Episode 12: Women's Rights? It's Complicated

Melody Lehn discusses the long and complicated relationship between first ladies and women’s rights from 1776 to Seneca Falls to suffrage to the Equal Rights Amendment.

Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, and X/Twitter.

TRANSCRIPT

Teri Finneman: Eleanor. Dolley. Mamie. Jackie. They were the nation’s original influencers. Some were fearless, some were fragile. All left their mark on the nation’s history. In this podcast, we'll reflect on the fascinating legacies of the women forever tied to the White House. I'm your host, Teri Finneman, a journalism historian who studies media portrayals of first ladies with production editing by Bella Koscal. This is The First Ladies podcast.

Since the women's rights movement launched in Seneca Falls in 1848, first ladies have shown varying levels of support for the advancement of their own gender. Despite their own powerful positions in the White House, not all thought women should have a political say, but those who were activists may surprise you.

In this episode, our guest Melody Lehn discusses the long and complicated relationship between first ladies and women's rights. Melody, welcome to the show. Why did you become interested in studying first ladies?

Melody Lehn (1:18): I think this is such an excellent question to start with, and if I had to sum it up into one word, my answer would be indignation. I was in college at Furman University, a liberal arts college in South Carolina during the 2008 election, and I grew up in a pretty conservative community, and I didn't follow politics very closely, but I was surrounded by a lot of friends who were studying political science and who said, hey, you have a civic obligation to pay more attention to this, and I was persuaded by that. So, I started following Hillary Clinton's campaign, and one of the things that I eventually picked up on was the fact that a lot of her labor and the activities that she undertook as first lady were dismissed outright, or at the very least neglected, and that really kind of bothered me.

(2:11): I was not particularly a fan of Clinton, but I was so struck by the fact that someone so well-known, polarizing to be sure, but someone so well-known could be so publicly active and it just didn't seem to count. So, that really spurred me on as I went to graduate school at the University of Memphis and studied rhetoric, and I wanted to look more closely at Clinton's record. So, I wrote my dissertation on this newspaper column called “Talking it Over” that she wrote between 1995 and 2000, and it was a really interesting experience to learn that that column got very little attention.

I even had a wonderful opportunity to very briefly chat with Clinton herself during the 2016 election. She came to South Carolina to make a campaign stop, and I mentioned to her that I'd written my dissertation on her column, and she was so surprised. She said, really? And I said, yes! And that was just, I think for me, a real culmination and validation of the fact that there was a lot more to understand not just about Clinton as first lady, because there's, of course, been a great deal written about her, but certainly about all of the other first ladies who we know a lot less about. So, Clinton was really my entry into what has been a much broader and more wonderful inquiry into various U.S. first ladies.

Teri Finneman (3:30): Well, we're going to be covering a lot of first ladies today. Let's start with Abigail Adams. If anyone knows anything about Abigail Adams, it's probably her famous quote asking her husband to remember the ladies. Give us the context of why she said that and what she wanted.

Melody Lehn: I couldn't agree with you more. She's such a natural starting point when we think about first ladies and the ways that they intersect with the women's rights movement. I think she probably couldn't have imagined that the words that she wrote in this private letter to her husband in 1776 would have not only survived, but also really endured in a way that encapsulates what for her was I think a pretty progressive view of maybe not women's rights so much as women's, you know, participation in the founding of the nation. So, she wrote to her husband, you know, kind of a reminder and appeal, might even some say perhaps in a bit of a veiled threat, to remember the ladies lest they foment a rebellion in a democracy where they had no input in the framing of the laws under which they were governed.

(4:40): So, I think, for her, she wouldn't really have been thinking in 1776 of women's rights the way that we perhaps think of it today. She wouldn't have been thinking about suffrage or, goodness, women running for office themselves, but she was known to really be an advocate and supporter of women's education, their ability to cultivate intelligence, their rights to property as well, and also legal protections in case of divorce. So, I think for her, you know, that letter is really a remarkable document, and it gives a really good starting point for trying to understand, again, the ways that first ladies have been a part of the conversations happening in national discourse about, you know, women's roles and their rights as well as their responsibilities.

