First Ladies (21 page)

Except for her well-publicized refusal to serve liquor, Lucy Hayes remained silent on every important issue, her absence particularly noted on the suffrage front. The stand she had taken earlier when she spoke out on the equality of the sexes did not lead her to conclude that women should vote. When Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton came to discuss the issue with the president, he received them alone,
and Lucy appeared only at the conclusion of the interview for the housewifely duty of showing the visitors around the mansion. Her Aunt Phebe McKell, who continued to urge Lucy to speak out for woman's suffrage after she had become First Lady, had no effect. Lucy either did not see voting as an appropriate activity for women or she perceived it (correctly) as a politically unpopular cause. Perhaps she agreed with Rutherford who had written in his diary before he became president: “My point on [suffrage] is that the proper discharge of the functions of maternity is inconsistent with the like discharge of the duties of citizenship.”
⁵³

The president's wife had always been seen as an avenue to the president, but the Hayes administration marked a new level of appeals for her help. Lucy's travel across the continent and the appearance of her picture in advertisements and magazines made her one of the most famous women in America, and people who lacked advocates elsewhere looked to her. One member of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints couched her request in woman-to-woman terms when she wrote “Mrs. President Hayes,” asking that she help defend plural marriage. “Having been informed through friends of the goodness of your heart,” Elizabeth Davis wrote, “and your sympathetic nature toward those of your sex who appeal to you for aid, I determined to approach you by letter in behalf of myself and my sisters.”
⁵⁴

Such entreaties, along with those of the suffragists and the leaders of the temperance movement (which had become dominated by women in the late nineteenth century), show that something new had happened to the role of First Lady, as the president's wife was now being called. Women throughout the country approached her as their special representative. Those who saw themselves as traditional homemakers would seek her endorsement of their view, while those who sought a more active role in public affairs would want to make her their champion. The old conflicts were still present. Some Americans would expect the president's wife to represent the taste of the majority while others wanted to see in her the epitome of sophistication and high culture (like the characters in Henry Adams's novel.) Never an easy job to fill, the role of the president's wife now became even more complex.

The interest in describing the role was just beginning when Lucy Hayes left the White House. In the 1881 edition of
Ladies of the White House,
Laura Holloway divided her subjects into three groups. From Martha Washington to Louisa Adams, they had been strong women, Holloway wrote, “appropriate to the needs of a young country,” but those who followed (1839–1877) had reigned as “social queens,
nothing more.” Lucy Hayes initiated the third period: “her strong, healthful influence gives the world assurances of what the next century's women will be.”
⁵⁵

If Holloway's readers understood her to be introducing a champion of independent thinking and careers for women, they were wrong. Lucy Hayes had played an important part in her husband's political career, Holloway concluded, “and she so freely identified herself with [his] administration that it can never be remembered apart from her,” but she knew her limits. “The highest place for a woman in a republic is beside the man,” Holloway wrote, “performing the pleasant duties of hostess of the Executive Mansion.” As for influence on legislation, Lucy “has had no more power in the White House than in Ohio…. She did not impose taxes upon [the President] or make him pay tribute to her rank as wife.”
⁵⁶

Holloway's enthusiastic support of Lucy Hayes has not stood the test of time, and history has tended to write her off as narrow-minded “Lemonade Lucy.” Whatever her failures—and since so many sought her help, she was bound to disappoint some of them—Lucy Hayes did mark an important change. She played the part of First Lady as an adult role, rather than in the childlike mode of some of her predecessors, and her popularity shows that for many Americans she was the ideal First Lady. If her feminist contemporaries could not stomach her docility and her devotion to her husband's career rather than her own, they would certainly have noticed that they stood in a minority.

Lucretia Rudolph Garfield, who followed her sister Ohioan, Lucy Hayes, into the White House in 1881, provides another, far more poignant example of a political wife who learned to fit her own ambitions into her husband's career. Her diaries, although not nearly so complete as those of her husband, show real evidence of an intellectually alert, capable, feminist-inclined young woman who was nearly erased into nothingness. Her transformation does not divide into neat parts, and it might have followed a similar pattern had she married a businessman, minister, or member of any of the other professions that include a wife's contribution as part of the husband's job. But the Garfields matured in a period of history that took its name from Queen Victoria, when strong pressures pushed wives to conform to accepted standards and heavy sanctions awaited those who did not. Dress reformers, “free love” advocates and even suffragists found themselves the object of reproach and ridicule, and even a tentative word favoring reform was interpreted as taking an extreme position.
It is almost inconceivable that a man could have reached the presidency in the nineteenth century had his wife publicly advocated any feminist cause. Although effect does not neatly follow cause in Lucretia Garfield's case, her increasing docility parallels James Garfield's political success.

The woman who became the wife of the twentieth president of the United States had attended Ohio's Eclectic Institute (later renamed Hiram College), a school her parents and other members of the Disciples of Christ Church had helped found. James Garfield also began his studies there in the early 1850s but he quickly transferred to the considerably more prestigious Williams College in Massachusetts, where his good looks and charm earned him immediate popularity. His prowess in debate attracted many women friends and even he seemed unsure why he continued an almost dutiful courtship to a serious and shy Lucretia Rudolph back in Ohio.

