H-NET  BOOK REVIEW
 Published by H-Pol@ksuvm.ksu.edu  (November 1996)

 Lewis L. Gould, ed., _American First Ladies: Their Lives and their
 Legacy_. New York:   Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996. 712 pp. 37
illustrations and index. $95.00 (cloth).

Reviewed for H-POL by Gil Troy, McGill University


The fledgling field of First Lady scholarship is not for the feint-hearted.
For years the very notion seemed to be a contradiction in terms. Studying
the ladies who served tea and purchased White House china was not
the way to gain respect or secure tenure.  Even in these more feminist
times, when the blossoming of women's studies and of social history
has made us appreciate what these premier hostesses can teach us,
many recoil from studying these traitors to their gender, these women
who stayed behind the scenes serving as the wives of prominent men.

Lewis L. Gould, the Eugene C. Baker Centennial Professor in American
History at the University of Texas at Austin, has probably done more
than any other contemporary historian to legitimize the study of First
Ladies.  He is reputed to have taught the first course on the history of
First Ladies. His lectures and his articles in forums ranging from the
_American Scholar_ to _Presidential Studies Quarterly_, have defined
First Ladies as powerful actors, important celebrities, and interesting
symbols of American political culture.1  His monograph _Lady Bird
Johnson and the Environment_ (Lawrence, KS, 1988) is a gem, a
serious, hard-headed assessment of an important politician freed of the
sentimentalism and the dogmatism characteristic of too many other
works. Gould's collection of essays from different scholars analyzing
the thirty-eight First Ladies from Martha Washington to HillaryRodham
Clinton in his encyclopedic _American First Ladies: Their Lives and their
Legacy_ marks the culmination of his efforts and the maturation of this
field of inquiry.

 Studying First Ladies exacerbates what Stephen Skowronek in _The
Politics Presidents Make_ (Cambridge, 1993) identifies as one of the
critical problems in presidential scholarship: how to trace lines of
development in a highly idiosyncratic institution. Marriages are individual
and volatile, with few formulas or clear patterns emerging over time.
Good marriages have followed bad marriages in the White House; strong
marriages like the Trumans' have been strained in the White House; and
problematic marriages like the Eisenhowers' have healed in the  White
House. There is no correlation between having a successful marriage
and a successful presidency, especially when the definition of marital
success is even murkier and more fluid than the definition of presidential
success.

Thus far, the most successful books about First Ladies have been
individual biographies, be it Jean H. Baker's _Mary Lincoln: A Biography_
(New York, 1987), or any number of the impressive books about Eleanor
Roosevelt, including Blanche Wiesen Cook's _Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume
One_ (New York, 1992), which covers Mrs.  Roosevelt's life until her
move into the White House in 1993; Doris Kearns Goodwin's _No
Ordinary Time_ (New York, 1994), which covers the relationship
between President and Mrs. Roosevelt during World War II; and Allida M.
Black's _Casting Her Own Shadow_ (New York, 1996), which
covers Mrs. Roosevelt's liberal crusade after her husband's death.  All
these books, along with Gould's work on Lady Bird Johnson illuminate
the individual and her times, while making a substantive contribution to
our understanding of the institution of the First Lady.  Books addressing
the First Lady over time have been much less successful in analyzing
substantive issues. The two best efforts are Carl Sferrazza Anthony's
two volumes on _First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents' Wives and
Their Power_, 2 vols. (New York, 1990-1991) and Betty Boyd Caroli,
_First Ladies_ (New York, 1987). While both offer vivid portraits of the
president's wives, and give some sense of the institutional development,
neither advances a substantive interpretation.  "The reader who expects
to find here a tightly argued thesis will be disappointed," Caroli
confesses. "None has emerged except the unsurprising conclusion that
individual First Ladies have reflected the status of American women of
their time while helping shape expectations of what women can properly
do" (p. xxi).