Teri Finneman: Sarah Polk was first lady when the Seneca Falls Convention took place in 1848 that launched the women's rights movement in the U.S. and pushed for women to be given the right to vote. What can you tell us about her stance on that?

Melody Lehn (5:39): I have to tell you, Polk is such a frustrating figure for me. It's frustrating because, on one hand, yes, she was a Southerner, she had been a slave owner. She was involved in the temperance movement, she supported it, and the temperance movement was very adjacent to the emerging women's rights movement that really started at that 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, but Polk was not involved in the convention at all. She didn't comment on it. She was not in attendance. She really, on the other hand, though, believed that she belonged in the political process. As a first lady, she was progressive. She attended debates, she spoke with different male congressmen about policies. There's even evidence that she helped her husband write speeches, which I think is very progressive when you think about an unelected spouse shaping presidential rhetoric.

(6:33): So, she belonged in political settings, in her mind, at least, but certainly she didn't do much, if anything, to lift a finger for other women to have the same kinds of access. So really, she was very absent on the Seneca Falls moment as it unfolded.

Teri Finneman: Suffragists pressed both President Hayes and First Lady Lucy Hayes to lend their support for the cause. Lucy was the first presidential spouse to hold a college degree, although, really, people today know very little about her. So, how did she react to the movement

Melody Lehn (7:08): Yeah, I think what has survived about Lucy Hayes is kind of encapsulated in that nickname, which you've probably heard: “Lemonade Lucy.” She was, even more so than Polk, really committed to the temperance movement, which I think would have given her some access to the women's rights movement and even some, you know, justification if people were to find it controversial. But she and her husband, both, the records suggest, really subscribe to the same view on this, which was that, as they understood it, the political duties of citizenship were really inconsistent with women's demands, particularly as mothers. So, they found the idea of separate spheres to be very appealing, that men belonged in the public sphere running things and women belonged in the private sphere tending the home and raising their children.

(8:00): This was really disappointing for the leading women's rights activists of the day. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton appealed to both Rutherford and Lucy Hayes and sought an audience with them at the White House. Rutherford agreed to meet with them, but Lucy would not meet with them, although she did agree to give them the customary White House tour. So, I think she was very sort of not a supporter of the women's rights movement while she was in the White House, but I think that when her husband's administration ended, she shifted from being maybe this status of not supporting it to openly opposing it.

So, there's a case in 1888, I think it was, when Susan B. Anthony appealed to the former first lady to help generate some delegates for this gathering of the International Council of Women, and Hayes not only refused to help, there's evidence that she actually lobbied behind the scenes to deliberately exclude these activists from having a place at the table.

(9:04): You know, first lady scholars have tended to read her in, I would say, one of two ways. She either just opposed it outright, or some have suggested that she was more savvy than that, and she may not have cared either way, but she felt like it was too unpopular, so she didn't want to get her hands involved in it. I would say that, based on the research I've done on her, the former view tends to seem more accurate to me that she really opposed it, given that she went so far out of her way while not even really a public figure anymore to block women's rights activists from having opportunity to express their views in various contexts.

Teri Finneman: You note that Lucretia Garfield took interest in women's rights and privately expressed sympathy for the grievances of those involved with the cause. What did she have to say about it?

Melody Lehn (9:52): You know what's really disappointing about Lucretia Garfield is that she, I think, really might have contributed a great deal to the institution, but the dualities of, certainly her husband's assassination, but also, she had poor health, and this was something that plagued a lot of 19th century first ladies who may have been far more active with women's rights as well as any other topic, but their health kept them really confined in a lot of ways. She was only first lady for less than a year in 1881, and what's interesting is that first lady scholars who have studied her tend to categorize her as a supporter of women's rights. I kept encountering this as I read about her, so I really thought to myself, okay I've got the secondary sources that make this claim. What proof can we have from sort of a primary source that would really substantiate the view that she was an active supporter?

