Ladies: A Conjecture of Personalities
Feather Schwartz Foster
(Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
2003 Publish America
ISBN: 1592863612

First Ladies from Martha Washington to Mamie Eisenhower tell their own stories. Or to be more exact, whatever they want -- in their own words & in their own styles.

Ladies: A Conjecture of Personalities by Feather Schwartz Foster is a book of voices crossing boundaries between fact, conjecture, & most importantly, centuries. Through dialog boxes, the Ladies talk to each other across eternity.

“It's chatty & catty; fun & informative.”

Senior Reviewer Dr. Alma Bond writes:

When I first picked up Ladies: A Conjecture of Personalities, I didn't expect too much. I thought, “how can anyone take seriously a writer whose first name is Feather?” I was wrong. As I got into the book, I found myself enjoying it. By the time it was finished, I loved it! I found out that Feather Schwartz Foster is no lightweight, but a serious historical scholar with a terrific sense of humor! The name is a ruse, I decided, to throw us off the truth & disguise her true identity. Fortunately, I was not fooled for long.

Ladies: A Conjecture of Personalities is a work of fiction. It is purely conjecture based on historical fact; a book of voices that were seldom heard during their lifetimes, & have been submerged in historical neglect. Ms. Foster has attempted in her own inimitable manner to bring them back from oblivion. Each Lady has her say, with others contributing their thoughts in dialog boxes, as topics arise that interest them. It is an original & clever way of bringing together isolated historical facts. Foster has tried (& succeeded in) giving readers a portrait of the uniqueness of these women, their individual styles, & their distinctive ways of expressing themselves.

Seventeen ladies lost children, four had husbands who were assassinated, another five survived assassination attempts. It is interesting to read how the ladies handled these tragedies. Some dwelt on them, some glossed them over, & some avoided the references entirely. For example, a few, like Jane Apppleton Pierce & Mary Todd Lincoln, never recovered from their grief, while others, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, used the tragedies in their lives as impetus for further development.

The book brings to life all the First Ladies between Martha Washington & Mamie Doud Eisenhower, & throws in comments by modern First Ladies from Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy through Hillary Rodham Clinton, for good measure. Except for a few beloved First Ladies, i.e. Mrs. Kennedy & Mrs. Roosevelt, I, for one, knew very little about them. Foster's book has changed that. Each lady speaks in her own voice, so that one often knows which lady is speaking without being told. It is quite a tour de force on the part of Ms. Foster to develop 29 major characters along with the modern First Ladies whose voices are heard only in their comments, without having them mixed up in the minds of the readers.

What a delightful way to learn history! For example, I learned that The White House used to be an open house for any “well-behaved, properly dressed people” who wanted to drop into “the President's house” & chat. This continued until Hoover's election in 1929, when the White House became too unwieldy & posed serious security problems. According to “Lou Hoover”, they then ended all “open houses”. The “good old days” had something to say for themselves.

Speaking of Lou Henry Hoover, I never had the slightest interest in her, & couldn't have told you her first name. To my surprise, I discovered that she was an educated woman, a serious scholar, & one easily able to handle all the ceremonial & functional duties that most of the other Ladies whined about. She was graduated from Stanford University as a degreed geologist, at a time when few women went to college. Hoover was a mining engineer & traveled all over the world to practice his profession. Lou went along with two babies in tow, & helped him in his work, drafting reports & analyses. She became the intermediary for the “native” contractors, making sure things were done promptly, properly, & as inexpensively as possible. Later she translated an ancient mining treatise from its original Latin. The book was published & actually became a “best seller”! Although both of their names were listed as co-authors, she had done most of the work. So he “let” her keep the royalties. During the war, the Germans had decimated Belgium. Lou went on a speaking tour of the United States & raised more than $200.000 -- in 1916! The Hoovers made an excellent team & established a true partnership. Lou Hoover is someone I would have liked to have known. I never cared much for Herbert Hoover, but reading about his warm & successful marriage made me think he couldn't have been all that bad.

