Author Description

Meet Michelle Obama and all her predecessors in the first book that profiles every woman who has served as our nation's First Lady. In America's First Ladies: Power Players from Martha Washington to Michelle Obama, Rae Lindsay reports behind-the-scenes details about the lives of these forty-plus un-elected, unpaid women who filled what many call the world s hardest job. They range from the famous to the obscure, from the beloved to the unpopular, from the well-educated to those who could barely read. Some were elegant and gregarious entertainers; others endured grief and pain in private. Many served as their husbands' eyes, ears and voices. Some bloomed, while others wilted under the light of public scrutiny. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, Any woman who goes into public life has to have a hide like a rhinoceros. When Michelle Obama took on the First Lady role she set some major precedents: not only is she the first black First Lady, but in addition, her great-great-grandfather was a slave. She has vowed to be "Mom-in-Chief" to her pre-teen daughters (the youngest children to live in the White House since Amy Carter), but her education and career experience will lead her to take on significant national projects as well. Barack Obama calls her his "rock," and, in this role, she most certainly will act as her husband's influential "eyes and ears." In America's First Ladies, Rae Lindsay relates the major roles played by our Presidents wives or surrogates, as well as the First Lady foibles that impacted on presidential families and, sometimes, our country. Martha Washington was such a poor speller that often George wrote her letters for her. She also recycled muslin grain sacks as morning dresses. Abigail Adams often wrote three love letters a day to her husband; in one she urged him to remember the ladies, one of the first feminist statements. Dolley Madison and Nancy Reagan fudged their true birth dates Eliza Johnson and Abigail Fillmore taught their husb