A Model of Conservative Womanhood

Amy S. Greenberg opens her excellent biography of Sarah Childress Polk, wife of President James K. Polk, by contrasting two notable events of 1848: the Seneca Falls Convention and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Greenberg suggests that the treaty, which ended the War with Mexico, was by far the more momentous of the two for both free and enslaved American women. The treaty expanded U.S. territory and fueled the political clash over slavery; for First Lady Sarah Polk, it was the premier achievement of her husband's presidency.

Greenberg's biography establishes Sarah Polk as the first woman in the White House to be her husband's political partner. With James, she was an ardent Democrat and expansionist. As Greenberg argues, her practice of deference to male authority allowed her to maintain her reputation as a lady while still wielding power in the White House. Her outward acceptance of female submission has also contributed to historians' neglect in favor of the women (and men) at Seneca Falls. In advance of the upcoming anniversary of the 19^th Amendment in 2020, Greenberg offers a critique of the field of women's history and its focus on suffragists and other activists. She directs readers toward women like Sarah Polk, who embraced their subordination within the patriarchal family in order to influence politics. For Greenberg, Sarah Polk's significance rests in her conservative womanhood, which was inseparable from her Democratic politics. In our polarized political moment, Greenberg shows that gender, race, and class identities have long divided American political parties.¹

Greenberg's book is the first scholarly biography of Sarah Polk, whose little surviving correspondence is scattered. Most secondary sources rely on fiction and myth. In Greenberg's determination, Anson Nelson, vice president of the Tennessee Historical Society, and his wife Fanny, who regularly visited and interviewed Sarah Polk in her last years, compiled the most valuable resource, Memorials of Sarah Childress Polk: Wife of the Eleventh President of the United States, published in 1892. As Sarah wished, the Nelsons portrayed her as an exemplary Christian woman, devoted to her husband and country.

Of course, Sarah Polk was not the first woman to engage in Washington politics. Catherine Allgor's Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (2002) examines how women dominated life in the new capital, hosting receptions, making social calls, and securing patronage positions for friends and allies. They regularly attended Congressional sessions, following the debates from their seats in the ladies' gallery. During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson rejected this female influence as dangerously aristocratic, but women resumed their networking after he left office. Dolley Madison, the subject of a biography by Allgor (A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation, 2007), developed parlor politics into an art form, turning the White House into a social space that facilitated political relationships and deals. It should come as no surprise that Sarah Polk befriended Dolley Madison soon after moving to Washington, and invited her predecessor to all White House dinners and events. Together, the two women achieved Dolley's dream of a Washington Monument. Dolley Madison also defended Sarah Polk's practice of allowing her nieces to return social calls, which would otherwise overtake all the first lady's time and energy. In Allgor's view, the presidency of Andrew Jackson, which elevated the common man, marked the end of women's reign in Washington, DC. Greenberg indicates that it only took on a different, more deferential and Democratic form, in Sarah Polk, who shared her husband's partisan Jacksonian politics.

Sarah Polk was raised to be a woman of substance. She was born in 1803, the daughter of Elizabeth Whitsitt and Joel Childress. Thanks to her parents' wealth, made in land, cotton, and slaves, and their republican commitment to female education, Sarah received an education that rivaled those of her feminist counterparts such...