First Ladies (38 page)

While her husband earned a reputation as an efficient food administrator in Europe, Lou Hoover traveled with less fanfare back and forth between England and the United States. In London she worked with the American Women's Committee to set up canteens, maintain a war hospital, and operate a fleet of Red Cross ambulances.
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She even helped start a knitting factory to assist unemployed women.
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In the United States, she gave speeches to attract money for her European activities, raising $100,000 in the San Francisco Bay area alone.
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At the invitation of the Stanford faculty, she spoke to them about unrestricted German submarine warfare.
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When the United States entered the war in the spring of 1917, Herbert returned to Washington to serve as Food Administrator, and Lou complemented his role by publicizing strategies for food conservation. She invited reporters into her home to show how she achieved “wheatless and meatless days” and cut sugar consumption below the suggested limits. The same woman who would later cringe and refuse when reporters sought interviews with her in the White House allowed the
Ladies' Home Journal
to publish “Dining with the Hoovers” in March 1918 and include information on what she fed her family.
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Besides acting the part of public model housewife, Lou helped start a club, a cafeteria,
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and a residence, all for young women who had come to Washington to work during the war.
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After 1921 when her husband entered President Harding's Cabinet as secretary of commerce, Lou Hoover continued her public, activist role. The time seemed right to finish what Elizabeth Monroe and Louisa Adams had begun a century earlier, and Lou resolved to stop the mindless “leaving of cards” that had been traditional for cabinet wives since the beginning of the republic. She “rebelled at spending four or five afternoons a week at this fruitless job,” Herbert explained, and “secured an agreement among the Cabinet Ladies to an announcement that it would not be done any more.” Herbert may have exaggerated Lou's role, but the visits ended.
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Nothing about Lou Hoover in the early 1920s suggests she would retreat from active leadership, especially of women and young people. In 1924, in the wake of revelations about the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration, she called a special conference to emphasize women's responsibility to speak out on the dangers of dishonesty in government.
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She persuaded the National Amateur Athletic Association, on whose board she served as the only woman, to form an advisory council of athletic directors to encourage physical education for women “in every institution” in the country.
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When invited to speak to a convention of teenagers, she used the opportunity to exhort the girls to plan to combine marriage with a career, and she volunteered her own opinion that anyone who fell back on children as an excuse for not working outside the home was “lazy.”
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Lou, who had started married life with a staff of six and worked her way up, might easily have underestimated the hours of work needed to run a household, even with the new appliances available in the 1920s. But she was not unique in expecting that wives could have careers, too. More married women were working outside their homes than ever before, the percentage rising from twenty-three to twenty-nine in
the 1920s.
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Although “glamorous” new jobs in decorating and copywriting were opening up to women, most women still found their jobs in low-paid drudgery—laundry, domestic, and agricultural sectors—but they were not the focus of Lou Hoover's discussion. For her, work had brought personal satisfaction, and she seemed to assume that other wives and mothers would profit as she had done. Just how they would balance cooking, cleaning, laundry, and child care with their jobs remained unclear.

Increased discussion of wives' roles in general may explain why the candidates' spouses received so much attention in the 1928 contest between Herbert Hoover and Al Smith. The cosmopolitan Lou Hoover, in her subdued blues and grays and her crown of queenly white hair, contrasted sharply with Catherine (Katie) Smith, a product, like her husband, of New York's Lower East Side. Katie's Roman Catholicism, her city speech, and reputed weakness for excessive imbibing reinforced her husband's unpopularity in areas of the country intolerant of such habits and beliefs. Jokes spread that if she got to Washington, she would present a vulgar model of American womanhood to the rest of the world.
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“Can you imagine,” one Texas Republican woman reportedly asked a public meeting, “Mrs. Smith dealing with foreign dignitaries? One of them might say, ‘That's a nice hat,' and she would answer, ‘You said a mouthful.'”
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The Democrats became so concerned with Catherine Smith's effect on votes that the party's Women's Division organized speaking trips through the South. Frances Perkins paired with the wife of Charles Dana Gibson on one such assignment, and the two of them went from luncheon to tea, insisting that their good friend Katie would do perfectly well running the White House. She had a natural dignity, they argued, that would appeal to anyone who met her. As for the rumors about her drinking, they had never seen her touch a drop “even in her own house.”
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In spite of the work of Perkins and other Democratic women, some national periodicals reported the Hoover victory with sighs of relief. Finally the sophistication that had disappeared under the untraveled Florence Harding and Grace Coolidge could be restored, one magazine suggested. Frederick Collins, writing in
Woman's Home Companion
the month of Herbert Hoover's inauguration, stressed Lou's “serenity … and … cosmopolitan background,”
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while novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, in
World's Work,
pointed to Lou's strength. Recent First Ladies had suffered under the pressures of the job—Ellen Wilson and Florence Harding had collapsed—but the athletic Lou would prove stronger, Rinehart predicted.
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Between 1992 and 2008, the popular First Ladies exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History highlighted the women's roles in the nation's political history and social reform movements. Courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Regal Edith Roosevelt reportedly never made a mistake. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Helen Taft (also seen below) raised many eyebrows when she broke precedent and rode with her husband to the White House after his inauguration. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Painter Ellen Wilson kept a low profile in her own work and in her efforts to improve Washington's slums. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Edith Wilson showed none of her predecessor's reticence. She thrived on the attention she received as First Lady. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Although one of the oldest First Ladies, Florence Harding made every effort to appear vital and energetic as she greeted White House visitors. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.