First Ladies (30 page)

Such an assault on the old male monopoly of politics perplexed Woodrow Wilson, the first president since Andrew Johnson to have been born in the South. Although Woodrow eventually came out in favor of the suffrage amendment, he acted reluctantly, moved less by conviction than by the realization that he could not arrest change. He had, after all, been raised in a Presbyterian manse where he was accustomed to hearing the male head of the household speak not only for the family but also for God, and he did not easily transfer authority to women. Few men outdid Woodrow Wilson in appearing to like women, but rather than treating them as intellectual equals, he expected them to supply his support system: bolster his ego and laugh at his jokes.

Beautiful women who knew how to conceal their brains beneath adoring glances and innocent repartee were especially welcome in his presence. Youth did not necessarily attract him—indeed, he called all the women he liked, even the middle-aged ones, “My little girl”—and he exacted from all those who wished to be counted as his friends a juvenile obeisance to his views and an unquestioned acceptance of his courtesies. In the list his daughter compiled of the women he admired most, southerners predominated.
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His first wife, Ellen Axson of tiny Rome, Georgia, might not at first glance appear a likely candidate for Woodrow's attention. Like her husband, she grew up in a Presbyterian manse and in her case, both grandfathers had also been men of the cloth. Ellen showed little interest, however, in following the examples of her mother and grandmothers. Her father pronounced her as a youngster too “obstreperous and independent” for her own good,
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and she dreamed of going to New York to study art as her teacher had done.
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That plan was deferred, however, while Ellen attended a local women's college. Then her mother died, leaving Ellen, the oldest of four children, to help raise the younger ones. Just as she was finally working out the possibility of combining serious art study and family responsibilities, young Woodrow Wilson came through her town and imposed another complication. He renamed her “Eileen,” and pursued her with what one historian called “among the greatest love letters in the English language.”
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Ellen put Woodrow off, pleading first that her family needed her and then pointing out that he could hardly think of supporting a family on his income. Both her excuses ring a little hollow, however, because when Ellen, at age twenty-four, inherited some money of her
own after her father's death, she left the brothers and sister and headed north—not to Baltimore where Woodrow had gone to pursue a doctorate in political science, but to a boardinghouse on New York City's West Eleventh Street and art classes nearby.

Like many presidents' wives, Ellen Axson showed a streak of independence in her youth that her husband lacked. While he picked his schools carefully from among the most prestigious (Princeton, University of Virginia, and Johns Hopkins), Ellen enrolled in the infant New York Art Students' League.
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Inexpensive and student-run, the League admitted both men and women,
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and its constitution mandated equal representation of both sexes on its governing board. The League hewed to the mores of the time, however, by segregating drawing sessions that included nude models—women attended in the afternoons and the men went in the evenings.
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Not yet known as Greenwich Village when Ellen Axson arrived there, the area around West Eleventh Street already attracted a wide variety of people moving into the city. The 1880s marked the largest single decade of that century for population shift to the cities, and New York drew more than its share—not just immigrants from Europe but men and women from farms and small towns across the United States. The aspiring painter from Rome, Georgia, was not unique in her complaints of loneliness. To fill her time and help her feel more useful, she joined a reading club
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and volunteered to teach two nights a week in a “missionary school.”
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Since Ellen Axson had evidently already decided to marry Woodrow Wilson, her assertion of independence is remarkable, particularly in light of Woodrow's disapproval. From Baltimore he wrote that he did not like the idea of her going out alone in the evening, although he hastened to add that she had every right to develop her own talents. In any case, he considered this show of independence on Ellen's part a temporary aberration because he was convinced, and assumed she agreed, that a woman found completeness only through marriage and a family.
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Ellen showed only temporary ambivalence between accepting the excitement of art classes in New York City and the staid life of a professor's wife. She wrote to Woodrow in strangely biblical terms: “I was indeed meant for you—that I may do you good and not evil all the days of my life.”
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Ellen Axson's flirtation with the artist's life may have grown out of several considerations, including the inspiration of contemporaries who had achieved national and even international reputations. Mary Cassatt, the Philadelphia painter, had been exhibiting in Paris since the 1870s, and Harriet Hosmer, the Boston sculptor, had earned wide
acclaim and considerable personal wealth. Several women had exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 and two of them had won medals.
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Even women of lesser promise than these might have seen advantages in an art career. Preparation and study often occurred in private, without the necessity of enrolling at an established institution, and the work itself was performed at home, so that like a writer, an artist did not have to travel to some central place of employment.

