María Eva Duarte de Perón was born in Los Toldos, Argentina. Her parents were not married, and her father had another family. Her legal and societal status as an illegitimate child followed her in her life. Her mother struggled financially, and the situation worsened after her father died in a car accident when she was seven years old. In 1930, the family moved to Junín, where she developed her love for the stage. She began to perform in various community theater productions and aspired to become an actress. At 15, she ran away from home to Buenos Aires to pursue her dream. Soon after her arrival, she joined a theater company and landed numerous radio parts. In 1937, at 18, she had her film debut and later acted in a series of B-movies. In 1942, she signed a five-year contract to participate in a radio program called Great Women of History to voice prominent historical women, such as Queen Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great. By the age of 23, she was the highest-paid radio actress in the nation, earning six thousand pesos a month. This year, she co-founded the Argentine Radio Syndicate, a union of broadcast performers, and was elected its president. In 1944, she was invited by the Secretary of Labor, Juan Perón, to a benefit gala to support the victims of an earthquake that occurred in San Juan. From the moment they met, they were unseparated, establishing their marriage a year later. She was 24, and he was 49. In 1946, her husband, who gained political power and support from the public, especially after being arrested by his political opponents, decided to run for president. She was a leading figure in her husband’s campaign, using her radio program to dramatize his accomplishments and traveling with him throughout the country. Her approachable attitude toward the people and empathy for the working class increased his popularity when he was elected president. Perón did not hold an official position in the government, but she was the de facto minister of health and labor, which allowed her to increase the wages of workers’ unions. She used her position as the first lady to advocate for various causes, improving the living conditions of the poor and women’s suffrage. Thanks to her effort, Argentinian women were granted equal political rights and universal suffrage in 1947. Two years later, she founded the Female Peronist Party, the first large female political party in the country. Perón also founded and headed the Eva Perón Foundation. Supported by the government, unions, and private businesses, the foundation established thousands of schools, hospitals, elderly housing, and orphanages. In 1950, 31 years old Perón was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer. Despite her health condition, she continued to be active in both philanthropy and politics, and in 1951 she was chosen by her husband to run for vice president. The opposition from the military and upper-class citizens led her to decline her candidacy. Despite the various medical procedures she went through, her cancer has spread, and she died at the age of 33. Three years after her death, Perón’s husband got overthrown from the presidency, and her embalmed body was stolen and hidden in Italy under the name “María Maggi.” Sixteen years later, her body was exhumed and sent to her husband’s exile home in Spain. In 1973, he returned to Argentina, serving as president until his death a year later. His third wife, Isabel Perón, returned Evita Perón’s body to Argentina and displayed it beside her husband. Later, her remains were reburied in the Duarte family crypt. Read more...

Mary Ann Todd Lincoln was born in Lexington, Kentucky, as the fourth of seven children of a wealthy family, who had a big household and owned slaves. Mary was well educated, learned French, drama, and music. When she was 6 years old, her mother passed away, and her father remarried not long after. Mary and her stepmother didn’t get along, and at the age of 21, she moved to Springfield, IL, to live with her older sister. Her wit and outgoing attitude attracted several admirers, among them was Abraham Lincoln. Mary’s family did not approve the match since Lincoln was 9 years older than her, came from a poor background, and had little education, but they still got married. Mary supported her husband’s career as a lawyer and a politician, even when he was absent for months, and she had to take care of their four children by herself. She helped to promote his public life, hosting events, and giving strategic advice. During the Civil War, she remained a Unionist, though her family supported the south and several of her half-brothers served in the Confederate Army. Mary accompanied her husband on military visits to the battlefields, visited wounded soldiers and wrote letters for them to send to their families. Despite that, at the White House she had a bad reputation and considered outspoken and lavish spender. Mary was holding President Lincoln’s hand at the Ford’s Theatre when he was assassinated on April 14th, 1865. As a widow, she returned to Chicago to live with her children, while lobbying to get a pension from the Congress, claiming that she deserves one just as much as other soldiers’ widows. At the age of 53, she lost a third son (after two died in their childhood), and suffered from depression, mood swings, and paranoid thoughts, until her eldest son sent her to a mental institution, where she tried to commit suicide. After she was released from the hospital, Mary spent few years traveling throughout Europe, but when her health got worse, she returned to the US to live with her sister until she died at the age of 64. Read more...

