First Women

C-SPAN’s yearlong historical past sequence,
First Women: Affect and Picture, featured interviews with greater than fifty preeminent historians and biographers. On this informative e book, these specialists paint intimate portraits of all forty-five first girls — their lives, ambitions, and distinctive partnerships with their presidential spouses. Susan Swain and the C-SPAN group elicit the main points that made these ladies who they had been: how Martha Washington deliberately set the requirements adopted by first girls for the subsequent century; how Edith Wilson was complicit within the cover-up when President Wilson grew to become incapacitated after a stroke; and the way Mamie Eisenhower used the brand new medium of tv to bolster her, and her husband’s, optimistic public photos.

This e book offers an up-close historic take a look at these fascinating ladies who survived the scrutiny of the White Home, typically at nice private price, whereas supporting their households and well-known husbands — and typically altering historical past. Full with illustrations and important biographical particulars, it’s an illuminating, entertaining, and finally inspiring learn.