Untold Power
The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson
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A nuanced portrait of the first acting woman president, written with fresh and cinematic verve by a leading historian on women’s suffrage and power
While this nation has yet to elect its first woman president—and though history has downplayed her role—just over a century ago a woman became the nation’s first acting president. In fact, she was born in 1872, and her name was Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. She climbed her way out of Appalachian poverty and into the highest echelons of American power and in 1919 effectively acted as the first woman president of the U.S. (before women could even vote nationwide) when her husband, Woodrow Wilson, was incapacitated. Beautiful, brilliant, charismatic, catty, and calculating, she was a complicated figure whose personal quest for influence reshaped the position of First Lady into one of political prominence forever. And still nobody truly understands who she was.
For the first time, we have a biography that takes an unflinching look at the woman whose ascent mirrors that of many powerful American women before and since, one full of the compromises and complicities women have undertaken throughout time in order to find security for themselves and make their mark on history. She was a shape-shifter who was obsessed with crafting her own reputation, at once deeply invested in exercising her own power while also opposing women’s suffrage. With narrative verve and fresh eyes, Untold Power is a richly overdue examination of one of American history’s most influential, complicated women as well as the surprising and often absurd realities of American politics.
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Historian Roberts (Suffragists in Washington) delivers a solid biography of first lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson (1872–1961). The seventh of 11 children from a Confederate family in Virginia, Edith met Woodrow Wilson at the White House in 1915. She was a widow and he a widower, and the two married later that year, though Edith thought "the role of White House hostess was absurd," with its "unworkable mix of inscrutable rules and constant public attention." Roberts credits Edith with modernizing the role of first lady, noting that she was the first to stand behind the president when he took the oath of office and to travel abroad in her husband's name. More controversially, Edith hid the extent of Wilson's disability after a stroke in October 1919 left him "bedridden, half-paralyzed, and often incoherent." Serving as her husband's steward for more than a year, Edith chose which matters to bring to his attention, though she claimed to have never made a decision on his behalf. As Roberts succinctly puts it, Edith became "the most powerful woman in the nation," while pretending to be "nothing of the kind." Enriched with incisive sketches of the era's political figures, including socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and concise history lessons on the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations, and more, this is a rich portrait of a singular first lady.
