that flora fraser be out to the stare before the crowd really fills and if you can start. moving thank you all, thank you for frazier. so wonderfully would all be here tonight.. did you know that all of c-span's american history program to reveal the watch online. go to c-span.org slash history and type your topic of interest into the search box. thousands of programs looking into the people in places that shaped our nation. all available online at c-span.org slash history >> this session, first ladies -- impact and influence, will explore the many ways in which first ladies have shaped history as the closest adviser to the president. as advocates for both change and continuity, as well as how the influence america's society, politics, culture, and diplomacy. now, i have a very great pleasure of introducing what many people consider the brightest jewels in the crown of first lady historians of america. so starting with dr. barbara perry, and while doctor perry is walking up here, it should be noted that she just came out today with an article in the publication the hill, on the first ladies and war. and as barbara said, she was inspired by the association. she is the gerald l. baliles professor and director of presidential studies at the university of virginia miller center, and currently serves on the board, which we are very honored, the board of directors of the white house historical association. joining her on stage, our panelist doctor diana carlin, professor emerita of communications, and many have called her the queen of communications. [laughter] at st. louis university. and then we have doctor catherine allgor, who made a very fabulous statement earlier today in this session, the president of the massachusetts historical society. and dr. stacy cordery, which i understand is the british way to pronounce it -- and she is the dennis and vaune johnson endowed chair of theodore roosevelt honors leadership studies that dickinson state university. this is an incredible panel. and as stewart has always advised us, we have a responsibility here to inspire, to encourage, and to teach. and i think with this panel, you will get an abundance of material. thank you so much. [applause] >> well, welcome everyone to this panel on first ladies. thank you, theresa, for that very nice introduction. thank you to stewart and to anita for this amazing summit here in dallas that we've all been waiting so to participate in and attend and to be in person. you and the team at the white house historical association have done amazing work, as you always do. and many thanks to my colleagues here, all of whose work has inspired mine over the years. so i'm very grateful to them. so as teresa said, we are going to be looking at first ladies today and thinking about their influence on their president husbands. we are going to be thinking about when they promote change, and sometimes we talked about when they have not been in favor of change, which we can decide if it might be a good or bad thing. let me start -- i'd like when the last panel, we said let's do a flash poll. how many of you either work in the field of first ladies or where you work has some connection with first ladies or you just are a first lady aficionado? let's see a show of hands. great! well, this is super. we welcome you all, and for those of you who don't, we hope you spread the word about first ladies and f.l.a.r.e. particularly, as well as the white house historical association, all of its good work in this field. so, we wanted to start with a pretty basic question, and that is how did the position of first ladies come to be? that's not in the constitution as the presidential position is, and office is, and it's an unelected position, as we know. so how did it start? and i'm going to turn to my first two colleagues to my left here, to diana, who is writing a book about all first ladies, a textbook, and you might tell us a little bit about that today, and we wanted to start with the very first first ladies, and i also want to turn as well to catherine allgor, because she's a specialist on the founding first ladies as well, and particularly dolley madison. so let me turn to diana first. >> well i don't think you can really study the presidency without studying the first ladies. you know, i'm biased, but i believe that. that it really started because this has been a partnership from the beginning. when martha washington arrived in new york, a couple of months after the president had arrived, she was greeted with, by the president in a barge, he then, in new jersey, rode her over to the shore in new york. she was greeted with a gun salute. and people were yelling, long live lady washington! and when she arrived, she found out she already had a schedule. they realized that because our president is both head of government and head of state, that there would be events that needed to be planned with dignitaries that he needed to have his members of congress there, and that they they needed to host them. and so nobody was better than martha at that because she'd been doing it for years. so she had a schedule, she had restrictions, and so it was a two person career from the very beginning. and she had abigail at her side, and i'll let catherine talk a little bit more about that. but martha definitely understood the concept of soft power. and that has been something that has been a trend for first ladies to use all the way through, since the beginning. so, the beginning was that martha was a partner, as she had been with the president all through their marriage and through those years during the revolutionary war, where she would go to the camps, and winter camps every year. and would assist him and try to keep morale up and organize sewing circles and that type of thing. but it was a partnership, it still is and so the two go together. she was not called first lady. that didn't really happen until later, in the 19th century. she was called lady washington, which was the term that was given to her by some of the revolutionary war soldiers. they even had a lady washington's brigade. and that was sort of the vestige of the british past, but she was also an example of what a southern lady would be. so, that was the beginning. >> great. >> i just think it's really striking. so, in other venues, i've actually said that dolly madison was the first first lady. and i'm prepared to defend that. but the truth is, you're right. right from the beginning, martha washington is getting the message, but what's also true, again, there's an in intentionality from her, so she begins dressing a certain way. and