From first lady to first partner: The changing role of gender and power

When Jennifer Siebel Newsom rejected the term “First Lady” and decided to use the term “First Partner,” she became the first wife of a California governor to signal that she wanted to break traditional gender stereotypes.

No spouse of a US president has ever officially adopted such a title. But many women who are California’s and the nation’s first ladies have expressed concerns about taking on such a role. A few accepted the title but ultimately continued to defy expectations of what it meant to be a First Lady.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California in 2003, Maria Shriver left her established career as a news reporter and anchor. She never wanted to be First Lady, then acceptedand broke in “kicking and screaming.”

Shriver used his time in Sacramento to renovate the state history museum and build the world’s largest museum. Women’s Conference and launching a program to provide financial resources to low-income working families during recessions. While promoting his memoir last year, in question“It turned out to be probably the best job I ever had.”

Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown’s wife, Anne Gust Brown, tended to stay away from the public, preferring to work behind the scenes as an unpaid assistant. Trained as a lawyer, she took a deep interest in her husband’s political life, helping him run his attorney general campaign and write his gubernatorial inaugural address. But she said she never thought of herself as the first lady.

“This has always been a topic I’ve found difficult,” he said. said Alta Journal in 2018. “Somehow I don’t carry or gravitate towards that title very well.”

The spotlight is even more intense for America’s First Ladies.

America’s first First Lady, Martha Washington, was reluctant to move into the new presidential home in New York, although such a title had not yet been coined, and struggled with her new role as hostess of presidential drawing rooms. In a letter to his nephew, he wrote that he felt “more like a state prisoner than anything else” and that there were “certain limits set for me which I must not go beyond.”

Still, he took on his duty with fortitude. He later remarked: “The greater part of our happiness or unhappiness depends not on our circumstances, but on our temperaments.”

When Jacqueline Kennedy entered the White House in 1961, she instructed her staff to address her as Mrs. Kennedy.

“The only thing I don’t want to be called ‘First Lady’ is ‘First Lady,'” she joked. “It looks like a saddle horse.”

Indeed, the role of the First Lady has long been traditional; So much so that historians note exceptions such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.

Barbara A. Perry, a professor of management at the University of Virginia, said that in the 1930s and ’40s, Eleanor Roosevelt became the “eyes, ears and legs” of Franklin D. Roosevelt as she was limited by polio. During World War II, he traveled to battlefields in the South Pacific and wrote columns for a nationally syndicated newspaper six days a week for decades.

“He was hounded and criticized with terrible jokes,” Perry said, but he didn’t back down. “He didn’t care. He wanted to do the right thing.”

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he liked to joke that the votes for him were “two-or-out”; this was a reference to his wife Hillary Clinton’s career as a successful lawyer.

But the truth turned out to be more complex. After winning and tasking his wife with crafting a universal health care plan, Perry said it sparked controversy in part because he had a major public policy role and kept much of it secret. The Clintons’ finances were put under the microscope during the Whitewater scandal, and Hillary Clinton was also criticized for comments that she was not “a little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.”

“The reason Americans react if the First Lady strays too far from her skis is because, as they say, they are unaccountable,” Perry said. “This is not an office, it is not defined anywhere.”

After Clinton, librarian Laura Bush played a more traditional role focusing on literacy. Michelle Obama, an attorney who graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, has focused on relatively uncontroversial issues like healthy eating and nutrition.

Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said Michelle Obama was targeted simply because she is a Black woman because she likely chose not to take on a heavy-handed policy position.

“The combination of racism and sexism was brutal,” she said.

In 2021, Jill Biden became the first First Lady to continue her professional career outside the White House by working as a teacher at Northern Virginia Community College.

This role will likely change over time, Walsh said; This is not only because women have careers separate from their husbands, but also because more women and LGBTQ+ politicians are taking on leadership roles, and their husbands and partners are also taking on the role of first wife.

“There would be less of an expectation for someone in that role to be that kind of silent partner or supportive partner … whether it’s the president or the governor,” Walsh said, noting the example of Doug Emhoff, who served as second gentleman to Vice President Kamala Harris while pursuing his own professional life.

Still, Walsh said Siebel Newsom could open herself up to extra criticism by positioning herself as a “partner.”

“We’re at a point in our history where this more non-traditional role, like a First Lady or First Spouse, is going to receive scrutiny and criticism from the other side,” Walsh said. “This will be another way to potentially attack the island, and that’s unfortunate.”

Perry acknowledged that the “first joint” label might not play well in Central America.

“They will see this as part of trans work and gender fluidity,” she said. “He needs to be careful about this.”