The shared dilemma of Jill, Melania, Michelle and Hillary
Despite the lodging, the plane and the superior staff, being first lady of the United States seems like kind of a drag. It’s an unenviable role, an impossible ideal. FLOTUS must represent her spouse and help deliver his agenda, but the less she says publicly of any consequence, the better. There’s the constant pressure to appear perfect, as every faux pas will be dissected and haunt her legacy. Plus, she must uphold tradition, the Jackie-ness of it all. Her very title is archaic yet must embrace modern times.
As Katie Rogers puts it in “American Woman,” a history of the modern first lady, the role “bestows upon its holder no formal responsibilities, only the pressure of meeting the ever-shifting expectations of the president, his aides and allies, the American people, and a restive press corps.” All this, and it doesn’t pay a cent!
Rogers is a gimlet-eyed White House reporter for the New York Times who writes with more verve than many on the beat.
“American Woman” and its subtitle, “The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, From Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden,” seem like misnomers, though, since half the volume is about Jill Biden, understandable as Rogers covers her for the Times. Also, Melania Trump doesn’t seem American at all. It’s her inherent foreignness – her background, her bristling at performing many
White House tasks (including, at first, moving in), those David Lynchian Christmas fails – that fascinates. Among the many dishy details we learn: Melania tasked aides with carrying a huge cosmetics case nicknamed “The Brick” and transformed her unused East Wing office into a present-wrapping “swag room.”
The book starts with Our Lady of a Hundred Iterations. In 1992, Hillary Clinton famously told “60 Minutes” that “I’m not sittin’ here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” Though, as Rogers notes, “Really, she had.” After all, that’s basically the job description. Hillary was better educated than her predecessors, a feminist in a historic though evolving position, and more ambitious than most. She faced a hailstorm of criticism for being a woman of her times. “No first lady had ever tried to push the boundaries of her role so far and so fast,” Rogers writes. “Americans have not seen another first lady quite like her since, but Hillary’s time in office permanently and fundamentally shifted how Americans view the role.”
For any politician, it’s a gift to follow an outlier. The same holds true for a first lady. Laura Bush benefited from the Hillary backlash. The Bidens, steered by Jill, have tried normalizing an abnormal place, even as Jill did something quite beyond the norm for a first lady: working outside the
White House, teaching at a community college. She accomplished this so well that we no longer marvel at its novelty.
Many of these women married at a tender age, without fully understanding what they were getting into. “You know I hate politics,” Michelle Obama said while campaigning for Joe Biden four years ago. Yet she has proved to be one of the century’s most gifted speakers, a supernova on any stump. Because Hillary came off as too ambitious trying to solve health care in her initial months, “in recent decades, the idea of a reluctant first lady has become the rule and not the exception,” Rogers writes. Safety first. Despite their talents and experience, first ladies adopt projects that face limited opposition: literacy, supporting military families, healthy eating and exercise, combating bullying.
At age 26, Jill married into a family reeling after the death of Joe Biden’s first wife and infant daughter, instantly becoming a mother as well as a wife to a man fueled by political ambition. She watched him repeatedly fail at winning the presidency. Rogers admits that when she started the book, the current first lady “was a mystery to me.” While Jill projects a sunny, unflappable disposition, she is “the family’s selfappointed grudge holder,” Rogers writes, “the one who is not to be crossed,” and “much steelier than she appears.” Like most first ladies, Jill is a fierce guardian of her husband, a top adviser who has repeatedly demonstrated strength in a family hurt by addiction and loss.
When Jill tried for a big swing, making community college free for all Americans, she failed, much as other first ladies have when attempting grand projects, like Hillary and health care. But, Rogers notes, “there is one part of the process Jill has mastered: the sort of lowstakes media appearance that can win her a slate of flattering news coverage.” Even in the 21st century, the first lady role clings tenaciously to the past – its evolution a succession of baby steps mastered in high heels, accompanied by a gracious wave and a constant smile.