First ladies are rarely what they seem. When I met Hillary Clinton, I thought we might discuss the political strategy designed to secure her return to Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, she wanted to talk about how she always puts uneaten olives back in the jar and cling-wraps tiny bits of cheese for another day. 'I find it soothing to potter in a kitchen,' said Mrs Clinton, without the smallest trace of irony. Obviously, conserving cheese rinds is a political act. Our interview was for a women's magazine and Hillary, with a memoir to sell and a senatorial career to build, had spent many years atoning to voters for her claim, at the debut of the Clinton presidency, that she wasn't the sort who 'sat around and baked cookies'. While Clarissa Eden complained that the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room, Hillary saw her popularity swept down the waste-disposer on a tide of other women's cake mix.  Though old images are hard to shift, the metamorphosis of Nancy Reagan proves it can be done. Once, she was a shopaholic who spent $209,000 on a new dinner service and who, when asked what she thought of Red China, is supposed to have replied: 'Never on a yellow tablecloth.' Now everyone admires Nancy with a fervour not always extended to her husband.  As middle America traipsed past Ronald Reagan's coffin, obituarists wrangled over who, exactly, they were mourning: a President who taught America to dream again, a pragmatist who hastened the end of the Cold War, or a shambling second-rater who wooed the rich, sowed disdain for government and smoothed the political turf for George W Bush.   There is nothing equivocal about the sanctification of Nancy, the central figure at the state funeral she had choreographed to the last flutter of a Kleenex. Profilers presented almost as endearing foibles the stories of bad parenting, vanity, excess, control freakery, alleged pill-popping and the fact that she could never forgive Raisa Gorbachev for not looking like a hod-carrier.  Maybe Nancy did drive her chef into a frenzy with rehearsals for the banquet in honour of the Prince and Princess of Wales. But perhaps she also detected in Ronnie's toast to 'Prince Charles and Princess Andrew' an early whisper of the dementia that she would have first to hide and then manage in her long role as keeper of the Reagan myth. The families of Alzheimer's sufferers warm to her and so do other ordinary voters. One of America's most reviled first ladies has become the face of caring America and a template for political spouses everywhere.  In the week of Nancy's image makeover, this generation of first wives assembled at Sea Island, Georgia. While the G8 leaders addressed matters of state, such as the Iraq handover, international debt relief and why Jacques Chirac won't do smart casual, Laura Bush was hosting one of those spouses' programmes that typically include a round-table discussion on global women's issues followed by a visit to a mat-weaving co-operative.  No doubt the timetable left Cherie Booth time to reflect on why she was being beaten up, back home, for her eBay purchases of an old alarm clock for Leo and a 15 pair of pink plastic high heels. Not to mention why a survey in Top Sant magazine lumped her in with Victoria Beckham and Jordan as the least popular British role model.  The glorification of Nancy, the baiting of Cherie and the magazine survey are all part of one picture. First wives, popular or not, are the emblem of how societies regard women. Nurturers are approved of, while dissenters such as Blair and Clinton are liable to be torn apart. Some times, the criticism is legitimate. Hillary did not emerge well from the Whitewater scandal, and Mrs Blair's handling of Cheriegate, the saga of her links with the dubious Peter Foster, was appalling.  But who cares if she doesn't realise that top-to-toe cowhide is becoming only on a World of Leather sofa or that white pixie boots are naff? Who is sniping one minute about her extravagance and the next at the cheapskate purchase of a 99p clock? Not men, who couldn't give a damn. The critics are women and, specifically, the sort of women who responded to Top Sant' s survey.  Half are self-confessed social misfits with bad sex lives. Six out of 10 want to give up work, even though 84 per cent believe their talents are unrecognised. The report, hailed solemnly as final proof that women cannot have it all, is actually the lament of addled moaners. These voices are not those of normal working mothers struggling on, in comfort or in poverty. They belong to a nailbar sisterhood of self-repressed loafers who must loathe themselves as much as they profess to dislike Mrs Blair.  High-flying political spouses make such women feel inferior. Invisible first ladies described by Jackie Kennedy as 'moths hanging on the windowpane' instil unease. That leaves self-denying martyrs, or glamorous and good-tempered women like Sandra Howard, in whom Top Sant woman can discern, with only a slight stretch of the imagination, a mirror image of herself.  In less liberated times, there was more freedom for politicians' spouses. Violet Attlee was a Tory and Clementine Churchill a lifelong Liberal. No one had a view on whether or not Audrey Callaghan bought her alarm clocks at H Samuel, while Eleanor Roosevelt's cake-icing skills went unrecorded.  But we are not quite entering a pre-feminist dark age. In America, a new model first lady will play Stepford spouse, but she will also cruise the political talk shows. Laura Bush, the ultimate power doormat, was on CBS soon after Ronald Reagan's death. Her father had died from Alzheimer's, she said. Even so, she rejected Nancy's call to relax restrictions on the stem-cell research that might produce a cure. Mrs Bush was saying what the President dare not.  Nancy Reagan, though steeped in the politics and ideology of the religious right, has taken on a faith lobby opposed to science and careless of humanity. From Hollywood to the Senate, others are backing her campaign. Meanwhile, today's G8 spouses are shaking out their identical pastel trouser suits and reading the disobliging headlines generated in their absence.  Some, like Cherie Blair, get too little sympathy and too little chance to contribute to public debate. Laura Bush, with her mixture of influence and compliance, has no inspiring message to impart. Both, in their different ways, are a symbol of the subordinate role of women in national life.  That leaves the way clear for Saint Nancy. The eulogies paid to a grieving widow may be overdone, but her stem-cell crusade makes her an authentic icon created by the politics of George W Bush. In 21st-century America, the new role model is a woman once notorious for her extravagance, her social climbing and her edicts that the President's appearances must be cancelled because the stars were improperly aligned.  There is something very scary about that.