she, along with george washington and alexander hamilton, maybe john jay, they start communicating about the kinds of ceremonies that would be proper for a new republic. because of course, at that time, they got a real tight kind of like lane to stay in. the american colonists have rebelled against the monarchy. they were going to create the world anew, the world turned upside down. anti-monarchical, anti king, anti royalty. it's all going to be new. except when it came to ruling, they realized that the only vocabulary of power they had was monarchical and aristo-, and so how are they going to cut that? and so we have these moments in the historical record where george washington is wondering exactly how many pairs of matched horses is enough to convey his authority pulling his carriage through, and how much would be, like, too much. i think the answer was three pair. but the same thing with martha. how would she dress? what would convey a sense to the outsiders, who were not sure this america thing was going to work, and the new americans, who were not sure this america thing was going to work, and that they were being ruled properly, and well. and they came up with ceremonies that tried to combine a kind of almost democratic energy, i think, with, you know, some kind of vestige of royalty. and that's why i think lady washington and dolley madison is going to be lady, but she's also going to be queen dolly, yes. >> yes. >> yes. >> so thoughts about -- and we can't leave the founding -- we -- certainly get to more dolley madison -- but abigail adams, we always cite her letter to her husband about the constitutional convention, about don't forget the ladies, when they were putting together the constitution. but of course, in a way, they did. any thoughts about abigail and john adams? and moving into the white house? >> well, yes. and they were the first couple to move into the white house. but nobody stayed terribly long. they weren't impressed. i think abigail, in some ways, embodies another part of partnership that diana is talking about. she really wasn't interested in what they would call presiding. so, she adopted martha's innovations and ceremonies rather dutifully, but the role that abigail played was really that of advisor. she really was her husband's closest adviser. and in the spirit of republican virtue, that's small r republican virtue, john adams made a terrible decision not to change his cabinet, so he ended up with a cabinet full of traitors all working behind his back, he was always relying on abigail, but in that particular circumstance, she really was his very closest adviser. >> and that's fascinating that you mentioned that, catherine. because really, coming up to modern first ladies and contemporary first ladies in terms of personnel issues, we know for example that nancy reagan so important on issues of personnel, never afraid to tell her husband, that person should go, or that person's not good for you. so it clearly starts at the very beginning in that kind of advisory capacity. so before we come back to dolley, let me turn to my colleague stacy, and we did have a panel some months ago in the midst of the pandemic, when we were always online, doing these great panels for the white house historical association and for f.l.a.r.e., and, stacy came up with a set of, i guess you would call them road maps or criteria, does if how do we know if a first lady is being influential? how do we know that at the time, if we do know it? what are some of the signposts that we might see? and then afterwards, how do we know? what are some of the signals that a first lady is being influential? >> well, these are -- many of these go back to the very earliest first ladies, as you two have discussed. and some of it is commonsensical. has she achieved what she said she would achieve, in some cases? and on the other end of the scale, as we have the sienna first ladies poll. we take a sounding of what americans think about how well their president's succeeding, how well is the first ladies standing in that as well? we will get to how her relationship with her husband seems to succeed or fail, how any cause she might espouse supports her husband's programs. there are a number of ways that we, i think, try to decide what, whether a first lady is successful or not. it gets tricky when you try to really put a number on it, because so many of these causes are causes that are continued from first ladies who preceded them. and sometimes the country changes so much that causes get abandoned because something else comes in their place. >> well, it seems to me that one of the things that we mentioned about martha washington and again will lead us into dolley is this concept of soft power. and i am a pseudo-historian. i'm really trained as a political scientist. so we like to think in terms of power and how power is used and defining power. and typically, political scientists and others will define soft power as diplomatic power, diplomacy, cultural exchanges. and we know that first ladies certainly have excelled at that. so, let's think in those terms, and then let's turn to dolley, in that, you called it, catherine, when we were talking, this unofficial role. because again, this is a position that is given to this woman who's the spouse of the president, simply because she's the spouse of the president. >> yeah. and i mean, at some point, somebody is going to ask the very rude question, why should we care about first ladies? [laughter] and one of the things is that by studying first lady, the same way studying women, their words, their work, their life, we learn things we would not have known about. and it cannot just be a record of contributions, but constitutions. and that it can change the narrative. and maybe one of the things it's going to do for you political scientists is to change that word soft power, which sounds soft, and not powerful. because it may be this thing we are calling soft power, might be the power. studying first ladies brings up the study of the everyday, for instance. the power of the every day, the power of material culture, in different ways. so to address your question quite directly, and using the roadmap you gave us, she's good on this one, james madison's major issue that he had to solve was the question of unity. this was alluded to earlier in the day, but this was a time when the united states of america was referred to in the plural. the united states are, right? because nobody was sure this republican experiment was going to hold, nobody. the outsiders from europe, looking with a jaundiced eye, and the people, actually, new