Mary Jordan, a journalist with the Washington Post, has recently released a biography entitled, “The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump.” Mrs. Trump is quoted as saying this in 2016: “Not a lot of people know me,” which still seems to be the case, even after her 3½ years as FLOTUS. But she is not the first female inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to struggle to develop her role, often in lives tinged with tragedy.
As a young girl, I was fascinated with the first families of our country, especially with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the beautiful wife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Until I looked up her biography, I hadn’t realized that she was only thirty-one when she and Jack moved into the White House, bringing with them the three-year-old Caroline and the two-month old “John-John.” I can remember the news of her second son’s birth in August of 1963, and how the nation grieved with the young family when the premature infant died two days later. Our collective grief was far deeper when the dashing president was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and we watched in days of non-stop television coverage as the weary widow, heavily veiled, bid a sorrowful farewell to her husband.
For Jane Pierce, the death of her last surviving son Benny in a train derailment shortly after her husband was elected president was devastating, and she never recovered. Mary Todd Lincoln struggled as well, saying, “What a world of anguish this is and how I’ve been made to suffer.” Her son’s death in 1862 took a huge toll on her, and according to the White House website, the assassination of her husband “shattered” Mrs. Lincoln.
Ida Saxton McKinley, from Canton, Ohio, also experienced the assassination of her husband, but even before his death, her life had been suffused with tragedy. Both of their daughters died in childhood, and Ida had epilepsy, euphemistically referred to as fainting spells.
Frances Cleveland faced the challenge of youth, only twenty-one when she married the president in 1885 and moved into the White House. In her later, post-White House life, she was against women’s suffrage, infamously saying: “women weren’t yet intelligent enough to vote.”
In our attempt to sort through the facts of the complicated racial history of our country, we note that a number of presidential wives personally owned slaves, as many were wealthy in their own right, often having inherited enslaved people. Martha Washington brought nearly one thousand dower slaves to her marriage with the man who would become our first president. Especially troublesome was the experience of Julia Grant. General Ulysses S. Grant led the Union Army during the Civil War, and later became president, yet during that same war, Mrs. Grant either owned or had the use of her father’s enslaved people. Yet others, like Ida McKinley, were staunch abolitionists.
Think too of the words of Michelle Obama at the 2016 Democratic convention, “That is the story of this country. The story that has brought me to the stage tonight. The story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, who kept on striving, and hoping, and doing what needed to be done. So that today, I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”
In 2020, the role of “first lady,” or “first spouse,”(I can only hope) remains a strange one, most similar to the traditional role of a minister’s wife. Unpaid, yet with expectations to be fulfilled, it truly is life in the unforgiving fishbowl of public opinion. Yet still, few have taken the advice of Bess Truman: “A Woman’s place in public is to sit beside her husband, be silent and be sure that her hat is on straight.”
Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter explains the alternative: “Do what you can to show you care about other people, and you will make our world a better place.” This Independence Day weekend, I’m saluting these flawed yet faithful women who sacrificed their own well-being, bravely looked tragedy in the eye, and made our world a better place.
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