The Strangest Job in the World
Edith Wilson may have been closer to running the country than being a kindly helpmate.
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The role of first lady couldn’t be stranger. You attain the position almost by accident, simply by virtue of being married to the president, but then it comes with punishingly high expectations. The moment’s prevailing ideas about womanhood and marriage—right now, very confused and fluctuating ones—are projected onto the plus-one, who must conform or find some way out from under this burden. Katie Rogers’s new book about our most recent first ladies, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden, looks at exactly this struggle to play a part for which there is no longer any clear script to follow.
“Every first lady in modern times has been a pathbreaker,” writes Helen Lewis in her essay on the book: Perhaps, she argues, none more so than … Melania Trump. Having largely ignored what a first lady is supposed to do—including not even living in the White House for a long stretch of time—Trump broke the mold, one that keeps being refashioned with each new partner who finds herself (or, hopefully one day, himself) in the role. Helen’s essay made me think about the memoirs by first ladies, which now seem almost like a genre unto themselves. One of the earliest entries, largely forgotten today, was by a woman who may have been closer to running the country than being a kindly helpmate: Edith Wilson.
First, here are three stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- Seven great graphic novels that go beyond words
- “Preface,” a poem by W. H. Auden
- An excerpt from Xochitl Gonzalez’s new novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last
Helen Taft’s Recollections of Full Years, published in 1914, was the very first memoir by a presidential spouse (Julia Grant also recorded her memories, though they weren’t published until 1975). But My Memoir, by the second wife of Woodrow Wilson, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, came out in 1939 and seems to have really set the trend in motion. Her story had high dramatic potential. After all, she and the president, both widowed, met and got married in 1915, while he was in the White House and not long after World War I had started. Then something even more consequential happened: Wilson had a stroke in October 1919 that left him almost completely incapacitated. “Madam, it is a grave situation but I think you can handle it,” Edith records the doctor saying to her in My Memoir. “Have everything come to you; weight the importance of each matter, and see if it is possible to solve them without the guidance of your husband.”
By most accounts, Edith then basically took over. No less than an official White House biography describes her as “functionally running the Executive branch of government for the remainder of Wilson’s second term.” If Melania matters because she took the liberty of checking out, Edith might be our most underrated first lady for actually taking on the job of president.
You wouldn’t learn much from My Memoir about the scale of her decision making in the year and a half in which she was effectively in charge. The book is filled with observations about the events and people Edith encountered at Wilson’s side, such as a dinner at Buckingham Palace and details about what she and the Queen both wore. The New York Times review characterized the memoir—with the era’s jaw-dropping but casual misogyny—as a “large, chatty, emphatically feminine book.” To the extent that Edith describes her role in the White House, it appears reserved to being simply a “steward” of her husband. The book, written 15 years after his death, was largely an effort to defend his legacy, not to bolster her own unexpected contribution to history. (The most recent issue of The Atlantic, coincidentally, has an essay from David Frum calling for the “uncancelling” of Wilson.)
How thrilling it would have been to read about what she actually experienced as a woman without any higher education, who had never run anything, suddenly inhabiting what was one of the most powerful positions in the world. The fact that she had had to censor her own story speaks to just how circumscribed the role of first lady was—but would not always be. Even as Edith Wilson was publishing her recollections, Eleanor Roosevelt was in the White House, offering a very different picture of the kind of independence and will a presidential spouse could exercise. She even wrote about it, in the not one but multiple memoirs that she published in her lifetime, whose titles tell their own tale: This Is My Story, This I Remember, and On My Own.
The Most Consequential Recent First Lady
By Helen Lewis
Which president’s wife abandoned the script entirely?
What to Read
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, by Eudora Welty
This volume brings together every short story Welty wrote, the large majority of them set in small-town Mississippi. In the collection, women cluster together, opining, helping out at funerals, and fanning themselves waiting for rain; the men go off to drag the river for drowned bodies. The Natchez Trace, the historic trail that cuts through the state, crops up again and again, a wild, difficult, almost mythical road that looms large in the characters’ minds. Welty is famous for much-anthologized stories like the antic “Why I Live at the P.O.,” but her oeuvre is weird and dreamlike, with a pervading aura of secrecy: In one story, a deaf boy forms an attachment to Aaron Burr at the inn where Burr plans his conspiracy; in another, a girl is kept confined by a husband far too old for her in a plot straight out of a fairy tale. In each, Welty’s precise and lavish descriptions of the world abound—a night sky “transparent like grape flesh,” the “embroidering movements” of insects, the Mississippi River “reaching like a somnambulist driven to go in new places.” Every detail seems to hold meaning, to express some facet of the emotional revelations her characters are continually arriving at. Taken together, the stories feel like a glimpse into the humid, shadowed interior of the state itself. — Chelsea Leu
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Your Weekend Read
Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies
By Dara Horn
The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with “Fuck Jews.” They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.