James's first mention of Lucretia in his diary indicates that her abilities first attracted him. While both were still at the Eclectic Institute, they had been selected to speak at a school ceremony, and James judged his own performance poor; but Miss Rudolph's speech, he wrote, was “full of good, practical, sound commonsense and elegantly and eloquently expressed.”
⁵⁷

About a year later, after he had broken off a romance with another woman, James's thoughts turned again to Lucretia, whom he alternately praised and criticized. She had, he admitted, “a well balanced mind, not of the deepest and most extensive kind but logical and precise.” Yet he could not deny that he found her dull and he concluded that she “is either studiously concealing [her social nature] or she does not possess it.” Her views on women's rights alarmed him: “There are some of her notions concerning the relation between the sexes which, if I understand, I do not like.”
⁵⁸

Until James and Lucretia married in 1858, their courtship never followed a smooth line and they both showed real doubts. When they were separated, James raised his expectations of what she meant to him and then found himself disappointed when they met. One vacation went so badly that James seemed ready to terminate the court-ship—until she showed him her diary where she had expressed her strong feelings about him, thus convincing him she had “depths of affection that I had never before known that she possessed.”
⁵⁹
After he returned to Williams, her correspondence became full-blown love letters in which she wrote of “walking in the warm sunlight of your love” and he responded that he looked forward to the time when “I will have you in my arms again.”
⁶⁰

James Garfield confessed at one point in the courtship that he did not feel about Lucretia as he thought a bridegroom should but then abruptly, in the fall of 1858, when Lucretia was twenty-six and employed as a teacher, he told her to proceed with plans for their simple marriage rites. She had her own doubts and right up to the time of the ceremony worried about losing the autonomy she had enjoyed—earning her own money and making her own decisions. Just weeks before the wedding, Lucretia warned James: “My heart is not yet schooled to an entire submission to that destiny which will make me the wife of one who marries me.” She determined to try her best, even though her “heart almost broke,” she wrote, “with the cruel thought that our marriage is based upon the cold, stern word duty.”
⁶¹

In the first years of her marriage, Lucretia continued to live almost as a single woman. She kept her teaching job, and since she and James boarded with another family, she had few housekeeping chores. Her husband's election to the state legislature a year after their marriage meant that he was frequently absent from home, and when the Civil War started, he enlisted. James made very clear that he considered their marriage a mistake, and although Lucretia accepted much of the blame, she thought him “a little hard.”
⁶²
While his letters were often brusque and judgmental, hers repeatedly promised to attempt to conform to his demands and become the submissive helper he required: “I am going to try harder than ever before to be the best little wife possible,” Lucretia wrote in March 1860. “You need not be a bit afraid of my introducing one of those long talks [that strike in you] such a terror … ever again.”
⁶³

On their fourth wedding anniversary James coolly appraised their time together as unsatisfactory but concluded that both partners deserved credit for trying. Lucretia, who had become aware of his attentions to a New York widow and confronted him on the matter, learned in late 1862 that James did not wish to continue with his wife “any[thing] other than a business correspondence.”
⁶⁴
After four and one-half years of marriage, Lucretia calculated that she and James had spent less than five months together.
⁶⁵
They both understood that the separation was partly voluntary and that theirs was a troubled union.

Had something not affected the course of this marriage, it is unlikely that James Garfield's political career would have proceeded as it did, but Lucretia became increasingly docile in the 1860s and her husband's attitude toward the family changed. In part the alteration may have resulted from grief. Within a few months of each other, two of their children died—their first daughter at age three and then,
only weeks later, an infant. In 1867 Lucretia and James went to Europe, a kind of second honeymoon,
⁶⁶
and soon after their return she convinced him that they should move the family, now numbering three children, to Washington. The house they built at Thirteen and I Streets became their residence for much of the year.

Two more children were born to the Garfields, and James began to take greater interest in his older sons' education, drilling them in Latin and Greek and urging Lucretia to brush up on her knowledge of languages so that she could help, too. He did not lose interest in other women and even had to make a special trip to New York to retrieve compromising letters he had sent to a woman friend there, but more and more of his time centered on family activities. In 1873, after fifteen years of marriage, he wrote to his wife, “The tyranny of our love is sweet. We waited long for his coming but he has come to stay.”
⁶⁷

Whatever James Garfield meant in that letter, his actions did not show that he considered his wife an important part of his social life in the capital. Between 1872 and 1874, his diary records that he accepted dozens of invitations, only three of which involved Lucretia.
⁶⁸
The Garfields rarely invited people to their home, and Lucretia understood that Washingtonians found her dull. One man wrote his daughter after an evening with the Ohio congressman and his wife that they were probably “very good people … but a plainer, stiffer set of village people I never met.”
⁶⁹

By the time James Garfield won the Republican party's nomination for president in 1880, Lucretia had become a seasoned political wife in the nineteenth-century meaning of the term. She avoided all controversy and kept her opinions to herself. Newspapers extolled the Garfields' exemplary family life, and Republican party literature bragged that its candidate, born in a log cabin, had made a “fortunate marriage [to] a farmer's daughter … refined, intelligent [and] affectionate. [She] shared his thirst for knowledge and his ambition for culture,” but, the Republican party emphasized, she was no bluestocking: “[She has] the domestic tastes and talents which fitted her equally to preside over the home of a poor college president and that of a famous statesman.”
⁷⁰
In that brief but telling description of Lucretia Garfield, nothing remained of the young bride who had described herself twenty-two years earlier as in no mood for “submission.”

Unfortunately Lucretia Garfield, who had been ill with malaria and absent from the capital, had only a few weeks in the White House before her husband was shot on July 2, 1881. Most of her record as
First Lady comes from the weeks she kept vigil at her husband's side until his death nearly three months after the assassination attack. The entire country monitored the president's condition through frequent medical bulletins and newspaper accounts that made a stoic martyr of Lucretia. “The wife of the President is the bravest woman in the universe,” one newspaper reported.
⁷¹