They said Jackie Kennedy spent way too much money refurbishing a sadly down-at-the-heels White House. They thought Lady Bird Johnson was just kidding about beautifying America (and yet she did!). Pat Nixon was too mousy. Betty Ford shared too much information - opening up about her bouts with breast cancer and substance abuse - turning the taboo into a serious conversation.
Rosalyn Carter’s insistence on being well informed about current events and her influence on her husband were characterized as unsuitable for a First Lady.
Nancy Reagan, who had an impeccable sense of style and a love for high fashion, was raked over the coals for wearing a fortune on her back. She also was castigated for her devoted protection of her husband.
Barbara Bush was thought too remote from everyday Americans.
Hillary Clinton was cast as too involved in her own law career until she was recast as too influential in her husband’s administration. Her critics ultimately settled on portraying her as the ball-busting, drab, arch villainess of an evil feminist and/or Democratic conspiracy to take over the world.
Surprisingly, Laura Bush was treated pretty well despite her husband’s controversial time in office.
When Michelle Obama entered the White House as our first African American first lady, things quickly got nasty and racist. Her degrees from Princeton and Harvard were sneered upon as the results of affirmative action. Her sense of style, which rivaled Jackie Kennedy and Nancy Reagan, was slammed as somehow “inappropriate.” Racist, sinister memes of her and her family flooded not only the Internet, but even some mainstream media outlets. Her major initiative as First Lady was children’s nutrition, promoted with a White House vegetable garden. Opposing media characterized it as her tyrannically forcing Americans to eat a specific diet.
Melania Trump has been ridiculed for her modeling background, being an immigrant, and her design choices for the White House and its grounds, not to mention her decorations for the Christmas holidays.
Now it is Dr. Jill Biden’s turn. The Wall Street Journal Opinion Page has kicked off the First Lady bashing season with a badly written, misogynistic assault on her University of Delaware Ed.D.giving her the right to the honorific of “Dr.” Evidently the author perceived Biden’s degree as meaningless because her study field was Education and her school wasn’t Harvard. But wait. Wasn’t Michelle Obama’s Harvard Law Degree problematic too?
It would appear that to a deeply misogynistic component of America’s literati, no list of qualifications and accomplishments is sufficient to allow any First Lady a role other than wife and mother and, even then, no doubt they can be gleefully denigrated.
It is time to cut the spouses of our presidents some slack!
