First Ladies of the United States: Edith Wilson

Described as “America's first female president,” Edith Wilson was the second wife of Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States, and first lady from 1915 to 1921, taking on the duties of the president for over a year after her husband's stroke. She essentially ran the country in her husband's absence during her “stewardship,” the word she used to refer to her takeover of the West Wing.

She was born Edith Bolling in Wytheville, Virginia. Her father was a circuit court judge, and the family was descended from one of the earliest English settlers to Virginia Colony. She was also, through her father, a direct descendant of Pocahontas. The seventh of eleven children, she had little formal education, taught at home mainly by her invalid grandmother. At the age of fifteen, she enrolled in a finishing school for girls, but, ill-prepared and undisciplined, she left after only one semester. She had just one more year of schooling at a private girls’ school in Richmond, Virginia. While visiting her married sister in Washington, D.C., she met Norman Galt, a prominent jeweler, and the couple married in 1896, living in the capital for the next twelve years. In 1903, she gave birth to a son, who only survived a few days, and the complications of his birth left her unable to have more children. In 1908, Galt died unexpectedly...