(10:48): And what I found was this really interesting document. It's unpublished; it's undated. It could be a letter, it could be just some thoughts that she was writing out on what she talked about as women's duty, and she addressed this document to her husband, and one of the things that she wrote, which I thought was incredibly fascinating and I think very much akin to some of Abigail Adams's observations as well in terms of writing privately to your husband and hoping to shape his political inclinations, she wrote that she wondered if the women suffragists of her time were correct in all of the characterizations that they made about these terrible wrongs.

So, we know from the Seneca Falls Convention that the Declaration of Sentiments that Elizabeth Cady Stanton authored with others talked about all of the various ways that women were excluded – property rights, education, other sorts of things, voting certainly, which was the most contested sentiment expressed at Seneca Falls – and Garfield wondered if they were perhaps on the right track, but she wasn't thinking about suffrage.

(11:58): She was thinking about work. So, she talked in this letter about men being the kings of their own work, while women could not similarly, and this is her language now, triumphantly pursue their vocations. So, I think it's interesting because she's a bit of a mixed bag, right? She was supportive of women pursuing not just vocation, but also the education that they might need in order to pursue that vocation, but at the same time, she was allegedly repelled at the prospect of women publicly campaigning for the vote, and she even went so far as to join an Ohio anti-suffrage association.

So, I think what I would characterize her as is someone who's both progressive and conservative in her views about women's rights and the various grievances. She was on board with women being professional to an extent and being educated, but she thought, maybe she didn't oppose the ballot so much as women being out there campaigning and perhaps even campaigning in very militant ways. So, I would characterize her, yeah, as both progressive and conservative. Very, very interesting and underappreciated first lady, I would say.

Teri Finneman (13:09): I've really been looking forward to talking to you about Ida McKinley, another one of those first ladies who few people know anything about, yet she had a unique relationship with Susan B. Anthony and even took an interest in Victoria Woodhall, the first woman to run for president. Tell us more about Ida and her support of women's rights.

Melody Lehn: I think the first thing I would say here is that if anyone ever has the chance to go to the McKinley House in Canton, Ohio, it's now the First Lady's Library and Museum. It is a wonderful place to not only learn about lots of first ladies, but to learn a good deal about McKinley herself. I would characterize her similarly to Lucretia Garfield, very underrated, and I think a lot of this had to do with, again, what plagued so many first ladies of her era. She was very ill while her husband was in office.

She had what we would contemporarily characterize as epilepsy. So, she was ill, she had episodes in public, which I think were embarrassing to her, and she wanted to very much keep that away from the public eye. So, she stayed behind the scenes a good bit, but even though she was confined, she was still very active to the extent that she could be, and even as far back as when William McKinley was governor of Ohio, she was interested in learning more about the women's rights movement.

(14:30): She did urge, as you mentioned, her husband to invite Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Victoria Woodhall to speak. I think that shows that she was interested in hearing what they had to say, even as she no doubt would have known that they were very controversial figures in certain parts. She also, and I think this is really fascinating, she granted the National American Women's Suffrage Association permission to use her name and likeness in fundraising. So, certainly, as presidents and first ladies at the turn of the century became more public figures or what Gil Troy would call the presidential couple, the media reporting on that would have been increasing at this time, so her name being attached to the suffrage cause might have been compelling for some people who thought that it might be unfeminine or, you know, problematic to see that while the first lady, a woman we respect, you know, is a good wife and mother, she supports it. So, I think that was very compelling that she agreed to allow her name to be used in permission for fundraising.

(15:35): She even, and this is a really interesting anecdote, she hand-sewed a doll that was sold at an Ohio suffrage bazaar to raise funds for the cause, and that doll was called Carrie Chapman McKinley, sort of a merge between Ida McKinley's name and the suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt. So, she very much was aware of sort of the public goings on and the kind of, we might even say, like the marketing idea, right? She was very aware that her name could lend some credibility, but she did more than just sort of do what might be these smaller symbolic acts.

