As a slightly different question: Did we have comprehensive opinion polls regarding approval/disapproval or like/dislike ratings for Hillary Clinton 20 years ago? Was she overall popular or unpopular?

And was she more or less popular/liked than Bill?

As a preface, I'm going to say that I'm going to do my best to maintain an air of political neutrality in this posting - I don't want or intend to turn this into a policy debate.

Hillary, as noted in Henry Louis Gates 1996 New Yorker article HATING HILLARY: Hillary Clinton has been trashed right and left—but what’s really fuelling the furies?, received animosity from both the political right and the political left; and, for that matter, from women as well as men.

Guess who said this of Hillary Clinton:

"To understand Mrs. Clinton's arrogance and inability to admit even the slightest mistake, we need to see her as she sees herself: a disinterested force for good seeking to correct, through government, what all sensible citizens should recognize as evil. How many hells on earth have been unwittingly created by impatient ideologues, their gaze stubbornly fixed on their ultimate objective? How many innocent bystanders have been trampled because they stood in the way?"

You probably wouldn't have guessed Ariana Huffinton but that is indeed who it was ^1.

And as previously stated, this dislike wasn't only from figures associated with the right:

You saw it openly from writers and the press mostly during the time Clinton was in office: e.g. - Progressive writer and political activist Michael Lerner said of her after she distanced herself from him after incorporating his own language (e.g. the idea of a "politics of meaning" into her speeches) : “So here is Safire saying this woman is a ‘congenital liar,’ ” Lerner adds, sounding not at all displeased by it. “I am sure glad he didn’t know about all these things, because he might have been able to use them to bolster his case.”

However, if you look at the time before and after Clinton's presidency, you'll find Democratic politicians being a fair bit less tight lipped in their public statements. During the 1992 Democratic primary for instance "Jerry Brown accused Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, of unethical behavior and funneling state business to her Little Rock law firm". It's entirely reasonable to assume that this lack of amity didn't suddenly disappear when the party closed ranks around the sitting president and first lady and public criticism stopped.

Hillary Clinton was disliked in Washington - out of a combination of four factors - only three of which she shared with her husband:

• Both Bill and Hillary had numerous instances of potential scandal or potentially morally suspect instances in their past.
• Both Bill and Hillary had a history of speaking vague statements or untruths (what their opponents would call lying)
• Both Bill and Hillary had a history of making sudden pivots in their policy positions driven by political expediency.
• However, while Bill Clinton pragmatically "played the rogue" when it came to his political career Hillary - in opposition to the standard consensus politics of the era - injected a severe moral note to her policy prescriptions; opposition to her agenda wasn't just bad policy - it was morally wrong.

It was the dissonance between the fourth point and the first three which made her a figure of hated by people who tolerated only mildly disliked her husband.

Bill Clinton was able to campaign for Governor of Arkansas on a progressive platform and then suddenly pivot to being a political centrist once in office - abandoning many of his campaign promises and earning him the nickname "Slick Willie" -without much political damage to himself because he was able to smile, shrug, and soldier on because he made it both manifestly obvious that he was "playing politics" and because he was able to couch his pivot as a shift in recognition from the perspective that one policy was marginally better to the position that the other policy was marginally better. He was able to walk way relatively unscathed from scandals such as Whitewater for similar reasons.

For Hillary, on the other hand, who couched her policy agenda in moral terms and who tried to represent herself as a moral figure, false statements and sudden political pivots made her seem mercenary, hypocritical and self-serving. It was this moral dissonance that sparked Bill Kristol to say of her "She strikes me as a sort of moralistic liberal who has a blind spot for actions that are in her own interest. These are exempt from that cold gaze that she casts over everyone else’s less than perfect actions.” Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter for Reagan and Bush opined after the Whitewater scandal broke that, had an “an air of apple-cheeked certitude” that is “political in its nature and grating in its effects,” of “an implicit insistence throughout her career that hers were the politics of moral decency and therefore those who opposed her politics were obviously of a lower moral order. . . and that[n]ow, with Whitewater going on, nonliberals are taking a certain satisfaction in thinking, Uh-huh, you were not my moral superior, Madam.”

