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First Ladies
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“[On being a First Lady:] You will find that you are no longer clothing yourself, you are dressing a public monument.”
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“[The President of the United States] gets off easier than his wife, to whom we traditionally assign ceremonial tasks so we can scorn her for being frivolous — when we're not complaining that she has no business interesting herself in substantive state matters because nobody elected her to office.”
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“No matter how different our First Ladies have been — and as individual women they have ranged from recluses to vibrant hostesses to political manipulators on a par with Machiavelli — they have all shared the unnerving experience of facing a job they did not choose.”
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“First ladies are doing a lot. But the job remains undefined, frequently misunderstood, and subject to political attacks far nastier in some ways than those any President has ever faced.”
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“I will tell you one thing. They will never drag me out like a little old widow like they did Mrs. Wilson when President Wilson died. I will never be used that way.”
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“So many people, you know, hit the White House with their dictaphone running. I never even kept a journal. I thought, 'I want to live my life, not record it.'”
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“The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse. Would you notify the telephone operators and everyone else that I'm to be known simply as Mrs. Kennedy and not as First Lady.”
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“Being first lady is the hardest unpaid job in the world.”
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“The first lady is, and always has been, an unpaid public servant elected by one person, her husband.”
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“I have learned something about the job of being the President's wife. She is not chosen by anyone except her husband and she really has no obligations except to him.”
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“First ladies throughout our history have been expected to be adoring wives and perfect mothers ...”
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“I don't think I was as bad, or as extreme in my power or my weakness, as I was depicted — especially during the first year, when people thought I was overly concerned with trivialities, and the final year, when some of the same people were convinced I was running the show.”