender reversal, radical feminist as emasculator, and the wife the husband wants to get rid of, to portray Hillary Clinton as violating gender norms.
Over fifty books and scholarly works have been written about Hillary Clinton, from many different angles. There has been a cottage industry in attack books against her, put out by Regnery Publishing and its brethren, with lurid subtitles such as Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House, Hillary's Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House, and Can She Be Stopped? : Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless .... When she ran for Senate in 2000, a number of fundraising groups with dire-sounding names such as Save Our Senate and the Emergency Committee to Stop Hillary Rodham Clinton sprang up. She was a reliable bogeyman of Republican and conservative fundraising letters, on a par with Ted Kennedy and the equivalent of Democratic beggings to fear about Newt Gingrich.
By the 2000s she had escaped the First Lady role for the Senate, but her polarizing status largely remained. In 2006, before her presidential campaign began in earnest, Time magazine's Ana Marie Cox said "she may be the most polarizing figure on the current political landscape," NPR's Daniel Schorr said that, in light of her qualities as a public figure and candidate, her polarizing force made her the "great political paradox of our time," and historian Gil Troy titled his biography of her Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady. A Time magazine cover that year showed a large picture of her, with two checkboxes labeled "Love Her", "Hate Her", while Mother Jones titled its Jack Hitt-written profile of her "Harpy, Hero, Heretic: Hillary". A typical public opinion poll reporting Hillary Clinton's favorability versus unfavorability showed large percentages in both camps, few undecided, and none who did not know who she is. By the time of her presidential campaign for 2008, however, there were a few signs that her polarizing quality be abating. Democratic netroots activists consistently rated Clinton very low in polls of their desired candidates, while some conservative figures such as Bruce Bartlett and Christopher Ruddy were declaring a Hillary Clinton presidency not so bad after all and an October 2007 cover of The American Conservative magazine was titled "The Waning Power of Hillary Hate".
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