But Ellen Axson must have also noticed that women artists who boasted large reputations had not combined their careers with marriage. Neither Cassatt not Emily Sartain (the medal winner at the Philadelphia Centennial) nor Hosmer ever married, and Hosmer had explicitly stated her reasons. “An artist has no business to marry,” she wrote. “For a man, it may be well enough but for a woman on whom matrimonial duties and cares weigh more heavily, it is a moral wrong, I think, for she must neglect her profession or her family becoming neither a good wife and mother nor a good artist. My ambition is to become the latter, so I wage an eternal feud with the consolidating knot.”
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There is no evidence that Ellen Axson knew of Hosmer's pronouncements, but her study at the Art Students' League stopped after one year.

In June 1885, Woodrow completed his course work for the doctorate at Johns Hopkins, and Ellen accepted his calculations that two could live “as cheaply as one and one-half.” Since Woodrow's beginning salary at Bryn Mawr was only $1,500, he and his bride had to pay careful attention to finances. They boarded the first year with another family, and Ellen did her part in economizing by putting her painting easel away and traveling into Philadelphia twice a week to take a course in home economics. The next year the Wilsons were able to rent a house of their own and bring Ellen's younger brother and sister to live with them.

The move came none too quickly because Ellen gave birth to two daughters, Margaret and Jessie, within twenty-five months. When she bore still a third daughter two years later, Woodrow concealed rather poorly his disappointment—he had written his wife that he was “glad—almost as at the thought of having a boy.”
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The future president now headed a family of four females, and under his tutelage they could also become adoring.

For a man who showed little appreciation of brainy women, Bryn Mawr was a mistake, and Ellen had her own reservations about his going there. When Woodrow was considering whether or not to take the job, he had informed Ellen that he found women speakers “manly,” giving him a “chilled scandalized feeling.”
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She replied as though she
thought all women moved in an intellectual realm well below his: “Do you think there is much reputation to be made in a girl's school—a ‘Woman's College?' … Can you be content to serve that sort of an institution?” Although Ellen had studied art in a coeducational school, she placed Woodrow on a pedestal far above women, and the idea that he would consider working as a subordinate to a woman was dismaying. She begged him to consider: “Can you with all your heart cooperate with the strong-minded person who conducts [the college]? The ‘Dean!' how ridiculous! If they are going to have ‘prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,' it would be more consistent … to exclude men altogether. … Seriously dear, I fear you would find it very unpleasant to serve, as it were, under a
woman!
… [It would be] so unnatural, so jarring to one's sense of the fitness of things, so absurd … beneath you.”
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In spite of his own and Ellen's misgivings, Woodrow took the job as the best of his offers and soon he was complaining that his boss, M. Carey Thomas, was younger than he, forgetting that it was a question of five days and that both were only twenty-eight. After three years at Bryn Mawr, Woodrow confessed he had been “for a long time hungry for a class of men,”
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and he escaped with relief to Wesleyan College where he became an enthusiastic sports booster. An alumnus recalled years later that Professor Wilson ran up and down the sidelines at football games, exhorting Wesleyan players to victory.
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In 1890 Woodrow moved on to the better known Princeton.

Frances Wright Saunders, in a carefully researched biography of Ellen Axson Wilson, portrays the rest of the Wilson marriage as a partnership, with Ellen playing an important, background role in Woodrow's success while, at the same time, pursuing her own interest in art. More than a skilled hostess, she translated German texts for Woodrow
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and worked out administrative arrangements which he, when he became president of Princeton, offered to the faculty for their acceptance.
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She traveled on her own and continued to paint and sell her work.

