In a March 31, 1776 letter to her husband John, Abigail Adams urged him and other members of the Continental Congress to “remember the ladies…all men would be tyrants if they could.”  It would take until 1920 for women to achieve Suffrage, but the indomitable Abigail–despite her inability to vote or hold property–would be a powerful First Lady in John Adams’ Presidency (1797-1801).

The significance of First Ladies has reflected their historical times, although some–like Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison–rose above inequity to make positive achievements in partnership with their Presidential husbands. As America elected a President in November 2020, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., opened a new exhibition spotlighting First Ladies. EVERY EYE IS UPON ME: FIRST LADIES OF THE U.S.  showcases First Ladies, from Martha Washington to Melania Trump, in over 60 portraits and related artifacts.

Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet describes how finding portraits of First Ladies was a major challenge, since so few exist. But the exhibition curator, museum Senior Historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, was resourceful and discovered representative portraits for all in various media–paintings, drawings, watercolors, photographs, engravings, silhouettes, sculpture, and a video installation of photographs by Annie Leibovitz. The diversity of portraiture actually helps convey the changing times in which the women served.

EVERY EYE IS UPON ME is the first major exhibition to explore the achievements and significance of America’s First Ladies. Its title was borrowed from a phrase, John Tyler’s First Lady from 1844-1845, Julia Gardner Tyler, used in a letter to her mother, “Every eye is upon me!”  Ms. Tyler may have been worried, but other First Ladies relished their national platform. 

An ambitious woman in difficult times, Mary Todd Lincoln had harbored political ambitions of her own before marrying Abraham Lincoln, and was frustrated that she lacked more control during his Presidency. Sidelined by Lincoln’s focus on saving the Union, she shopped. As curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw notes, Mrs. Lincoln had “a notoriously well-appointed closet.”  She also forged a strong friendship with her seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved woman who bought her own freedom and operated a successful fashion emporium in Washington, D.C.  Keckley dressed the First Lady elegantly, and the “Capelet” she created for  Mary Lincoln is displayed in the exhibition.

Focusing on the First Lady’s image, the exhibition is organized into six chronological sections–“Becoming First Ladies (1789-1845),”  “Manifest Destiny and the Civil War (1845-1872,”  “The Gilded Age (1877-1901,”  “Imperialism and Progressivism (1901-1933),”   “Serving a Cause (1933-1993),”  and “Into the New Century (1993-Present).”    Some First Ladies were wives of Presidents, while others were relatives or family friends. Thomas Jefferson, a widower, called upon Dolley Madison to serve as White House hostess before she became First Lady on her own when James Madison was elected President in 1808.

Exhibition curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw told me in an interview that it was fascinating to focus on how singular each of the First Ladies’ lives were, how they reflected the gender beliefs and strictures of their times, and above all,  “how human they were.”  First Ladies were all different ages, from 21 to their early seventies, and came in a wide range of body types. Shaw explains that the First Lady fashions exhibited–including those of Mary Todd Lincoln, Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, and Michelle Obama–bring the presence of these women “into the galleries in a way that portraits only hint at. I think it’s a great reality check for people to see this.”

Shaw is a fine storyteller, and offers such tidbits as when Grace Coolidge–First Lady from 1923-1929, and much more gregarious than her husband Silent Cal–was given a raccoon for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of serving it, she named the raccoon “Rebecca” and turned it into a family pet.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a remarkable First Lady who served longer in that role than anyone else (1933-1945). Her portrait by Douglas Chandon is wonderfully revealing, showing how open she was as a person, and how expressively she used her hands. She has been the subject of many biographies, notably Blanche Wiesen Cook’s three volumes (1992-2017) that have been called “monumental, inspirational, and grand.”  But David Michaelis has now contributed a one-volume biography he simply calls ELEANOR.

Right: Yousuf Karsh (1908 – 2002), Eleanor Roosevelt, 1944. Gelatin silver print, Image: 12 3/8 × 10 1/16″. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Estrellita Karsh in memory of Yousuf Karsh.

Michaelis, who has previously written CHARLES SCHULZ AND PEANUTS and N.C. WYETH, believes that Eleanor Roosevelt remains “under understood.” In ELEANOR, he describes the various stages of her life, beginning with her Gilded Age birth in 1884 and her unhappy childhood.  Nicknamed “Granny” as a child, her lack of beauty was a disappointment to her mother, who treated her with “unfathomable meanness.”  She adored her father Elliott–Theodore Roosevelt’s younger brother–but he deteriorated into alcoholism and drug addiction and died at an early age. Her mother died of diphtheria when she was eight,  and Eleanor recalled shedding no tears. Orphaned, she was raised by a grandmother and sent off to boarding school in France.

Eleanor learned to win favor by being helpful and productive, and Michaelis notes that her lifelong motto was “you must do the thing you think you cannot do”—an injunction that carried her through the years of her complicated marriage to  cousin Franklin, the birth of six children, the discovery of FDR’s affair with Lucy Mercer, his polio, and his election as President that made her First Lady from 1933 to 1945.

Left: Michelle Obama’s Milly gown, designer: Milly, 2017. Cotton poplin. Loan courtesy of Michelle Obama. Photo courtesy of Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In background: Amy Sherald (b. 1973), First Lady Michelle Obama (2018). Oil on linen, 72 1/8 × 60 1/8 × 2 3/4″. Coll: National Portrait Gallery.

Michaelis describes how she constantly evolved in response to her times, shedding the strictures of upperclass white womanhood to embrace issues she deemed important.  First opposed to Suffrage, she changed her mind, believing that the only way women would stop being bossed by men was to become bosses themselves. As First Lady, she emerged as an agitator for change, reshaping the traditional character of that position and transforming it with her very public sense of duty. She held regular press conferences, wrote a daily newspaper column, and notably fought for human rights and dignity. She famously facilitated Marian Anderson singing at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 after the DAR had refused to let her sing in Constitution Hall.  After FDR died in 1945, she became known as the “First Lady of the World” for her advocacy of the United Nations.  She served as the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, and oversaw the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In many ways, Eleanor Roosevelt and Abigail Adams were kindred spirits, fighting against gender strictures of their times and advocating social justice for all.  Abigail’s 1776 letter to John is mainly remembered for her line, “remember the ladies”—but the rest of that letter was stronger:  “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

Before the Smithsonian closed its museums again for the pandemic, the Portrait Gallery’s FIRST LADIES exhibition was set to remain open until May 23, 2021.  There is an online exhibition, and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw says that a virtual tour is “in the works.”  At some point this Spring, an online interview with new First Lady Dr. Jill Biden would be an excellent addition.

By Amy Henderson, Contributing Editor

EVERY EYE IS UPON ME; FIRST LADIES OF THE UNITED STATES at the National Portrait Gallery was originally to be open until May 23, 2021; it is currently accessible online only—npg.si.edu