Does America keep electing the wrong spouse? Law school transcripts say yes
Long before their husbands were elected president or vice president, several of America’s future first and second ladies had already eclipsed them in the law school classroom.
Usha Vance was described as “50 billion times better” than JD Vance in a moot court exercise, in a recent Vanity Fair profile of the vice president which spoke to their former professors and classmates at Yale. Hillary Clinton was remembered as a relentless go-getter, while Bill Clinton rarely attended class. And when a professor was asked to compare Barack and Michelle Obama, he offered an unvarnished assessment: “She was better.”
While the sample size is small, the pattern is striking.
Only four first or second ladies attended law school, long a training ground for America’s political elite. Each met her future husband there or arrived on campus ahead of him. Again and again, people who knew them at the time recalled a similar dynamic: The women were the standouts, seemingly destined to play second fiddle to no one.
The pattern raises obvious questions: Did America elect the wrong spouses? What stopped the women from running and winning?
Political scientists point to several factors, including the male-dominated nature of politics, long-standing sexism and a persistent gender gap in political ambition. Men, research has found, are more likely than women to seek office — including when women have comparable or stronger credentials.
Marilyn Quayle, the daughter of Hoosier State physicians, began taking night classes at the Indiana University School of Law in the 1970s. There, she met and married Dan Quayle, the future vice president under George H.W. Bush.
The couple sat together in tax lectures, but Marilyn Quayle drove much of the discussion and regularly sought out the professor afterward, Time reported in 1989. Classmates nicknamed her “superwoman” for balancing family responsibilities with law school. While pregnant, she even induced labor early so she could take the bar exam.
That reputation endured as her husband rose through politics.
“To be honest with you, I was campaigning for the Senate one time, and someone came up to me and said, ‘I went to law school with your wife.’ And I said, yeah, I was there too,” Dan Quayle later said.
In 1988, the year Bush chose Dan Quayle as his running mate, The Washington Post reported that stories about Marilyn Quayle’s classroom prowess had circulated for years.
“Over and over, men and women who attended night law school at the University of Indiana in the early ’70s say flatly that Marilyn Tucker – a bright, friendly, industrious young woman determinedly bound for a career – was smarter than her good-looking, somewhat lackadaisical classmate, Dan Quayle,” the outlet reported.
Hillary Clinton attended law school at roughly the same time, studying at Yale Law School in Connecticut from 1969 to 1973.
There, she met her future husband, Bill Clinton. The pair first spoke in the library after Hillary Rodham, as she was then known, approached him and said: “If you’re going to keep staring at me, and now I’m staring back, we at least ought to know each other’s name.”
