The Most Consequential Recent First Lady

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The most consequential first lady of modern times was Melania Trump. I know, I know. We are supposed to believe it was Hillary Clinton, with her unbaked cookies and her pantsuits and her valiant but doomed attempts at health-care reform. But Melania Trump redefined the role of FLOTUS—by rejecting it.

Back in 2017, she made a half-hearted effort at holding down what I believe to be the world’s most thankless job, and then she decided, like Bartleby the Scrivener, that she would prefer not to. Even more surprisingly, it turned out that no one could force her. For decades, we have been assured that American voters want an unblemished nuclear family—a supportive spouse and smiling children—in the White House. The Trumps smashed that norm, along with many others. In this year’s primary season, as her husband cruises toward renomination, Melania has largely remained out of the public eye: On her to-do list over the past few months, according to reports, has been to renegotiate her prenup. This is not how it is supposed to be.

Perhaps, though, every first lady in modern times has been a pathbreaker. Because the status of women in America is still in flux, each has defied expectations in one way or another. Even in the 2020s, the “firsts” keep coming: Jill Biden is the first FLOTUS ever to keep her day job, as a teacher in a community college.

In American Woman, a survey of first ladies from Hillary Clinton onward, the White House reporter Katie Rogers shows how groundbreaking Biden’s decision initially seemed to those around her. Surely a first lady holding down a job would present impossible security challenges, or grave ethical concerns, or would simply be repulsive to the electorate? Not at all. Secret Service agents patrol the halls of Northern Virginia Community College, and Biden is paid via a trust to avoid violating the emoluments clause. The voters don’t seem to have noticed, let alone revolted. And why should they? In America, roughly seven of out 10 mothers now participate in the labor force; Jill Biden is following, rather than setting, a trend. “Each First Lady’s decisions have inevitably made it easier on whoever comes next,” Rogers writes.

The continued existence of Biden’s teaching career illustrates how inviolable assumptions about first ladies can seem—until they are smashed by the obstinacy of an individual woman. If Jill Biden has undermined the idea that presidential spouses can’t work, then Melania Trump disproved the idea that a wholesome family life, complete with a beaming, compliant spouse by your side, was a prerequisite for electoral success in America. (In the Republican primaries, Ron DeSantis had a political family straight out of central casting—photogenic wife, three adorable kids—and he didn’t even make it to New Hampshire.)

Throughout Trump’s presidency, Rogers records, “observers had questions about whether Melania was willfully sabotaging her husband with her contrary comments and body language in public.” That theory seems like a stretch, but I can see how it arose: Anything less than devoted, self-sacrificing support in a first lady is unusual. And after several years of seemingly phoning it in, Melania gratefully exited the stage entirely. When she left the White House in January 2021, she got on Air Force One in a black suit, carrying a Birkin bag, and got off the plane in sunglasses, a kaftan, and flats. “It was the fashion equivalent of an out-of-office reply,” Rogers writes.

This was not always Melania’s attitude. “I would be very traditional,” she told The New York Times in 1999 when asked what she would do as first lady. “Like Betty Ford or Jackie Kennedy. I would support him.” As with many Melania pronouncements, her choice of examples is odd, even inscrutable. Jackie Kennedy, sure: She is known for looking stylish and turning a blind eye to JFK’s many affairs. But Betty Ford, a passionate supporter of abortion rights and the women’s movement, who was candid about her mastectomy and her substance-abuse issues? That one is harder to parse.

The essential enigma of Melania is one of the many challenges Rogers faces in American Woman. Another is that Hillary Clinton threatens to swamp the narrative, because her story has become such a common entry point to debates about feminism and frustrated female ambition. Some of these arguments have, by now, been raging for decades; hers is the life that launched a thousand op-eds. When Clinton posted on social media in January about the lack of nominations for Barbie’s female director and lead female actor, the overwhelming response from the internet was neither anger nor cheers, but weariness. Finally, after more than three decades of Clinton being in the public eye, America was tired of arguing about whether rich, white women succeeding is a feminist triumph or not.

What makes Clinton such an irresistible subject is her own political ambition. Although the other first ladies covered in American Woman—Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, and Biden—have all wrestled with preserving their identity in the shadow of their husbands’ careers, none of them have wanted to run for president themselves. (And all three took their husband’s name without apparent angst, unlike Hillary Rodham.) Bush and Biden seem to have always been happiest in a supporting role, and the more driven Obama is at last living her best life—hanging out with Oprah, writing best sellers, no longer always needing to relax her hair. Perhaps her story once read as a tragedy of spousal sacrifice; today, the pact between the Obamas seems more balanced.

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Rogers is clear about one thing: No one ever wants to be first lady. She quotes Martha Washington complaining in 1789 that “I live a very dull life hear [sic] and know nothing that passes in the town—I never goe to the publick place—indeed I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else.” She records that Louisa, the British-born wife of the sixth president, John Quincy Adams, “spent much of her time in the White House eating chocolate, playing the harp, and writing plays about a repressed woman, a character she based on her life.” Even Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the most politically active first ladies, saw the role as a grim duty. She was “happy” for Franklin when he was elected, she wrote in her memoir, “but for myself I was deeply troubled. As I saw it, this meant the end of any personal life of my own.”

