Lou Henry Hoover

Lou Henry met Herbert Hoover while at Stanton University, where she was the only female student of geology. Mr. Hoover was also a geologist and mining engineer, and was offered an opportunity to lead China’s international mining program. The two married and lived in China for two years, where they faced the violence of the Boxer Rebellion as agents of foreign influence in China. Unperturbed, Lou Henry Hoover learned to speak Chinese in this time (she would have mastery over seven languages) and remains the only first lady to have been able to speak an Asian language. She continued to travel the world for her husband’s work, and then spent three years as the national president of the Girl Scouts while Herbert Hoover got involved in politics.
When Herbert finally became president, Lou Henry Hoover took on a more subtle role than she had in her ambitious life before the White House. She did what she could to preserve her family’s privacy and to keep private the ways that she influenced her husband’s policies. Under her influence President Hoover doubled the number of women serving in senate-approved positions of power, and the White House hosted the family of the first Black congressman elected since reconstruction- drawing furious condemnation from ex-Confederate states at the time. She also became famous for her regular radio addresses, where she took a pointedly feminist tone in explaining how men and women would have to blur their established responsibilities in order to overcome the burgeoning Great Depression.