 In _American First Ladies_ Gould tries to achieve biographical depth and
scholarly resonance by farming out the portraits of the First Ladies to
various experts and providing an introduction on "The First Lady as
Symbol and Institution." Gould wants to "provide the general reading
public, especially students coming initially to First Ladies, with informative
entries about each of these women, entries that also indicate the location
of primary sources, reliable biographies where available, and topics for
further research." (p. xiii) The entries range from five thousand to ten
thousand words, reflecting Gould's sense of the individual's historical
significance.  Each essay about a First Lady, he explains, "is a
self-contained unit with a chronological account of her life and an effort
to assess her place in the development of the institution of the First
Lady." Overall, the book "seeks to provide readers with a sense of the
institutional continuity and traditions of the position of the First Lady as it
has evolved over more than 200 years." (p. xiv)

The result is a compelling and illuminating work.  One essay after another
introduces us to fascinating women whose lives were an odd mixture of
great accomplishment and paralyzing passivity. Gould himself tackles
three of the most influential First Ladies, Edith Bolling Wilson, a woman
accused of seizing presidential power from her ailing husband; Lady Bird
Johnson, a woman who succeeded in carving out her own domain while
managing her demanding and dyspeptic mate; and Hillary Rodham Clinton,
a woman whose great successes -- and greater failures -- epitomize the
anomalous position of women in modern America.  Other particularly
effective portraits include Phyllis Lee Levin on the formidable New
England mother, Abigail Adams; Lynn Hudson Parsons on the difficult
marriage of John Quincy Adams to Louisa Adams; Jean H. Baker on
the oft-misunderstood and much-maligned Mary Todd Lincoln; and Stacy
A. Cordery on the poignant, and long unrequited, relationship between
Theodore Roosevelt and his second wife, Edith Kermit Roosevelt.

 In addition to providing the expected insights into presidential biography,
the growth of the presidency, the expansion of the national government,
and the role of women in America, these essays yield all kinds of
unexpected results. Again and again the reader is struck by the role of
class tensions in the relationships between up-and-coming future
presidents and their often well-bred wives. Melba Porter Hay quotes
John Tyler's heartfelt confession to his first wife Letitia that he was glad
he was of modest means when they became betrothed, for "If I had
been wealthy, the idea of your being actuated by prudential
considerations in accepting my suit, would have eternally tortured me."
(p. 111)  Also, the economic burdens of the presidency and of public life
in general for nineteenth century politicians become clear.  Many of these
women did not have easy lives. In addition to absentee husbands, they
suffered from alcoholic fathers, ne'er do well sons, the premature death
of loved ones, especially children. Some reflections on  these
phenomena in the introduction, and an assessment of whether these
individuals had particularly hard lives which perhaps inured them to the
demands of political life, would have made this volume even richer.

 To call a reference text like this with 32 different contributors uneven is
axiomatic, but it is a problem. Also, while Gould's credentials are
impressive, and he has enlisted some premier historians including Jean
Baker, most of his authors are unknowns.  The variety of backgrounds
his authors bring to the table, including a writer of children's books, a
developer of educational software, and a host of fledgling Ph.D. students
in nontenure track jobs at obscure universities -- many of whom studied,
it seems, with Gould -- may reflect the vagaries of the modern job market
and Gould's generous (and lamentably rare) desire to give some young
people exposure.  The roster also reflects the primitive state of First
Lady scholarship -- it is still considered somewhat disreputable,
somewhat fluffy. This excellent volume would have been even better
had more heavyweights of presidential scholarship been enlisted to take
a look at the wives. Asking a Fred Greenstein to write about Mrs.
Eisenhower, an Alonzo Hamby to write about Harry S. Truman, a Robert
Dallek to write about Mrs. Reagan or Mrs. Johnson, would have brought
more conventional historical issues to the fore and would have helped
compensate for most presidential biographers' neglect of the wives.
Bringing in more presidential scholars may have also avoided the one
truly lamentable flaw in this work, and in so many works about First
Ladies. Most First Lady scholars' desire to justify their field, to save their
subjects from obscurity, to prove these women's influence, leads to an
unfortunate celebratory tone. It is hard to believe that a collection of
essays about our presidents would be as upbeat, as positive, as
apologetic as this work tends to be. At times, the assessments are more
suited to a pep rally than a college seminar. The harshest criticism most
of the writers offer are that, occasionally, one of these ladies reflected
the limits imposed on women at the time. Until historians are ready to
criticize First Ladies as freely as most contemporaries were -- and still
are -- until historians stop searching for every minor example of a First
Lady's power and begin appreciating the First Ladies' role in
image-making, this field will not have fully arrived. Still, this authoritative,
enjoyable, and most welcome work represents a great leap forward in
this all too neglected field.

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