americans themselves. and james madison believed in unity and he believed, he worried, because they didn't think that enough unified the cold blooded new englanders and the hot blooded virginians. and he saw this group of people who were so very different, and he said, you know, we don't have what he called veneration, that history, we don't even have history, we don't have blood, we barely have a language. and sometimes a little shaky at that, that we all understood each other. but we had to have unity. so in theory he understood unity. he didn't have the appetite. but if you think in that way and then you look at all that dolley madison did in helping to found and cement washington, d. c., as the capital, and finally save it, when you look at the parties where she brought people together in a room and made them behave so they got to know each other as human beings, her role as the charismatic figure, using her dress and her parties. all of that can be seen as fulfilling this role of unity. and you might say unity, which is an emotional or a psychological state is, quote, soft power. but in the end, it's what got the united states of america into the singular, through the war, and really off into democracy. >> and if you haven't read catherine's book on the madison's marriage, it's a perfect union, correct, the title? >> well, it's a perfect union. because i do think james and dolley were perfectly matched. different politically but also a perfect union because as historians we always think, what is the concatenation of person and circumstance? and if the american revolution had never happened, i guess dolley would have just been a virginia gentry wife who threw great parties. but she rose to those circumstances. and just to get back to -- you use the word unofficial. and again. this was, i think this shows us something important. when i studied the old republic, and i did read a little political science, i figured out that for politics to happen, you need two spheres. and one is official and one is unofficial. and the official sphere you all know, it's the speeches, the legislator, the legislation, the peace treaties and all that. it's the product of politics. but then there's got to be a process. there's got to be a place where people can get together and they can propose things they might not propose in the official spotlight, the glare of the spotlight. they have to be able to negotiate. they also have to get to know each other as human beings. and that is the unofficial sphere. and because that takes place in people's homes, and at social events, women are disproportionately represented in that sphere. but you need both of those. and if -- somebody asks me yes, sometimes, what's wrong with washington, which i don't like to comment on contemporary things, it's the lack of the unofficial sphere. there's no place where men and women can get together and understand that though you and i might have a different idea of the public good, we do share commitment to the public good. and so again, by studying first lady, that's where you see the power of that. and note the absence of it when it's gone. >> right. well, i think the importance of dolley, also, is that she not only did this with her husband, but dolley then tutored several other first ladies that came after her. you know, after james madison died, she moved back to washington and she held court a lot. but i think about sarah polk. and you know, james polk, probably the most successful one term president we've had, ran on for fifths of a platform and accomplished all of them. he knew his health wasn't in great shape so he didn't run for a second term. but sarah spent a lot of time learning from dolley. >> but she set the tone for, i mean, decades. eleanor roosevelt was about being the exception that proves the rule. mrs. kennedy, i know she didn't like the idea of redecorating the white house. a lot of people see dolley redecorated the white house. but what she did was restructured it in a way that mrs. kennedy would've approved. this is amazing that before dolley's white house which was called the executive mansion and, it would only be during her tenure that it would get a familiar loving nickname, white house. there was no place in the capital city where all the men of government could get together. let alone their families. let alone visiting diplomats, let alone visiting americas, let alone anybody. it was, and what dolly did was she took that executive mansion and she turned it into a center for entertaining, where everybody in town would show up, and they did. and she threw weekly parties, and they were as regular and as grueling as they sound. but they became and an indispensable part of the washington political machine. and it's in those parties, i contend, that these people learn to work together in bipartisan ways, going towards something they didn't even know what's going to happen, which was that one party republic was going to turn into a two party democracy. >> you know, we are certainly still in the earliest days of this office but stacey focuses on the early 20th century first ladies, and so, let's turn to her and thoughts about how the role had changed. has it been changing? did it change? did the civil war, for example, change it as we get closer then into the gilded age and then to the 20th century? >> before we talk about change i think it's worth talking about that what doctor allgor has been describing is consistent through the centuries. edith roosevelt, for example, provided a space where theodore roosevelt could meet together with the booker t. washington. that was not something that could have happened just anywhere in washington d. c. and so, that space that first ladies and first families in general have provided for gathering americans across the political divide has been a crucial part of it. i think that's why in historical, historian solidarity with dr. allgor there -- the unofficials sphere, it is such an important term rather than -- i know, political science and soft power -- but the unofficial sphere is integral to what the first lady has always done, even down to today. so changes, well there are many changes in and we can talk more about these, but it has to do with the growth of gender expectations, the growth of women's activity in the world as we move through the century of civil war, it makes changes. women's war work. and then as we get toward the gilded age and moving into the progressive era, the sort of work that women do in the world to move out of their domestic sphere, which was the socially dictated acceptable place for