Monthly Program: First Ladies and Women’s Rights: Daughters of the Enlightenment

A presentation by Patricia Southard and Elizabeth Thacker-Estrada

As the country’s revolutionary past receded, the era of the Early Republic in the United States gave way to that of the Common Man. Upper- and middle-class white women increasingly found themselves confined in a private, religious, and domestic sphere separate from the public, political, and professional world of white men. The reign of such elite and celebrated founding mothers and First Ladies as Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Dolley Madison, had been succeeded by an age of mostly little-known proxy White House hostesses and invalid presidential wives. Yet despite a restrained public role, upper-class white women performed good works. Many in the North advocated for the abolition of slavery following the Second Great Awakening of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the South, slave-holding wives were accorded one kind of legal equality with their slave-owning husbands. Working-class, wage-earning women, whose numbers had grown since the Revolution, free black women, and later immigrant women, who were not constricted by the Cult of Domesticity, found opportunities in the new factories, mills and shops created by commerce and the Industrial Revolution. The Antebellum period was a tense and formative period for the Nation and prepared the way for the modern women’s movement. Patricia Southard is an independent scholar with degrees in library & information science, gerontology, and psychology. Most recently, she worked at the Golden Gate National Recreation Area Park Archives in San Francisco. She has written and lectured on a variety of subjects including the history of libraries and archives, Holocaust survivors, aging, life transitions, and caregiving and has presented at national and international conferences. She is currently writing an annotated timeline of Women’s Rights from Colonial times, a glossary of the Women’s Movement, and related essays. Elizabeth Thacker-Estrada, a retired San Francisco Public Library branch manager, is the President of the Institute for Historical Study. She has published articles and chapters about First Ladies of the United States, including a chapter on Antebellum presidential wives in A Companion to First Ladies. She is currently writing a biography of Abigail Powers Fillmore, who founded the White House Library. In 2010, she spoke at the “Reading in the White House” symposium at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Since 2018, Ms. Southard and Ms. Thacker-Estrada have delivered a series of presentations on First Ladies and Women’s Rights from colonial times to the present. They are planning a book based on their research.