First Ladies

“Why should my husband’s job, or yours, prevent us from being ourselves? Being ladylike does not require silence.” ~ First Lady Betty Ford

Today, few would argue that the first lady of the United States holds one of the most prominent social positions in the world. First ladies often help establish the country’s priorities and affect policy outcomes. The role, however, has evolved significantly since Martha Washington’s time. Each first lady has inhabited this complicated and evolving responsibility differently. The following portraits from the National Portrait Gallery's collection provide us with a means to explore the accomplishments, personalities, and lives of many of these exceptional women.

Abigail Smith Adams challenged the social and political limitations of the time by advocating for women’s rights, education, and the abolition of slavery. She readily expressed her opinions in letters to her husband, John Adams, by reminding him to “Remember the Ladies” as he helped to frame the new nation’s institutions. Always outspoken, Adams struggled to suppress her opinions when her husband served as president.

Sarah Childress Polk made her husband's political career the main focus of her life. Up until he entered the White House, she served as his private secretary, handling his correspondence and scheduling his speaking engagements. She was his most trusted advisor, and because she believed that entertainment took away from business, she relied on White House staff to handle the bulk of the hostess duties. Instead, she spent these social occasions speaking with politicians about legislation important to the President’s agenda. This lithograph by Nathaniel Currier is based on a daguerreotype by the photographer John Plumbe Jr.

As a young schoolteacher, Abigail Powers fell in love with one of her students, nineteen-year-old Millard Fillmore. After their marriage, she continued teaching to support her husband’s aspirations in law and politics, an unconventional decision for her time. Abigail Fillmore devoted her life to learning, and as first lady, she helped establish a reference library in the White House. She frequently invited popular authors and performers to visit with her at the presidential mansion. The gold chain that hangs from her neck in this portrait would have been attached to a watch to be used to keep up with her busy social schedule.

Harriet Rebecca Lane Johnston served as first lady for her bachelor uncle, James Buchanan. She was passionate about the visual arts and bequeathed her vast painting and sculpture collection to the Smithsonian. Her interest in Native art led her to become an advocate for the welfare of Native peoples and a promoter of indigenous arts. Harriet Johnston was photographed at Mathew Brady Studio sometime between 1860 and 1870. This original glass-plate negative is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s Frederick Hill Meserve Collection.

Raised in a wealthy Kentucky slave-owning family, Mary Ann Todd Lincoln actively voiced her political opinions throughout her life. While serving as first lady, she encouraged her husband to hire women in the treasury and war departments. Her focus on class position is evidenced in photographs, such as this one, which shows her in a fashionable ball gown. Nearly all of Mary Lincoln’s clothing was sewn by Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, an accomplished seamstress, whose mother was enslaved.

This photograph of Mary Ann Todd Lincoln, wearing a meticulously fashioned black dress, may have been taken in the autumn of 1863. She would still have been in mourning for her eleven-year-old son, Willie, who died of typhoid fever in February 1862. Three years later, her husband was assassinated.

Julia Boggs Dent Grant reveled in her role as first lady and White House hostess. Her receptions were lavish, and state dinners featured sophisticated menus prepared by Valentino Melah, an Italian-trained chef. While living in the White House, Grant helped her husband entertain a host of foreign dignitaries, including King Kalākaua and Queen Kapi‘olani of the Sandwich Islands (Hawai‘i), Russia’s Grand Duke Alexis, and a delegation of Japanese political and military leaders. This original glass-plate negative is part of the National Portrait Gallery’s extensive Mathew Brady Studio photography collection.

The journalist Mary C. Ames once described Lucretia Randolph Garfield as having a “philosophic mind” that made her not only her husband’s equal “but, in more than one respect, his superior.” Garfield loved literature and the classical world. She was fluent in French, German, Latin, and ancient Greek and spent much of her time in Washington, D.C., reading books that she borrowed from the Library of Congress. When President Garfield died in September 1881, Lucretia Garfield dedicated the rest of her life to the historical preservation of his books and papers.

After the death of President Woodrow Wilson’s first wife, he married Edith Bolling Galt. A successful and remarkably independent businesswoman, she drove around Washington, D.C., in an electric car. Edith Wilson brought great energy to their union and an innovative spirit to the White House. As first lady during World War I, when gardeners were in short supply, she used sheep to graze on the White House lawn and donated their wool to the war effort. Despite her aversion to suffragists, who in 1917 began picketing outside the White House, Wilson became the first wife of a sitting president to cast a vote in a U.S. election, after the nineteenth amendment was ratified in 1920.

Grace Anna Goodhue Coolidge was as friendly and outgoing as her husband Calvin Coolidge was stoic and reclusive, and her accessibility was central to his popular appeal. Before marriage, she taught lipreading to students at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, and she remained deeply involved with that institution until the end of her life. She once gave a five-minute speech in sign language at a luncheon for newspaperwomen, reinforcing her advocacy for the education of the deaf.

Iowa native Lou Henry met her future husband Herbert Hoover while the two were studying geology at Stanford University. The couple traveled the world for his work as a mining engineer, and she became fluent in several foreign languages. As first lady, she rejected restrictive social standards by inviting pregnant women to attend White House functions. She also defied segregationists by hosting Jessie DePriest, the African American wife of a Chicago congressman, at a White House tea for congressional wives. In this photograph, Lou Henry Hoover stands with her dogs, “Weegie” and “Pat.”

At the height of the Great Depression, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt traveled widely to assess federal relief programs, and during World War II, she flew around the world visiting troops. The activism that characterized Eleanor Roosevelt’s years as first lady did not end with her departure from the White House. As a U.S. delegate to the United Nations (1945–53), she was instrumental in formulating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and securing its ratification by the General Assembly in 1948. This work led many to hail her as the “First Lady of the World.”

As a woman who had worked hard to support herself through college, Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan Nixon was a staunch advocate of the Equal Rights Amendment. As first lady, she often visited hospitals and orphanages, and she traveled extensively. Her commitment to improving accessibility for those wishing to visit the White House resulted in foreign-language pamphlets and the installation of the first wheelchair ramps at the mansion. In this portrait, taken in Los Angeles in 1953, she waves to the crowd while on the campaign trail with her husband, then the vice-presidential candidate.

As first lady, Elizabeth “Betty” Anne Bloomer Ford earned both scorn and praise for her pro-choice beliefs and her strong support of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy just weeks after becoming the first lady. Her open encouragement of women to perform self-exams and to seek early medical care is credited with saving millions of lives. After leaving the White House, Ford spoke candidly about her drug and alcohol dependency, which she developed after suffering from a pinched nerve and chronic arthritis.

A strong supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, Barbara Pierce Bush was pro-choice and fought to destigmatize AIDS. She used her platform as first lady to combat illiteracy, writing several books and hosting a radio program with celebrity guests called “Mrs. Bush’s Story Time.” In 1989, the first lady created the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy to improve access to educational opportunities.

When Laura Lane Welch Bush entered the White House, she had been advocating for childhood literacy for decades as a teacher and school librarian. As first lady, her accomplishments included establishing the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries and founding the National Book Festival. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush took a deep interest in women’s education in Afghanistan, using her platform to support to the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF). The Laura W. Bush Library and Women’s Resource Center opened at AUAF in 2013; the university campus moved to Doha, Qatar, in 2021.