Bibliograph

Untold power, the fascinating rise and complex legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson, Rebecca Boggs Roberts

Type

Label

Untold power, the fascinating rise and complex legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson, Rebecca Boggs Roberts

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references and index

resource.biographical

individual biography

Illustrations

platesillustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Untold power

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1330403685

Responsibility statement

Rebecca Boggs Roberts

Sub title

the fascinating rise and complex legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson

Summary

While this nation has yet to elect its first woman president, just over a century ago a woman became the nation's first acting president. She was born in 1872, and her name was Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. She climbed her way out of Appalachian poverty into the highest echelons of American power, and, in 1919, effectively acted as the first woman president of the United States (before women could even vote nationwide) when her husband, Woodrow Wilson, was incapacitated. Beautiful, brilliant, cunning, and calculating, Edith Wilson was a complicated figure whose personal quest for influence reshaped the position of First Lady into one of political prominence forever. And yet few truly understand who she was. For the first time, a leading historian of women's civic participation takes an unflinching look at the woman whose ascent mirrors that of many powerful American women before and since - one full of the compromises and complicities women have undertaken throughout time in order to find security for themselves and make their mark on history. Edith Wilson was a shape-shifter who was obsessed with crafting her own reputation, at once deeply invested in exercising her own power while also opposing women's suffrage. This book is a long overdue examination of one of American history's most influential and complicated women, as well as of the surprising and often absurd realities of American politics

Table Of Contents

A Virginia Childhood 1872-1891 -- Woman of Washington 1891-1908 -- Merry Widow 1908-1914 -- Romanced by the President 1915 -- The First Lady in War 1916-1918 -- The First Lady in Peace 1918-1919 -- The Stroke 1919 -- "Stewardship" 1919-1921 -- After the White House 1921-1924 -- Woman of Washington Reprise 1924-1961

Target audience

adult

resource.variantTitle

Fascinating rise and complex legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson

Classification