That view of Ellen Wilson fails to give adequate weight to the evidence that shows her repeatedly sacrificing her own time and energy so that Woodrow could have more pleasure and rest. When he received an invitation to travel, she encouraged him to go while she stayed home with the children. He explored the Chicago Exposition in 1893 and then she made the trip later.
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He traveled through Europe twice on his own and then she went with one of their daughters. As a student of government and an advocate of the parliamentary system, he was drawn to Britain, but Ellen headed for Italy's art treasures.
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Although Ellen knew that one of Woodrow's trips was financed by a “wealthy widow around the corner”
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and that other journeys involved meetings with women, she refused to appear jealous. Frances Wright Saunders concluded, after an examination of the letters between Woodrow and his wife, that Ellen knew of her husband's long involvement with a divorcée, Mary Hulbert Peck, but rather than feed gossip and harm Woodrow's political chances, she treated Mary as a family friend.
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Woodrow indicated that he regretted his relationship with Mary Peck as a “contemptible error, … a madness of a few months, … [that left him] stained and unworthy,”
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but he continued to correspond with Mary until his wife's death.

The youngest Wilson daughter, Eleanor, wrote two books about her parents, and she described a considerably more self-sacrificing Ellen Wilson than did Saunders. Eleanor saw her mother as accepting the fact that she could not provide sufficient gaiety and laughter for Woodrow. He remained the center of the family—a loving, funny clown who could recite more senseless verses and perform more facial contortions than anyone else she knew. Even her adoring account indicates, however, that he divided his life into compartments, with women confined to the audience. His daughters, all of whom favored woman's suffrage before he did, failed to change his mind. When time came for them to enter college, he rejected more intellectual settings, which, as a Princeton professor and president he could certainly have arranged, and sent the older two to the nearby Woman's College of Baltimore (later renamed Goucher College) and the youngest to St. Mary's in North Carolina where, he hoped, she could unlearn her Yankee accent.
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Plans to make southern belles of his three daughters had obviously failed by the time the Wilsons moved into the White House because all three had chosen careers. Margaret, the eldest, worked hard to become a concert singer and while her father was in office she found opportunities to perform more plentiful than they would ever be again. Jessie, the dreamer and Phi Beta Kappa key-holder, had abandoned plans for foreign missionary work in favor of work in a Philadelphia settlement house. Eleanor, the youngest, reflected some of her mother's interest in art and enrolled in Philadelphia's Academy of Fine Arts to study commercial illustrating.
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Although they had been exposed to publicity when their father had served as New Jersey's governor, the Wilson daughters were unprepared for the attention focused on them after he became president. Magazines took such an interest in them that one congressman's wife confessed she was sick of reading about them. “They are more
before the public than any other White House family I have known,” Ellen Slayden wrote. “T[heodore] R[oosevelt] personally never let the public forget him, but the ladies of his household—until Alice took center stage—preserved a well-bred privacy.”
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Even Woodrow complained that he might be a public figure, fair game for all reporters, but he did not think his wife and daughters fell into the same category.

Ellen Axson Wilson received particularly close scrutiny. A month after the inauguration, the
Ladies' Home Journal
published two of her landscapes in full-color pages and noted that one painting had been exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and that others had been shown in Chicago and Indianapolis.
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Good Housekeeping
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and
Current Opinion
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carried similar stories. Ellen's domestic interests and abilities were not ignored and there were the usual speculations about the cost of her wardrobe. She felt moved to defend herself when one newspaper reported that on one of her shopping trips she had bought seven new gowns ranging in cost from $200 to $300 each. The actual amount spent had been much less, as she proved with the receipts which showed two gowns, one hat, one “waist,” two pairs of gloves, and some fabric to repair old clothes—all for a total of $140.84.
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