As a side note:

It's also worthy to note that one of the reasons is that Hillary occupied such a degree of mindshare, circa 1997, is that unlike any First Lady before (excepting perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt) or since, Hillary hit the ground running as a political operative in her own right upon arrive in Washington; championing a distinctive legislative agenda (e.g.health care reform) which, though it was advanced by the president and the party as a whole, clearly had her as the prime mover behind it (some Republicans labeled it "Hillarycare" for her role in it - sound familiar?); attempting to influence individual legislators to her side; and attempting to skewer her opponents. In such an environment, ire directed at Bill also spilled over onto Hillary. And, the thing of it of it is that, circa 1997, although Bill Clinton has done well for himself in spite of scandal, Hillary's reputation still bears all the scars associated with her pivots and her thrusting herself front and center into the nation's political consciousness viz-a-viz the fight over healthcare while at the same she gained precious little in terms of positive mind-share from it, as the legislation died before it could go anywhere.

Annotations:

• 1 And yes, as people responding to this have noted Huffington was at this point considered Republican - she remained nominally Republican into the Bush years when she flipped parties, spurred, among other things by her non-interventionist policy position - I use Huffington's comment here to illustrate the vitriol mainstream political commentators - including female commentators were willing to direct at the first lady* .

It's now been 24 hours since my last moderator action in this thread, so I'll give you the answer that I've written up. It's a rule in /r/askhistorians that you don't post an answer where you've been moderating. I'm violating the literal letter of that rule while keeping its spirit by limiting myself to a 24-hour gap. I never want to feel as if I'm abusing moderator privilege to "clear a path" for my own comment. If you feel I've done that, comment below, and I'll delete my comment and just PM it to /u/82364. I'd still like to share it with you all, though.

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Great question, and one that’s going to be difficult for us to answer here. Given the recent political situation, any modern interpretation of events will be shaded either through conscious or unconscious bias unless particular care is taken to avoid both. A look at this topic five or 10 years hence will likely give you a more complete answer with much better perspective.

We might even find, with the benefit of further hindsight, that what you see as “out of proportion” was in fact in proportion to later revelations and the atmosphere of later elections.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s discuss the topic. I contend that the origins of any extended animus stem from the fact that Rodham was the first feminist First Lady and used the position as a political tool in a way not seen since Eleanor Roosevelt.

For the purposes of this answer, I’ll refer to her as “Rodham,” to distinguish her from Bill Clinton and aid clarity.

Rodham was a teenager during the 1960s and embraced feminist ideas, ones that were radical at the time ─ particularly among conservatives (of both parties).

Rodham was, at age 21, the subject of a Chicago Tribune editorial that in the summer of 1969 sarcastically scolded her commencement address at Wellesley College.

”Miss Rodham’s rousing speech at commencement concluded with the French students’ slogan: ‘Be realistic. Demand the impossible.’ All right. We are realistic enough to expect that youngsters of 21 and less who now find courtesy and patience and reliance on ‘nonviolent political change’ impossible for them will in a few years grow up enough so that they, too, in their maturity, will exemplify these badly needed virtues.”

The Tribune maintained a conservative editorial stance at that time, and its attitude was not out of place even a decade later, when Hillary Rodham entered politics as the first lady of Arkansas.

Through the 1970s, Rodham was an advocate for what she in 1973 (“Children Under the Law” in Harvard Educational Review) referred to as “Children’s rights,” a term that was picked up in subsequent academic papers.

Rodham worked in the Watergate investigation run by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee as a staff attorney,and apparently clashed with Jerome Zeifman, the chief Democratic counsel for the committee, though there’s no independent corroboration of their clashes, and Zeifman’s account was published only in the mid-1990s, after Rodham had become thoroughly enmeshed in controversy.

Rodham married Bill Clinton in 1975, a year after he was defeated in the race for the U.S. House of Representatives by John Paul Hammerschmidt. The limited information I have accessible to me (access to digital copies of Arkansas newspapers for this period seems to be scarce) indicates that Rodham did not factor into this election, nor in Clinton’s election as Arkansas Attorney General in 1976, which was only lightly contested.

In 1978, when Clinton ran for governor, the situation was much different. Clinton ran to the left of both his Democratic primary opponents and his Republican general election challenger.