She did meet privately, unlike some of her predecessors, with suffragists at the White House, and I don't think there's any evidence that she herself, you know, said I am for women's rights or I am for women getting the vote, but I do think there is evidence that women's rights activists at this time most certainly would have viewed her as an ally to their cause, and that might have empowered them, particularly in those years, those post-Civil War years where there was a lot of uphill movement to try to regain ground before, certainly it took until 1920 for women to get the vote, so I think her encouragement would have been quite meaningful and symbolic to those women's activists toiling for the cause at this time.

Teri Finneman (16:56): Helen Taft wanted to be first lady more than her husband William wanted to be president. You note that her public opinions on women's rights set her apart from her predecessors and paved the way for more progressive first ladies to take even stronger stances on women's rights. Talk about her impact.

Melody Lehn: So, I think for Taft, a lot of it went back to what we see is pretty common for first ladies of the 19th century, and now, certainly with Taft, we're into the 20th century. She was an advocate for women's education, and one of the things that I thought was particularly savvy about how she framed education was that she framed it not as a way for women to compete with men or even to supplant men from their “rightful places,” but rather she understood education for a woman as the opportunity for a woman to round out her femininity, and I think that this was a particularly savvy move because for many, you know, the idea of (again) women leaving the private sphere, leaving their children or not getting married until later, was certainly a threat to their sense of, you know, what we would more modernly call the nuclear family.

(18:08): So, for Taft, this view of women's education and it being part of their bolstering rather than undermining their femininity, very much informed how she saw suffrage, and she, I think, really represents a turning point in first ladies coming around on the suffrage issue, and she believed that there was nothing unfeminine in a woman casting the ballot, and this was, I think, a very progressive thought at the time.

Now, she was very clear that she did not subscribe to the view that women should run for office, but she did think that women could vote and not compromise their roles as wives and mothers, and I think that, for her, a lot of this viewpoint was shaped by her own daughter, who was an educator herself. Helen Taft Manning was not only a devoted suffragist, but she also became a history professor and later even an administrator at her alma mater, Bryn Mawr, which was one of the women's colleges at the time.

(19:10): And certainly, I think Helen Taft Manning is someone certainly worth learning more about, but really letting the next generation inform her mind and perhaps even change it, Helen Taft was like several of the other first ladies we've talked about today, very open minded to hearing all perspectives and adjusting her thinking accordingly. So, I think that her views about education – really eventually coupled with her daughter's persuasion – shaped her in being a first lady who, unlike everyone up until now, is publicly in favor of suffrage.

Teri Finneman: Most people are familiar with Edith Wilson, Woodrow's controversial second wife, who basically ran the White House after he became ill and who was no fan of the suffragists picketing outside the White House, but you also talked about his first wife, Ellen. How did she feel about the women's rights movement?

Melody Lehn (20:07): Ellen is – I see her in ways similar to Lucretia Garfield in that she did not inhabit the role for very long. She was only first lady for 17 months before she died, and certainly as your question indicates, Edith Wilson, who was very strongly against suffragists and felt that they were unfairly attacking her husband and they should go to jail, we shouldn't have any sympathy for them. Ellen Wilson is a real – she provides a really marked difference to the view of her husband's second wife and kind of like Helen Taft whose education was sort of a gateway issue into women's rights via suffrage, I would say that that's a similar parallel to Ellen Wilson. Ellen Wilson was very interested in social reform and in particular, on housing for the poor and for African American citizens who were living in dire conditions, and Mrs. Wilson's bill was in fact the first piece of legislation that ever passed in Congress with a first lady having been sort of the champion behind it, and we didn't see that again until Lady Bird Johnson with beautification.