Obama likely felt obliged to disguise her ambivalence about becoming first lady, knowing that it would play into the racialized narrative of her alleged “ingratitude.” As a white woman, Melania Trump did not face the same attacks. Nonetheless, it is still remarkable how unemotional her approach appears to have been. When the Access Hollywood tape came out during the 2016 campaign, she refused to do a joint interview with Donald, as Hillary had once had to endure for the sake of Bill’s continued career. Soon after, she crisply dismissed the idea that people would pity her for being married to a groper. “People think and talk about me like, ‘Oh, Melania, oh poor Melania.’ Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t feel sorry for me. I can handle everything,” she told Anderson Cooper.

When Donald was elected, Melania refused to move from New York to Washington, D.C., for several months, citing her son Barron’s school commitments. When she did arrive at the White House, she complained that it fell to her to arrange the festive decorations—“I’m working … my ass off on the Christmas stuff,” she told an adviser, who secretly recorded the call. She rarely visited her East Wing office, and had one room converted into a “gifting suite” full of FLOTUS-branded swag. She remained disengaged, and according to Rogers, “Melania, Barron, and her parents often spoke exclusively in Slovenian to each other throughout their time in the White House.”

Occasionally, American Woman can feel slight because of how thoroughly the lives of these women have been picked clean already. Some set pieces recur across time, the most obvious of which is a first lady being conscripted to “soften” her husband’s image, or to reassure voters that he isn’t a sexist or a philanderer. For Jill Biden, that moment came in April 2019, when her husband faced allegations that he had a habit of invading women’s personal space. “I think what you don’t realize is how many people approach Joe—men and women—looking for comfort or empathy,” Jill told an interviewer. “But going forward, I think he’s going to have to judge, be a better judge of when people approach him, how he’s going to react—that he maybe shouldn’t approach them.” This defense reflects the key role of the first lady as guarantor of her husband’s character: He can’t be that bad, because he married her. (Notably, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff has not yet had to perform a similar role in relation to his wife, Kamala Harris.)

The biggest takeaway from Rogers’s reporting—aside from engendering a sneaking respect for Melania Trump’s refusal to play the game—is that Jill Biden is a key player in the current White House. She is involved in staffing decisions and strategic calculations—and God help any staffer who crosses her, because Joe is zealously chivalrous on her behalf. She has somehow managed to influence her husband without attracting the kind of “Lady Macbeth” headlines that stuck to Clinton.

Rogers is as tough on the Bidens as you can be while holding down a job as a White House reporter, a position that relies on continued access. The result is a narrative stuffed with intimate anecdotes—Jill scotched the idea of Joe running for president in 2004 by entering the room he was in in a halter-neck top with no scrawled on her stomach—that can feel light on critical analysis. Joe Biden’s family mythology is one of “loyalty and empathy,” but has that led to overindulgence of his son Hunter’s business misadventures? The couple’s reluctance to acknowledge one of Hunter’s children, Navy, also appears to trouble many staffers. Hunter demanded a DNA test to establish Navy’s paternity—he says he can’t remember the circumstances of her conception—and the Bidens followed his lead by ignoring their grandchild until the media pressure became overwhelming. One unnamed staff member, who, according to Rogers, “grew emotional as we spoke,” was unable to defend his boss’s decision to side with Hunter over “a little girl in Arkansas, even if she, too, had Biden blood.”

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The portrait of Jill Biden that emerges here is of a “Philly girl who is not to be crossed,” who is the “family’s self-appointed grudge holder.” Despite her intellect and determination, though, she has struggled to articulate what she thinks the role of FLOTUS should be. Rogers interviewed historians who emerged, puzzled, from a meeting with Biden to thrash out exactly this question, a year after the inauguration. “A year plus into this and only now are they trying to figure out what she is going to do with it?” one invitee told the author. “It isn’t like she didn’t spend eight years watching a First Lady at close range. So, what takes a year and a half?” During the informal coffee in the Blue Room, Biden’s staff grew defensive as their boss explained that she had been busy enough with her teaching and family responsibilities without also having to conjure up a detailed personal policy agenda. The historians’ take on her lack of notable achievements in the role was, according to Rogers, “a franker assessment than [Jill Biden] had expected.”

Perhaps there is no resolution to the first-lady conundrum, because the whole idea—of a political plus-one—is such an anachronism, based on a breadwinner/homemaker ideal that is nothing like modern America. (“If the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent,” Richard Nixon once said, “it makes the husband look like a wimp.”) As for Melania Trump, if her husband wins in November, who can say whether she will undertake another tour of duty in the White House? She might well prefer to stay at Mar-a-Lago, in her out-of-office kaftan. As Rogers notes, being FLOTUS is “the most-scrutinized volunteer gig in American politics.” Most recent first ladies have dealt with the onslaught by downgrading their careers and downplaying their achievements. Opting out entirely would be a truly radical choice.