Word: wifely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Betty Wright has a different -- and more serious -- problem. Although the wife of Speaker Jim Wright says she has a head for business, the House ethics committee could find little evidence that she used it in her $18,000-a-year job with Mallightco, the company founded by the Wrights and Fort Worth businessman George Mallick. Lawyers like a paper trail; they uncovered "no reports, no correspondence, no notes of telephone conversations, no investment ! analyses" by Mrs. Wright. The committee suspects Betty Wright's job of being a conduit for $145,000 in cash and gifts to the Speaker...
...congressional spouse should have a leg up socially and professionally; instead it is like having one foot shot off. "No one takes you seriously if they bother with you at all," says Jo Ann Emerson, wife of Missouri Congressman Bill Emerson and deputy communications director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. In Washington ignoring most of the women at a cocktail party is considered an efficient use of networking time. Let John Warner and Elizabeth Taylor walk into a room, and all the suits head toward the Virginia Senator. Taylor describes her three lonely years as a congressional wife...
...Unless an employer is looking for special access through you, you just look like trouble -- someone who will want all congressional recesses off, will have to travel back to the district to campaign on weekends, and might not be here two years later if your husband loses." Heather Foley, wife of Majority Leader Tom Foley, solved the problem by taking a job -- gratis -- in her husband's office...
That's one way to see your spouse. Emily Malino, wife of New York Congressman James Scheuer, complains, "Staff members want all of your husband. They'll schedule on weekends, birthdays and anniversaries." One wife recommends working in the office as marriage insurance. "With adoring staff all around, your husband might not want to come home to reality...
Like Betty Wright, most Washington wives are invisible until their principal gets in trouble. Pat Nixon held the title for most stoic wife until Maureen Dean gave an Oscar-winning performance during her husband's Watergate testimony, sitting primly behind him, blond hair pulled back, holding the Nancy Reagan gaze before there was a Nancy Reagan gaze. Former Attorney General John Mitchell's wife Martha took to telephoning reporters and was forcibly sedated. Rita Jenrette, whose husband John was convicted for taking bribes in Abscam, used her 15 minutes of celebrity to pose in Playboy, reveal that she and John...