Rebecca Boggs Roberts

A competent if unspectacular biography of Edith Wilson, second wife of the American president Woodrow Wilson. She is likely best known today as the woman who helped to cover up the true severity of the stroke her husband suffered in 1919, and filtered access to him for several months. Rebecca Boggs Roberts makes good use of Wilson's memoirs as a source, mining them both for what they tell us about Wilson's personality and for what her massaging/omission of certain events means. I can't say I warmed to her very much—independent-minded, yes, but she was a racist and an anti-suffragist—but I think Boggs Roberts creates an even-handed portrait of her.

But I didn't find the argument—admittedly made more forcefully in the marketing materials than in the book itself—that Wilson was the "first woman president" of the U.S. or an "unelected president" to be compelling. It's both hyperbolic and fairly unsophisticated in how it frames soft/behind the scenes power. I found myself wishing that Boggs Roberts was more familiar with work on medieval/early modern queenship; I think it would have strengthened her analysis of Wilson's roles.… (mehr)

This is a very fair and even-handed biography of controversial first lady Edith Wilson. When her husband became incapacitated by a stroke during his presidency, Edith took charge and controlled access to her husband, something which would be impossible today. For months she controlled who saw him and what papers he had access to.

What I liked about this book is that the author didn't shy away from Edith's faults. No. They are here. Up close and personal. I came away from the book with a better understanding of someone I had only known through the lens of what I had been told, that she was basically the first woman US president. What we have here is something much more complex. Edith wasn't in it for power or fame. She was there to protect the man she loved.

Very highly recommended.… (mehr)

Written by the daughter of Cokie Roberts, not a stranger to D.C. politics, this book gives an in-depth look at the end of the suffrage movement. The book begins with Alice Paul coming back from England where she learned political activism from the Pankhursts and concludes with the passage of the suffrage amendment in 1920. It rightly highlights the conflict between Paul's Congressional Union (which became the National Woman's Party during this time) and Carrie Chapman Catt's National American Woman Suffrage Association. Catt worked state by state and in a 'lady-like' style while Paul believed in a national focus and was not above using tactics that promulgated violence and danger. In fact she had been arrested, jailed and force fed many times for the cause.
Although I have read several books on Paul, who is my hero, and collect books on the suffrage movement in general, it was wonderful to see photos that I have not seen before, from the Library of Congress. The photo near the end of Alice Paul visiting Susan B. Anthony's grave in Rochester made the book worth it to me.… (mehr)