Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson
by Rebecca Boggs Roberts (Viking, $30)
It’s time to give due credit to America’s first acting female president, said Jessica Ruf in Washingtonian magazine. When President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke in October 1919, his second wife, Edith, stepped in to keep the government running while sustaining the ruse that her incapacitated husband remained in control. “Impressive? Yes. Ethical? Of course not.” But author Rebecca Boggs Roberts shows us Edith Wilson whole, said Lauren Mechling in The Guardian. When Edith met the widowed president in 1915, the 42-year-old Virginia native was a woman of means who ran a jewelry shop that she’d inherited from her first husband. Though she initially spurned Wilson’s marriage proposal, she wed the president later in 1915 and proved “an unflagging co-worker and ingenious image crafter.”
“In every respect she was quite a dame,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. “He’s a goner,” one White House staffer said of his boss just after Edith’s friends introduced her to the president. The first woman in D.C. to obtain a driver’s license, Edith cruised about town in an electric car, and the president leaned on her as an adviser even before she agreed to marriage. Later, she evolved into a golfing buddy as well, and when Woodrow was left bedridden by his stroke, Edith helped orchestrate the cover-up while managing her husband’s correspondence, meeting with dignitaries, and steering the voting of Democrats on Capitol Hill.
“Contemporary American culture has claimed her as a proto-feminist heroine,” said Jonathan Darman in Air Mail. But the Edith Wilson we meet here cared most about protecting her husband’s well-being and legacy, didn’t want power, and took no interest in securing women’s suffrage or resisting her husband’s embrace of racial segregation. “Whenever the real first female president finally arrives at the White House, she probably won’t gain the kind of inspiration from Edith’s story that she’ll find in, say, Eleanor Roosevelt’s. But when times get rough, she’ll be lucky to have Edith’s spirit standing watch.”