Another interesting relatively unknown First Lady was Grace Goodhue Coolidge. Most of us know Calvin Coolidge as a taciturn, silent man, but I had not realized that he probably wouldn't have gotten elected if his vivacious, outgoing wife had not been so loved by his constituents. “Where Calvin was dour,” she ‘said’, “I smiled; where he was taciturn, I was loquacious; where he was ill-at-ease, I exuded the confidence of a person with absolutely no agenda. And where he was "Calvin Who?" I was that delightful Mrs. Coolidge.” She lived on quietly in Northampton, Massachusetts for nearly thirty years after her husband died. His death freed her to try new things. She flew in an airplane, went to Europe, spent time with her son & his family, revived an old interest in the hard-of-hearing & became a trustee for the Clarke School. She lived every day optimistically, pleasantly, & as productively as her health allowed. She sounds like a delightful person, in contrast to her “dour” husband.

Perhaps the most revealing story is that of Mary Todd Lincoln. It is a “known fact” of history that Mrs. Lincoln was insane. This book casts doubt upon that verdict. She is also remembered as quite plump. That is not correct. Although she had a round face, she was five feet three inches tall & at her heaviest weighed 130 pounds. She suffered from terrible migraine headaches, & she did have a temper. Also she liked to shop. None of which sounds like psychosis, or many more of us would be considered crazy. After her husband was murdered, life as Mrs. Lincoln knew it, was over. She had two surviving sons, Robert & Tad. Robert had to assume full responsibility for the funeral, when his mother, unlike Mrs. Kennedy in similar circumstances, took to her bed. That's when he stopped being the “son” & became the “father”. When he married, the women didn't get along, & Mary & Robert became estranged. Her emotional health, which always had been frail, deteriorated even more. The story that most often is told to prove her incompetency is that one night, when she was staying alone in a Chicago hotel, she heard a noise outside of her rooms, so she opened her door to check it out. She was wearing her nightgown & a shawl. Robert was notified & decided that she was “exposing herself in a near state of undress”. This was deemed of sufficient cause to have her put away in a private sanitarium. She says, “What was I supposed to do? Quickly put on my corset and crinolines and finest ball gown to open the door and investigate?” After she was pronounced “cured”, she spent her remaining days with her sister, waiting for death to unite her with her loved ones.

Mrs. Lincoln ballyhoos another well-known story. It is generally believed that President Lincoln spent his life yearning for a purported “lost love” with an Ann Rutledge. Ms. Foster, in the guise of Mrs. Lincoln, says that Rutledge never even existed, or if she did, was merely a passing acquaintance of no significance. “And that's the truth,” comments Mrs. Lincoln, in ending her story.

I have read another First Ladies book, America's First Ladies by Betty Boyd Caroli. It is a coffee table book, with sumptuous photographs that are lovely to look at. Yet I much prefer Feather Schwartz Foster's less pretentious Ladies: A Conjecture of Personalities. It is clever, original, interesting, & even humorous, & left me feeling that I had learned a great deal about our First Ladies in a most pleasant manner. The book is recommended for all who like biography, history, mild humor, & clever writing.

About Feather Schwartz Foster: After spending three decades in advertising & public relations, & writing more than a dozen children's musicals, she has put her long-time hobby as a presidential historian to productive use, drawing on a personal library of more than 1000 president-related volumes.
(11/23/03)

Dr. Alma Bond
2003©Alma Bond
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

Reviewer's Bio:
Dr. Alma Halbert Bond is the author of ten published books, including:
The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle;
The Tree That Could Fly;
Tales Of Psychology (2004);
I Married Dr. Jekyll And Woke Up Mrs. Hyde (2000);
The Autobiography Of Maria Callas, A Novel (1998);
On Becoming A Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery (1994);
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1998);
Profiles of Key West (1996).

She recently recorded her new manuscript, Old Age Is A Terminal Illness, as an audio book.

She is also the author of a just published children's picture book called The Tree That Could Fly.

Dr. Bond teaches Psychology & Writing online at WriterSchool.