When remembering America’s first ladies, there is a general assumption that these women were the wives of the presidents. This is not surprising since, with the exception of James Buchanan, all the presidents have been married men. However, several presidents were widowers or husbands of women who could not assume their duties. These men had to rely on women who were neither their wives nor their companions as stand-in first ladies with the primary duty of entertaining visitors to the White House. They included daughters Martha “Patsy” Jefferson Randolph, Martha Johnson Patterson, and Margaret Woodrow Wilson; nieces Emily Tennessee Donelson and Harriet Lane Johnston; daughters-in-law Angelica Singleton Van Buren and Priscilla Cooper Tyler; and sisters Mary Arthur McElroy and Rose Cleveland. They were real persons who each brought a unique experience to their work, which, unlike the service of their more famous married counterparts, has long been forgotten.

“Trendsetter” first ladies show new ways of modeling femininity in a given era, often through attention to the visual. Because women in public long have been expected to be seen and not heard, fashion and image historically have provided a way of communicating nonverbally. Thus, first ladies who were considered trendsetters typically circulated new “looks” or images to a given public, drawing from the culture in which they operated to influence norms around femininity, beauty, and celebrity. This chapter assesses seven first ladies for their visual influence. Dolley Madison (1809-1817), Julia Tyler (1844-1845), and Frances Cleveland (1886-89, 1893-97) were the most notable of the nineteenth-century first ladies who found themselves positioned as style icons. Following in their footsteps were Mamie Eisenhower (1952-1960), Jacqueline Kennedy (1960-1963), Nancy Reagan (1980-1988), and Michelle Obama (2008-2016), who each leveraged the trendsetter role during their time in the White House.

Despite being unelected and unappointed, first ladies of the United States have served as notable political assets and liabilities before, during, and after their time in the White House. This chapter uses a variety of examples to illustrate the positive and negative impacts of first ladies as they have exerted their influence domestically and internationally, sometimes in alignment with and other times in opposition to their husband’s public agenda. These pages delineate the ways these women have been strategically deployed as emissaries for their husbands and as advocates for party policies, initiatives, and candidates up and down the ballot, as well as how they have instigated and mitigated scandals. The amorphous and often contradictory criteria for being an effective first lady expose every presidential spouse to criticism that is not always reasonable given the nebulous nature of the position.

In 235 years, only about two dozen women have experienced the role of “mourner in chief” as current or former first ladies grieving a presidential husband. This chapter examines the performances of six of these women in different historical contexts and under very different circumstances: Martha Washington, Mary Lincoln, Lucretia Garfield, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Nancy Reagan. This analysis considers first ladies’ performances of mourning during presidents’ illness or assassination; funerals and memorial services; and the expanse of time for which they survived their husbands. Through these case studies, the authors consider how a first lady’s mourning can shape her husband’s legacy, and what it can teach us about how Americans grieve.

Public memory denotes how groups recall the past and how those ideas take shape, evolve, and prompt differences or agreement about history’s events and actors. Examining first ladies through their tenures in office, memoirs, interviews, historic sites, and memorials often reveal how they wanted to be remembered. Biographies, dramatic films, documentaries, and historical fiction about them can determine how presidential wives’ legacies are preserved or morph in the public psyche over time. Siena College Research Institute’s scholar polls and Ranker online surveys rate first ladies among historians and the general public. This chapter applies such evidence to first ladies Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, Mary Lincoln, Edith Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Bush. Each exemplifies a variety of legacies—both positive and negative—and reflects how memorializations and public memories evolve.

US first ladies have exercised a complicated kind of activism when it comes to women’s rights. Some have acted as vocal advocates to insist that women’s equality should be a national priority. Others have used their platform more quietly to intervene on behalf of women’s rights. Still others have held and promoted views that have contradicted, undermined, or altogether avoided efforts to advance women’s rights. This chapter traces how US first ladies have addressed and influenced the prevailing women’s rights issues of their day, with a focus on two national campaigns: a federal amendment for women’s suffrage and a federal amendment for equal rights. By engaging or avoiding the debates surrounding women’s suffrage and the ERA, these women stretched the political and rhetorical boundaries of their platform and shaped public understanding about the ongoing struggle for women’s equality in the United States.