(21:17): So, for Ellen Wilson, she supported women's rights in that she felt that women should have sanitary and safe working conditions in government, and I would characterize her as very willing to have also heard different sides of the suffrage debate. She hosted both pro- and anti-suffrage advocates at the White House, and I think that that's really interesting, again, thinking of first ladies cultivating their influence by seeking to be as informed as they can be before rendering a public judgment that might mislead the public. So, I think that's a really noteworthy aspect of how she treated this particular issue, and much like Helen Taft Manning, Jessie Wilson, Ellen Wilson's daughter, also persuaded her mother to see suffrage as a potential solution for those disenfranchised working women.

(22:13): So, Ellen Wilson is noted to be the first presidential spouse to have ever issued a public statement on women's suffrage, and she did that in a 1913 interview for the magazine Good Housekeeping, and I think what's really remarkable about that interview is not only is it sort of, for a communication scholar like myself, textual proof, evidence of her views, but also, I believe this would have put her in opposition with her husband because he didn't come out in support of suffrage until five years later, and that was certainly after there had been a great deal of controversy and protests outside of the White House, and that really forced his hand. So, I think that Ellen Wilson, had she lived longer, I think we might have seen a slightly different, maybe even a dramatically different response from the White House in those final years before the 19th Amendment passed.

Teri Finneman (23:09): So, we've talked now about a few first ladies with sympathy for the women's rights movement, but then there's Florence Harding. It's been said that she by far was the first lady to give the most support to women voting. What made her stand out in this regard?

Melody Lehn: Yeah so, I mean, as we've kind of been chatting about a lot of the first ladies, the ones who commented at all or there's any record surviving at all of their views on suffrage, were silent or in opposition to, or they were quietly or in a very limited way supportive of suffrage. Harding not only publicly supported suffrage, to be sure, before she became first lady, but she actively admired the militant activities of those British suffragettes who inspired women like Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and the women who founded the National Women's Party, and these women were very inclined to pursue protest as a viable strategy for seeing the political gains that they hoped to make. They viewed the state-by-state campaigning, the slow work of that. They didn't disrespect that work, but they certainly reached a point where they said, you know, we've been talking about women voting since 1848 in Seneca Falls, and we're now into the 20th century.

(24:31): Harding, the record shows, was a supporter of what might have been clearly controversial protest strategies, and there's even a quotation that's attributed to her, which really struck me, and it's hard to even think of another first lady before or after her, who's ever said something like this while in office. She said, there are certain times and places wherein women must be militant to attain their proper degree of justice and right. I think that's such an incredible quotation, and I mean it really does defy the idea that, you know, the president's wife should be, you know, this kind of quiet political partner who doesn't upstage or contradict her husband in public.

Florence Harding really offers a contrast to that view, and she really broke the mold in subscribing to what then, and perhaps even now, would be considered a pretty radical belief. I think it's disappointing that the scandals of her husband's administration and even some of the, you know, conspiracy theories that she might have poisoned him or something like that have maybe disinclined people to pay more attention to her, or certainly at least, to engage in a more nuanced reading of her legacy on women voting and perhaps other issues as well.

Teri Finneman (25:48): I was also really glad to see you mentioned Bess Truman, who was often blown off as doing little as first lady. What were her feelings about the cause?

Melody Lehn: Bess Truman is so blown off. She's so often passed over, and, you know, I think we can say with some degree of certainty that this, you know, a lot of this has to do with a combination of following Eleanor Roosevelt, who was such a trailblazer, right, but also the fact that after the war, we sort of returned to an era of post-war conservativism, right, the idea of reestablishing families and men coming back from war and becoming now, again, the primary breadwinner. So, Truman, I think, sort of gets attached to this image as being a real return to a kind of quiet, conservative, submissive even femininity. She certainly didn't think that her role was to upstage her husband. She was very private as a first lady. She left no memoir. A lot of what we know about her comes from the book that her daughter Margaret wrote about her or other sorts of press coverage or letters that have survived the Truman administration.

