First Lady: The Life of Lucy Webb Hayes (review)

90CIVIL WAR HISTORY lacks a bibliography (it does have endnotes) . Most disconcerting is the style, which is a combination of present and past tenses that makes reading sometimes difficult. However, this book does not pretend to be a history monograph. It provides a personal view of the war and adds to the history of Texas's participation. It is an interesting book, although some historians may feel it lacking in certain areas. William h. graves University of Northern Iowa First Lady: The Life of Lucy Webb Hayes. By Emily Apt Geer. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, 1984. Pp. vii, 330. $19.95.) The purpose of this biography appears to be twofold: to fill the void that exists between earlier studies of the wives of former presidents, such as those of Mary Todd Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt; and to present the wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes as a transitional figure between her passive and almost invisible predecessors and her more active and visible successors. The author is convinced that the Lucy Webb Hayes that emerges is representative of the expanding roles that female public figures began to exhibit in the late nineteenth century. Geer has made extensive use of the letters, diaries, and journals of the Hayes family, especially the Lucy Webb Hayes papers (1841-90) kept in the Rutherford B. Hayes Library in Fremont, Ohio. The latter collection includes speeches, correspondence, memoirs, tributes, scrapbooks, account books, photographs, and even White House menus. "No scrap of paper seemed too trivial to be saved; even shopping lists were preserved by the Hayes family" (311). Geer informs us that Lucy Webb Hayes was well educated (Cincinnati Wesleyan Female College), supportive (of her husband's military and political careers and of the activities of her children), compassionate (a lifelong concern for veterans, orphans and the poor) , courageous and self-reliant (losing three of her eight children at early ages and facing civilian-family problems during the Civil War period), and religious and moral (active in the Woman's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church and in establishing a temperance policy for White House social functions). However, it was as First Lady that Lucy Webb Hayes left her mark. In supervising the many White House activities, such as afternoon receptions , state dinners, and visits to educational and correctional institutions , she established herself as the nation's official hostess and the White House once again became the social center of Washington. Her visibility in this role placed her as a member of an emerging group of active, public female figures during the late nineteenth century. Yet, her domestic character and her firm belief in the role of the supportive wife also BOOK REVIEWS91 trapped her in the passive, non-public female world of the past. Throughout her life, Lucy Webb Hayes remained consistently noncommittal on the more controversial issues facing women—on encouragement for business enterprises by women, on woman suffrage, and on professional education for women. Geer's biography is well written, and she has delved into materials that have not previously been fully utilized. However, there is much about this biography that, at times, tends to worship the unsung heroine. There is also much about the lengthy accounts of the social life and the travel and vacation itinerary of the Hayes family that seems to deaden psychological insight and trivialize what must have been a time of severe tension for such a woman caught between two worlds. The reader is left wishing that the author could have peered between the lines of her note cards. Steven L. Piott University of Wisconsin Center-Marshfield Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1890. By Peter J. Rachleff. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Pp. xi, 249. $34.95.) Peter Rachleff presents a history of the organizational and ideological development of the black laboring community in postbellum Richmond. Not surprisingly, he finds that racial separation characterized most aspects of ordinary working-class life. Yet, as he focuses on black laborers' quest for an enduring institutional vehicle for their activism, he finds that black and white workers cooperated in the short-lived working-class reform movement of...