In 2023, I met Edith Wilson, Sarah Polk, Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt courtesy of their biographers Rebecca Boggs Roberts, Amy S. Greenberg and Charlotte Gray.

Women have written books as far back as the 16th and 17th centuries, but these are exciting times for women biographers, like these three, who have reached beyond writing about famous men and are now explaining the roles women play in history. 

“Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson” by Roberts is a new and compelling look at one of the nation’s “most influential and complicated women.”

President Woodrow Wilson began dating his second wife – Edith Bolling Galt, a widow who was 16 years younger – in March 1915, eight months after his first wife Ellen had died at the White House of Bright’s disease. 

Eight months later, they were married at Edith’s home, a four-story, Washington duplex.

“Much was made of” the assertion that Edith was a ninth-generation descendant of Pocahontas, Roberts wrote. 

“Standing a statuesque five-foot-nine,” Edith’s appearance often made her the center of attention, and the president took notice. “Who is that beautiful lady?” he reportedly asked when he first saw the widow of jeweler Norman Galt drive by in her small electric car.

Roberts traces Edith’s relationship with Wilson and provides new insights into her role as gatekeeper and de facto president following her husband’s stroke in 1919.  

“Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk” by Greenberg is another insightful biography.

I purchased it because Sarah’s husband, James K. Polk, was president the year Iowa became a state. There’s no mention of Iowa in the book, but it is a captivating story about how she used her education, savvy and charm to mold “her brilliant, but unlikable husband” into a president. 

Both Sarah Polk and Edith Wilson were, like Abigail Adams and her daughter-in-law Louisa Adams, presidents’ wives who were in many ways more intelligent with better political instincts than their husbands. 

Born in 1803, Sarah Childress’s family socialized with Andrew Jackson, who “encouraged teenaged James to court Sarah.” Polk’s close association with Jackson earned him the nickname “Young Hickory,” but Greenberg makes clear it was Sarah who got James into politics and who adeptly managed his career from behind the scenes.

“Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt” by Gray is a twin biography of the mothers of two of the most powerful men of the 20th century. 

Both women were born in 1854 to well-to-do New York families whose travel across Europe and New York occasionally converged, although there is no evidence the two women met. 

Jennie was born in Brooklyn to a father who worked on Wall Street “making and losing fortunes, usually through speculation and short-selling stocks.” She was named for her father’s “latest passion – the superstar soprano Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale,” Gray wrote.

As a girl, Jennie traveled widely in Europe with her mother and three sisters, establishing a pattern that she and her many lovers would follow. At age 20, she married Lord Randolph Churchill, who was title rich and asset poor. Winston was soon born and mostly raised by a nanny. 

Sara was born in the Hudson Valley to an old-money family that “could claim several forebears who arrived on the Mayflower in 1621.” Her father, Warren Delano, increased the family’s already sizable fortune “in the lucrative China (opium) trades,” and continued to grow it by investing in U.S. industries, according to Gray. 

As a child, Sara spent time in China and Europe, where most of her formal education took place, returning to New York in 1870. In 1880, she met James Roosevelt, a widower twice her age, and 10 weeks later they were engaged and soon married.Two years later, Franklin arrived, and he was the central focus for the remainder of Sara’s life. 

Jennie and Sara were very different mothers; Jennie was mostly interested in her own affairs, but also encouraged and directed her sometimes volatile son, while Sara was devoted solely to her only child.