(26:55): But one thing that we do know about Bess Truman is that she was very close friends with a woman named Perle Mesta. Mesta was a Washington socialite, and she was heavily involved in the National Women's Party, and Alice Paul’s NWP, once women achieved the vote, they didn't sort of just say, okay, we got what we wanted. Now we can just find some other things to do. They said all right, what's next, and for Alice Paul and her supporters, what was next was a federal constitutional amendment for equality, what we now call the Equal Rights Amendment, and Truman’s friendship with Perle Mesta, and then by extension her, you know, contingent association with the National Women’s Party, may have really inspired her to privately support the Equal Rights Amendment, and Truman's biographers have credited her for lobbying Harry Truman to endorse the ERA, and in fact, he became the first sitting president to do so after Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt.

(28:03): They had really opposed the ERA, and Eleanor Roosevelt opposed it up until her death in the ‘60s. She eventually withdrew her opposition, but she never really came out for it. So, I think with Bess Truman, we have to really pay attention to the private lobbying and the records that have survived of that of knowing that she was affiliated with people who were doing work to see the ERA passed, and she is credited with lobbying her husband, and I think that that little nugget there leaves a clue that maybe Bess Truman was more supportive of at least certain women's rights initiatives than she's been given credit for. So, I think it raises some really interesting questions about her.

Teri Finneman: Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Ford, they get a lot of the attention for being activist first ladies, but you know that Pat Nixon really broke some molds herself. Tell us more about her work.

Melody Lehn (28:59): So, my interest in Pat Nixon goes back to a larger interest in first ladies and their increased international diplomacy. I was reading about Pat Nixon in Mary Brennan's book, her biography of Pat Nixon “Embattled First Lady,” and I came across this story about a trip that Pat Nixon took by herself to Peru after a horrible earthquake, and she raised all of these funds. She took this solo trip. So, I got a grant and went to the Nixon Library in California, and I was researching this trip, and I was not really thinking about Pat Nixon and women's rights at all. I was thinking about her as being very unsung as a goodwill ambassador, and while I was at the library, I really began to discover that the more I looked, the more I found that Nixon broke molds, but also, I think we should also credit her for at least attempting to break some molds, even though she certainly didn't identify as a feminist herself, she came up against a lot of resistance by the male staff in her husband's administration, and there's a lot that's been written about that they sort of wanted to push her to the side.

(30:16): H.R. Haldeman referred to her as sort of just a prop, and I think that's pretty disappointing because behind the scenes, she was really trying to get some things moving during her tenure in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. She, unsuccessfully, but she still tried to lobby her husband to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, and I think that's, of course, fascinating. We didn't see a woman appointed to the court until Reagan with Sandra Day O’Connor. She wore pants in public and was the first first lady to ever be photographed wearing pants in public while in office, and she was the first sitting first lady to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment. So, Lady Bird Johnson came out in favor of the ERA after her husband was in office, but Pat Nixon was actually the first first lady to endorse it while in office, and while I was at the Nixon Library, I found a copy of her endorsement, which was published as a one-page letter in the 1972 Republican National Convention program.

(31:21): What's interesting about the letter is, again, she's not making a sort of personal feminist appeal, but what she does do is she ties into this Republican Party tradition of having long endorsed the ERA. In fact, the Republican Party included the Equal Rights Amendment in its platform before the Democratic Party did, and Pat Nixon was clearly attuned to that, and even though she wasn't really out there lobbying aggressively the way we would see some of those who came after her doing it, she did say in press conferences that she supported it. Her press secretary, Connie Stuart, said during press conferences, yes, Mrs. Nixon supports it, and I think that makes her endorsement a historic turning point because it really did, in many ways, foreground the later activism we would see by first ladies like Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, as well as former first lady Lady Bird Johnson, who all were very involved in ERA lobbying up until that 1982 ratification deadline passed and the ERA did not successfully move forward.

Teri Finneman (32:30): And then as we wrap up the show, it was really fascinating that you mentioned none of the recent first ladies, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, Melania Trump, or Jill Biden have made the Equal Rights Amendment a priority during their tenures. Yet certainly, many of these women have taken on issues of women's rights, including in other countries. What do you make of that?

