First Ladies (25 page)

The Bryans lost the 1896 election but their working partnership continued. They started a periodical, the
Commoner,
in 1901 and continued to speak out on a variety of causes, including woman's suffrage which Mary had publicly favored in the 1890s when only a very small minority of women and virtually no politicians' wives admitted to such views. Even after Mary became crippled by arthritis and was eventually confined to a wheelchair, she continued to work hard to advance Will's career. In 1911 she accompanied her husband to Princeton to meet Ellen and Woodrow Wilson,
¹³⁵
and she appealed (unsuccessfully) to Florence Harding for a place for Will on the U.S. Peace Commission.
¹³⁶
After he died in 1925, she used the remaining five years of her life to edit his
Memoirs
.

Comparison of Mary Bryan and Ida McKinley might seem unfair. The former was fourteen years younger and had matured with more examples of strong, independent women to guide her. Mary had a far better education and came out of the frontier tradition that accepted large and responsible roles for women in family decisions. No string of tragedies of the magnitude of Ida's had deterred her. Why then, one might ask, did she prefer to funnel her remarkable energy and talent into her husband's career rather than develop one of her own?

Mary Bryan may have judged her time as premature for a woman to pursue her own career and left that for her daughter's generation. In
any case, she lived to see her elder daughter, Ruth, make a remarkable name for herself and constitute the sole entry for the family's distaff side in the history books. Unlike her mother, who married a man she “could work for,” Ruth Bryan married three men, none of whom she worked for, and she developed her own reputation as speaker, politician, and diplomat, Born in 1885, she was only five years old when her father won his first election to Congress but she grew up listening to him debate the tariff and campaign all across the nation.
¹³⁷
Those experiences no doubt influenced her as an adult and she became the first congresswoman elected from the South (Florida in 1928) and then the first American woman to win appointment to a major diplomatic post (envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotenitiary to Denmark, 1933).

But the century ended and time “turned over” in 1900 with Ruth Bryan's string of “firsts” far in the future. Women could vote in only four states (Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, and Utah), and most women who desired elective office chose to attach themselves to their husbands' careers. Despite all that women had done to speak out in public, form chains of national organizations, and break down some of the barriers that kept them out of the professions, ideas about femininity had not altered. Wives who took an activist role in the world outside their families were criticized for attempting “too much.”

First Ladies of the late nineteenth century fit easily into their times. Most had attended college (Lucy Hayes, Lucretia Garfield, Mary Arthur McElroy, Rose Cleveland, Frances Cleveland, and Caroline Harrison), but their degrees were in the typical “women's” fields of art and teaching. Even those who had shown a hint of independence in their youth seemed to mature into models of domestic acquiescence. A small minority of the country might appeal to them to speak out on women's issues but a majority still held for the homey hostess. The nation's Head Housekeeper might present a more serious, mature image but she was not really a “New Woman.”

Martha Washington, as portrayed by Charles Wilson Peale in 1776, about thirteen years before she became First Lady. Courtesy of The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association.

Although Abigail Adams lived nearly eighteen years after leaving Washington, she died before her son was inaugurated President of the United States in 1825. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Dolley Madison as she appeared in one of her famous turbans in 1817, about the time she ended her two terms as First Lady. Formerly attributed to Ezra Ames, this portrait is now considered to be the work of Otis Bass. Courtesy of The New-York Historical Society.

Stylish Elizabeth Monroe, dubbed “la belle Américaine” in Paris, aroused considerable envy among her peers in Washington. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Louisa Adams boasted many talents, as shown in this Smithsonian exhibit, which includes her harp, music stand, and music in front of a portrait of her. Courtesy of the Division of Political History, the Smithsonian Institution, Photo No. 41487-A.

Angelica Van Buren (left), daughter-in-law of widower Martin Van Buren, and Julia Tyler (below), young bride of John Tyler, both fit into a long line of youthful White House hostesses. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Before taking on the duties of White House hostess for her widowed father-in-law, Priscilla Cooper Tyler won fame for her stage appearances opposite her father, thus prompting comments about a country in which a woman could pass from being an actress to “what serves as a Republican throne.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Sarah Polk as she was portrayed by George Dury in the 1840s. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.