December 9, 2020

Jill Biden at a drive-in rally for her husband on the eve of Election Day in November.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

Gender Reporter

“The expectations of first lady are always at least a generation behind.”

— Katherine Jellison, history professor at Ohio University

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Eleanor Roosevelt never wanted to be first lady. For her husband, of course, she was “glad” that he was elected president of the United States in 1932. But for herself, not so much.

She knew that when she moved into the White House in a few months she would have to give up her teaching job. “I’ve liked teaching more than anything else I’ve ever done,” she told an Associated Press reporter. “But it’s got to go,” she added, a decision she hated making.

Almost nine decades later, Jill Biden, also a teacher preparing for her life in the White House, has indicated she will make a very different choice.

Dr. Biden, who started her career in the 1980s, has worked as an English teacher at an adolescent psychiatric hospital, high schools and community colleges, while earning two master’s degrees and a doctorate in education along the way.

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She didn’t quit teaching when her husband served as vice president, returning to the classroom just days after the inauguration. She juggled her two worlds by grading papers on Air Force Two or bringing a change of clothes to work so that she could “leave from the campus straight to a State Dinner.” When students asked if she was married to the vice president, she would deflect palace intrigue by simply saying she was one of his relatives.

Eleanor Roosevelt, Nov. 11, 1932.Bettmann, via Getty Images

Come January, when her husband’s job title changes, hers will stay the same: Unlike every other first lady in American history, she has said she will keep her full-time job.

“I’m going to continue to teach,” she said in an interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” in August. “It’s important — I want people to value teachers.”

That Dr. Biden’s career ambitions, beyond the formal duties of a first lady, are of note is a telling sign of how unrepresentative first families have become, a far cry from the reality of many American families.

Since at least the late 1950s, presidential families — at least while occupying the White House — have reflected the old-school nuclear family of the “Leave It to Beaver” sitcom variety: a heterosexual couple, married, with children; husband in the public sphere, bringing home an income; a perfectly coifed mother in the domestic sphere, managing everything from meal planning to Christmas decorations.

Through the ’50s and ’60s, this model mirrored a majority of American households and reflected the country’s broad attitudes at the time toward marriage, class and traditional gender roles.

But in the 1970s and ’80s, a combination of the women’s movement and declining wages made single-income households both impractical and undesirable.

“You had the beginnings of the unraveling of the economic prosperity of the 1950s, and it became harder and harder to get that American dream,” said Stephanie Coontz, social historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. “Many women were joining the work force, some of them because they felt so trapped at home by this monolithic idea of what a good family is, and some because they had to.”

Except the first ladies. Even those who had carved out their own careers and identities before their husbands were elected president had to contort themselves to fit into a vintage first lady mold.

“The expectations of first lady are always at least a generation behind,” said Katherine Jellison, a history professor at Ohio University who has researched and focused on first ladies. “I mean, the first first lady to wear pants in public was Pat Nixon in the 1970s. That’s just one example of how the expectations of the women fulfilling this role have lagged.”

Mrs. Roosevelt, after giving up teaching, continued writing for a magazine but donated all of her income to organizations like the Red Cross to quell criticism.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who at 26 served as a lawyer for the Watergate committee and eventually went on to become a corporate litigator earning a six-figure income, nevertheless felt compelled to emphasize her domesticity and soften her image to help her husband’s presidential campaign, writes Betty Boyd Caroli in her book “First Ladies: The Ever-Changing Role, From Martha Washington to Melania Trump.” She participated in a pre-election cookie bake-off against Barbara Bush and, for her first in-depth interview as first lady, spoke with a New York Times food critic about the White House menu (it included more broccoli and less French food than prior administrations).

From left: Nancy Reagan, Claudia Alta “Lady Bird” Johnson, Hillary Clinton, Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and Barbara Bush awaited their introductions at the Tribute to America’s First Ladies event in Washington in 1994.Barbara Kinney/William J. Clinton Presidential Library

Mrs. Clinton initially tried to take the first lady’s role into an unprecedented space by working directly with her husband on a crucial policy initiative as the head of a task force on health care reform, but the fallout — mainly in the media and among aides — forced her to revert to a safe and “traditional first lady mode” for the rest of her time in the White House, Ms. Caroli writes. Mrs. Clinton wrote books about raising children and family recipes, stood by her husband through his scandalous second term and advocated women’s rights around the world.

Her immediate successors may or may not have viewed her experience as a cautionary tale, but Laura Bush and Michelle Obama chose to steer clear of controversial, partisan, inside-the-Beltway projects during their time in the White House.

At a time of heightened divisions in Washington and a war abroad, Mrs. Bush advocated literacy and education (“There’s nothing political about American literature,” she told The New York Times).

Mrs. Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer who worked as a hospital executive before moving to Washington, got a taste early on during her husband’s campaign of the heightened, racially charged scrutiny that she, as the country’s first Black first lady, would experience. She was called “angry,” “abrasive” and “emasculating.” Her sizable, six-figure salary as a top executive at the University of Chicago Hospitals was questioned and seen as suspect.

Laura Bush and Michelle Obama at the White House on Jan. 20, 2009.Andrew Councill for The New York Times

When she moved to the fishbowl that is the White House, she carefully carved out a space for herself that was politically neutral, focusing on military families and childhood obesity. “Who can question that healthful living is a good thing?” Politico wrote at the time.

By the time she left the White House, she was one of the most popular political figures in recent memory, with a clean reputation of rising above the mudslinging.

Melania Trump, with her husband, at a campaign event in Wilmington, N.C., on Nov. 5, 2016.Damon Winter/The New York Times

Then came Melania Trump, who is seen by experts to have snapped back to a more traditional model of first lady, engaging in such few public appearances during her husband’s term that there was early speculation that Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka might occupy the first lady role.

Dr. Biden’s decision to keep working as a community college professor will finally close the gaping divide between the White House and working American women, creating her own, potentially enduring model of first lady.

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What else is happening

Here are three articles from The Times you may have missed.

Damon Winter/The New York Times

“A year like no other” The year 2020 in pictures from the optimism of a New Year’s Eve kiss in Times Square to the seemingly countless graves and coffins across the globe. [See the story]
“My agenda is Black. My community is Black. My county is Black. So what I do is Black.” Before the Democratic Party invested in Georgia, or President Trump and Joe Biden saw it as a battleground, Black women devoted years of hard work to turning out voters. [Read the story]
“I was a very late bloomer and very awkward, but I was always interested in sex. It was an uncomfortable stew of feelings to have as a young woman who wore glasses and looked the way I looked.” Jessi Klein — the Emmy-winning comedian and writer, who voices Jessi on the puberty comedy “Big Mouth” — has never been afraid to share her own most vulnerable moments. [Read the story]

In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson.

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