Melody Lehn: I think it goes back to that 1982 extension deadline. So, the ERA had been, again, endorsed by both the Republican and the Democratic Party in the ‘40s, and by the time we hit the 1970s, conservative activists, the one who's most remembered, Phyllis Schlafly, came out in opposition to the ERA, and it really then throughout the ‘70s and into the early ‘80s became this intensely partisan issue.

So, we had a series of first ladies express what could easily be characterized as bipartisan support. We had Republicans in Pat Nixon and Betty Ford and Democrats in Rosalynn Carter and Lady Bird Johnson, but Nancy Reagan opposed the ERA, and even though Ronald Reagan had once supported it, he then came out in opposition and really, I think, a lot of the shift in the Republican Party happened under his tenure, even though there were still many women who identified as Republican feminists who supported the ERA, but the party position eventually shifted.

(34:03): So, we see this with Barbara Bush, too. The 1982 deadline passes. Nancy Reagan is in opposition. Barbara Bush comes into office. She had once endorsed the ERA. Now, she steps back and says I don't want to talk about it anymore. So, by the time we reach Hillary Clinton, we see a lot of other shifts in women's rights. We see the Anita Hill hearings, for example, 1992, the Year of the Woman. Women are increasingly being elected to office, and the ERA still comes up intermittently. It came up, for example, during Ruth Bader Ginsburg's confirmation hearings, and it was used as evidence that she was perhaps unfit to sit on the Supreme Court, although we know that that didn't deter her ultimately from being appointed, but Hillary Clinton, as your question really indicated, shifted I think a lot of the priority to not just women's rights at home, but women's rights abroad.

(35:01): And we saw that with Laura Bush, we saw that with Michelle Obama as well. So, the ERA debate has never fully gone away, and I talk about this in a book that I have coming out later this year, the 100-year debate on the Equal Rights Amendment. The debate’s never fully gone away, but it has ebbed and flowed, and I would say that the ‘80s into the ‘90s and into the, I would say, at least through most of the Obama administration, really was a period of ebb. But then we reached the 2016 election, and the threat that many women activists saw in a potential Donald Trump presidency propelled them to revisit the Equal Rights Amendment and to question whether or not the debate was truly over, whether or not that 1982 deadline was a hard deadline, or whether or not if there could be more state ratifications.

(36:00): There have now been three since 2015, and women's rights activists have really renewed the push for the ERA at this point, but we've not seen first ladies really engage that conversation. So, Melania Trump has not been someone who has issued any comment for or against it. The Trump administration was very against it and made a number of efforts to see that it would be legally impossible for the ERA to go forward. Now under Joe Biden, President Biden has come out publicly in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, as has Vice President Kamala Harris, which is another really historic endorsement when you think about our first woman vice president endorsing it. But Dr. Jill Biden has not said anything that I've been able to find in support of the ERA to supplement the efforts of the president and vice president, and I think a lot of critics have viewed the Biden administration as not taking an active enough approach in renewing the possibility for the ERA to move forward.

(37:06): So, it'll be really interesting to see. I don't think the ERA debate is going to go away anytime soon. So, depending on who gets elected, whether or not we see Melania Trump back in office, or Jill Biden continues. Neither of them has really made any effort for or against the amendment. It'll be interesting, though, to see if and when that ever changes, so I think we'll just have to stay tuned and see how it plays out.

Teri Finneman: All right. Well, we have covered a lot of ground today. You have done a substantial amount of work, and we thank you for that and thank you so much for joining us today.

Melody Lehn (37:43): Thank you for having me. This was wonderful.

Teri Finneman: We hope you enjoyed the show. Tune in next time to uncover more untold histories of the nation's first ladies. I'm Teri Finneman, and this is The First Ladies podcast.

Show music credit: "Winning Elevation" by Hot_Dope.