Description The little-known story of remarkable First Lady Sarah Polk--a brilliant master of the art of high politics and a crucial but unrecognized figure in the history of American feminism.
Comprehensive, nuanced, and brimming with invaluable insight, Lady First is a revelation of our eleventh First Lad.
But her own legacy, which profoundly transformed the South, continues to endure.
Sarah Polk\'s life spanned nearly the entirety of the 19th-century.
And in the late nineteenth-century, she became a celebrity among female Christian temperance reformers, while she struggled to redeem her husband\'s tarnished political legacy.
During the Civil War, she operated on behalf of the Confederacy even though she claimed to be neutral.
She banned dancing and hard liquor from the White House, but did more entertaining than any of her predecessors.
While her marriage to James was one of equals, she firmly opposed the feminist movement\'s demands for what she perceived to be far-reaching equality.
Lady First also shines a light on Sarah\'s many layers and contradictions.
And we meet many of the enslaved men and women whose difficult labor made Sarah\'s political success possible.
We watch as she exercises truly extraordinary power as First Lady: quietly manipulating elected officials, shaping foreign policy, and directing a campaign in support of America\'s expansionist war against Mexico.
Polk, ascend to the White House.
We see Sarah as the daughter of a frontiersman who raised her to discuss politics and business with men; we see the savvy and charm she brandished in order to help her brilliant but unlikeable husband, James K.
Greenberg brings Sarah\'s story into vivid focus.
Now, in her riveting biography, Amy S.
Yet, while history remembers the women of the convention, it has all but forgotten Sarah Polk.
C.
While the Woman\'s Rights convention was taking place at Seneca Falls in 1848, First Lady Sarah Childress Polk was wielding influence unprecedented for a woman in Washington, D.
Description The little-known story of remarkable First Lady Sarah Polk--a brilliant master of the art of high politics and a crucial but unrecognized figure in the history of American feminism
