Washington, D.C. — During a recent A&E special, an interviewer asked former President George Bush how he hoped his term would be remembered. After a pause, Bush said, "I hope they think we did it with honor." It was such a simple wish and yet it rang as unfamiliar, even anachronistic.

Of all the things the Clinton Administration will be remembered for, the history books will be hard-pressed to include "honor" among them. Given today’s presidential discussions, the day when a president could speak of honor without eliciting skepticism, even cynicism, seems to be part of a distant past.

It strikes us that the concept of honor and honorable behavior is a matter of real concern to women. Once upon a time, honorable men acted honorably with women, a concept universally understood and accepted. Now, when the most powerful man in the world exploits a young and obviously confused intern, we talk about privacy and personal choices instead of honor and responsibility.

What happened? Trace the demise of honor and you’ve charted the rise of the liberal feminist movement.

Liberated women do not talk about honor. Roughly defined as integrity in words and deeds, honor’s chivalrous origins were its undoing. Honor is too laden with patriarchal implications and oppressive overtones – you can’t be a good feminist and ask men to think of themselves in such old-fashioned terms. Instead, women asked for egalitarianism and compassion while honor became something unfashionable – too overtly masculine, too traditional for a sophisticated life. Somewhere during the process of bulldozing the differences between men and women, honor became a ceremonial word for sweeping tributes or speeches – but wholly irrelevant in a liberated age.

In fighting to defend women from sexual harassment, feminist groups and their leaders depended on the country’s sense of decency, its sense of right and wrong – its sense of honor. In other words, the very stalwart values feminists tried to "modernize" for women’s private lives were useful political tools on other battlefronts.

This was a paradox ready to explode, and when the modern, sophisticated Bill Clinton ran afoul of some pretty fundamental values, both public and private, he lit the fuse. Now the feminists who cheered his modernity are left with a lot of explaining to do. Few are feeling as much heat as California’s Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer.

Elected by the slimmest of margins and working with high negative ratings for the entirety of her Senate term, she staked her claim to fame as a defender of women’s rights – and particularly their bodies. Boxer submitted Clarence Thomas to an electronic lynching and ran Senator Bob Packwood out of town on a rail.

After ridiculing and shaming Packwood and Thomas, Boxer’s stilted and weak denouncements of Clinton’s actions are notably free of vitriol or proclamations of righteousness. Her attacks on dishonorable conduct are feverish when politically expedient, but benign when the accused is part of the family (in this case, literally and politically.) Boxer’s hypocrisy is wearing thin – and is helping Matt Fong, her virtually unknown GOP rival.

This scene will play itself out around the country as the President’s feminist defenders try to douse the flames of their own hypocrisy. But as the slowly dropping numbers in opinion polls illustrate, honor is far from dead in the rest of the country. Whether Clinton resigns or serves out the rest of his term, the failure of his modern morality play has already been decided – the country’s sense of duty, decency and honor will ultimately prevail.

— Katherine Post

Senior Fellow of Women's Studies