But Edith Wilson was never elected President. In fact, when her husband Woodrow Wilson was first elected in 1912, women couldn’t even vote for another eight years. But a series of events—most notably her husband’s illnesses—catapulted her into a role that made her, de facto, America’s first female president.
Early in his second term, President Wilson led the United States into World War I. Edith—the President’s second wife—used her role as First Lady to advise her husband, attend key war strategy meetings and become her husband’s closest advisor. After the war, she went with the President to the peace negotiations at Versailles and helped him sell the idea of the League of Nations to a skeptical American public. It was on a “whistle-stop” tour of the nation to promote the League that Wilson fell seriously ill. Soon after, he suffered a debilitating stroke.
This is when Edith stepped in and began to “manage” the President’s affairs. This took the form of denying access to the President—even to his own Cabinet members. She also completely controlled the flow of information in and out of the president’s bedroom—and decided what the president should and should not see. In her autobiography, she stated, “To achieve anything amidst such distractions called for the most rigid rationing of time.”
Edith Wilson claimed that she never made any critical policy decisions, but even she called her role “my one-year and five-month long stewardship” of the presidency. Most historians agree that Edith’s role went far beyond “stewardship”. The consensus is that Edith was—essentially—serving as President of the United States until her husband’s term officially expired in March of 1921. Edith Wilson lived forty more years—and even got to attend the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961. She died later that year, without any acknowledgment of her role as—functionally—America’s first female president.