Six portraits of “powerful” women, each in his own way, to revisit the influence of First Ladies, at the time of #Metoo.
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Difficult, for a series on the first ladies of the United States not to start with Michelle Obama. In the lineage of the wives of President, the former lawyer occupies a monumental place: she was the first descendant of slaves to access, in 2008, at the White House, not to ensure the maintenance, but for the to occupy in the mistress of places.
So much for the marble statue. With regard to political influence, the collection of six portraits (out of the forty-seven First Ladies who held the job – De Martha Washington in Melania Trump) offered by TV story every Sunday until December 26, is contrasted . With an interrogation: what is the real weight that the wife of the US President can have on the conduct of his or her mandate (s)?
Mixing interviews, testimonials and archive images, the directors Liz Mermin, Kim Duke and Katharine English put forward some of those who have had a political or societal influence, grouped two by two, as in resonance. Without concealing the curse that attaches across the Atlantic to the first ladies, suspected of being too ambitious, expensive, “Maniganieres” …
Sunday, December 12, Michelle Obama and Nancy Reagan – His famous amazed look when looking at her husband, Ronald – open the series. Sunday 19 will be associated Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Two “powerful women”. “Vote Clinton, you’ll have two for the price of one!” Lance Bill Clinton in the middle of the campaign for his election, in 1992. His wife, Hillary, will be the only First Lady to briguer the White House, beaten. by Donald Trump in 2016.
A real pioneer
But it is Eleanor Roosevelt who appears, finally, like the real pioneer. From March 1933 to April 1945, she will play a leading role in the progressive orientation of her husband’s presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (“FDR”). This, in full period of war and global economic upheaval. “The largest political partnership in American history”, says a commentator.
Feminist, Antiracist, Antifascist, editorialist at the Women’s Democratic News, she holds the first press conference that had never allowed a First Lady. The head of the FBI Edgar Hoover is a 3,500 pages file on it! And Klu Klux Klan puts his head at $ 25,000. “FDR”, disabled by polio, sends it on tour in the country to “sell” its New Deal, its plan against the Great Depression. He knows she loves – and know – talk to the Americans. She receives tens of thousands of letters a month.
Painful shadow to his political commitment, she discovered, even before arriving at the White House, that her husband had an affair with the secretary she herself engaged, Lucy Mercer. For its part, it links intimately with one of the few star journalists of the time, Lorena Hickok.
First-scale political figure to be made of radio, she holds her weekly column on December 7, 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the evening of this historic day, it is the voice of Eleanor Roosevelt which is the first to be heard by the Americans. An unprecedented event for a First Lady.