In July 1978, recapping the Democratic primary, the New York Times referred to Clinton as “the 31-year-old whiz kid of Arkansas politics” and referenced attacks on Rodham, including the fact that she used her maiden name, something that apparently stuck in the craw of social conservatives:

”Mr. Clinton was the subject in the gubernatorial primary of a generalized attack from what he calls ‘social ultraconservatives.’ They accused him, in effect, of importing liberal ideas on gun control, marijuana laws, capital punishment and women's rights. Finally, the attack focused on the fact that Mr. Clinton's wife, a politically active lawyer he met at Yale, has retained her maiden name.

’They talk about “Clinton's wife,”’ he recalled, ‘and then they'd say “Ms. Hillary Rodham” in a sneering tone. That was probably the biggest mistake by my opponents — thinking they could use her against me.’

Mr. Clinton responded to the attacks by promising to use his wife as a key adviser if elected. ‘Our vote,’ he concluded, ‘was a vindication of what my wife and I have done and what we hope to do for the state.’”

Given what came later, we might consider this ironic. The first attacks on Hillary Rodham were not from Republicans, but from conservative Democrats.

Two years later, Clinton lost the governorship. Writing some 12 years after the fact, William Safire opined that the “petty annoyance” of Rodham’s refusal to accept Clinton’s name and abide by traditional standards contributed to Clinton’s loss.

That conclusion is accepted by Barbara Perry, who wrote the Hillary chapter of 42: Inside the Presidency of Bill Clinton, a newer book from Cornell University Press. Perry writes on page 178: “When her husband lost his bid for reelection as governor in the fall of that year, despite Rodham’s attempts to save the floundering campaign in its last weeks, friends and advisors urged her to take Bill’s surname to placate traditional Arkansans. She decided to do so if it would help her husband regain the governorship.”

Whether that was the deciding factor or not, Clinton was re-elected to the governorship two years later (Arkansas at the time had a two-year term of service for governors) and kept the office until his election as president in 1992.

During his tenure as governor, Rodham rejected the traditional mold of a stay-behind first lady, continuing to practice law and even serving on the board of Wal-Mart Corp. Rodham used her position to push for education reform and other causes that repeatedly brought her into the spotlight.

In 1987, when Clinton declined to run for the Democratic presidential nomination for 1988, he and Rodham both said that it would have been a contradiction for them to run for office and campaign on behalf of children while neglecting their own daughter.

''If this were 40 years ago,'' Clinton told the New York Times at the time, ''Hillary would be home or she'd be a schoolteacher and nobody would ever think she would go anywhere with me.''

The limited access I have to Arkansas newspapers from the 1980s indicates that Rodham’s independent status did turn off some Arkansas conservatives, but it is difficult to distinguish that from the typical political antipathy, and Bill Clinton’s general popularity further muddies the waters. I can’t make a definitive judgement on that without a detailed look at newspapers available on microfilm.

Rodham pushed education reform in the Arkansas Legislature on behalf of her husband and was chairwoman of the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession. She attempted to fight sexism in the legal profession and was featured in a 1988 ABA Journal article entitled “Would This Happen to a Man?” about the struggles of women in the legal field.

All of this naturally gave her an extremely high profile.

What is fascinating is that there was a book published in 1989, not long before the Clintons took the national stage for good, entitled First Ladies of Arkansas: Women of Their Times. This book was written by Anne McMath, herself a former Arkansas first lady, and while I don’t have access to the book itself, I do have access to its reviews, one of which ( by Louis Gould in Southwestern Historical Quarterly) declares that “Since the mid-1970s … governors’ wives have demonstrated increasing activism and visibility,” and goes on to describe Clinton’s involvement.

The papers that led to the creation of the book are now in the special collections of the University of Arkansas.

Continued below due to comment length limit.

Just wanted to drop a pre-emptive note for any answer-ers: Please limit your responses to events prior to 1998.

Also, for folks just joining us, a reminder that if you're just commenting on your own recollections or memories, we'll unfortunately have to delete that comment. The rules we have here don't permit us to judge anecdotes. Since you're commenting under an anonymous name, we can't verify it. We've got to go with published material that's accessible to others. If we do that, folks can argue for/against the merits of a source rather than for/against the person making the argument. It's a way to keep the discussion civil and verifiable.