Hillary Rodham Clinton started her journey into US politics as a determined student activist at Yale Law School, where she was marked as a passionate public speaker. There she also met her future husband Bill Clinton, whose political career will be entwined into hers. Her footstep into the national arena was when at the young age of 26 she was appointed as a member of the Legal Services Corporation board for the post-Watergate investigation. Before launching her diplomatic career, she delivered a legendary speech at the 1995 United Nations World Congress on Women in Beijing, which put women’s rights on the global agenda. That was a landmark in a long path of her activity to advance women. In the national arena, she is credited with promoting protections against domestic abuse, improving healthcare for women, and supporting equal pay policies. On the international scale, she established the first federal Office of Global Women’s Issues. Nonetheless, her activity was also criticized for focusing on white, middle-class, and educated women. After her husband was elected as US President, she juggled between the supportive-partner role, various scandals, and her own professional path. Clinton was elected twice as a New York Senator – the only time in history when a First Lady serves in public office while in the White House. After losing the presidential battle to Barack Obama in 2008, she was appointed as his Secretary of State. In her role as “Ambassador of US” she traveled to 112 countries, more than any other secretary of state. In 2016 she became the first woman to win a major US party’s presidential nomination and was the first female to run for the presidency. At the end of a heroic campaign, Clinton lost the elections to Donald Trump. Read more...

Born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, she grew up in the South Side of Chicago – sharing one attic, divided by wood paneling, with her parents and a brother. She was an excellent student, who skipped the second grade, enrolled into a gifted class in elementary school, and graduated as the salutatorian of her class from Whitney Young High School, Chicago’s first magnet high school. After high school, she studied at Princeton and later at Harvard Law School, where she became more aware of discrimination based on socioeconomic status, gender, and race. She joined demonstration for hiring professors from minority groups and worked for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, aiding low-income tenants with housing cases. At the age of 25, she sat in a 47th-floor office, working for a Chicago-based prestigious law firm, a job she hated for it felt like “document production.” There she met her future husband, Barack Obama, whom she mentored as a summer associate. As her husband climbed to the US presidency, she left corporate law for public service practice, working for Chicago’s City Hall and the University of Chicago and raising their two daughters. After her husband won the presidential campaign on January 20th, 2009, he became the first black US president, and she became the first black first lady of the US. During her time in the White House(2009-2017), she became a role model for women and an icon of “relatability” – making her position less official and distant from the public, using familiar language, and expressing her opinions openly, even if controversial. She also advocated for healthy nutrition and lifestyle, mainly for children. As a First Lady, she became one of the most popular women in US history, and in 2018, she was ranked the most admired woman of the year in Gallup’s Most Admired List and stayed at the top for several years. The post-White House years secured her status as an icon. She published a memoir, “Becoming,” which was the best-selling book of 2018. In it, she wrote about professional and personal matters, including the fertility treatments the couple went through to conceive their two daughters, and courageously revealed her feelings of being a ‘damaged woman’ because of her difficulties to conceive. By that, she brought great awareness to a sensitive subject that causes many women great pain, along with the political issues of the cultural and social definitions of fulfillment as a woman first and most by becoming a mother. Read more...

Born as Martha Wayles in Charles City, Virginia, and was the only child of wealthy plantation owners; her father was an attorney and slave trader; her mother died three weeks after giving birth to her. At 18, she married her first husband, Bathurst Skelton, who passed away two years afterward. In the same year, she met her third cousin, Thomas Jefferson, and the couple got married six months after her son from her previous marriage had passed away at the age of 4. After Martha’s father died, the Jeffersons inherited more than 100 slaves, among them was Martha’s half-sister Sally Hemings, who later allegedly became Jefferson’s mistress. During the American Revolution, Jefferson was the governor of Virginia, and Martha became the state’s First Lady. As such, she encouraged the women of Virginia to raise money and donate supplies for the Continental Army, and they managed to gain about $300,000. Martha always suffered from poor health, and died at the age of 33, probably due to Gestational diabetes or labor complications. 19 years later, her husband became the 3rd president of the United States. Read more...

Born in 1731, as the eldest of eight children of the wealthy Dandridge family, the owners of “Chestnut Grove” plantation in the British colony, Province of Virginia. Martha was well educated and learned to read and write so she would be adequate for running the estates and family affairs if needed. At the age of 18, she was wedded by her parents to Daniel Parke Custis, another wealthy plantation owner who was 20 years her senior. They had four children, though only two survived past childhood. Custis died seven years later, which left Martha one of the wealthiest women and a widow at the age of 25.   At 28, Martha married George Washington and moved with her two children to Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon. Soon George became politically involved in the upcoming revolution, and Martha entertained in their estate a company who came to be known as the Founding Father of the USA.   When the American Independence War began, George was the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, and Martha spent the winters with him in the camps, living simply and hosting other officers’ wives encouraging them to take part in the war efforts.   When the war ended, George Washington was being urged to take the office of the president of the newly formed USA, but Martha objected the idea and so she didn’t attend his inauguration. Despite her objection, she stood by his side, known as “Lady Washington”, as before, for her etiquette and hospitality, and so laid the standards for what would later become the role of “The First Lady.”   Martha Washington died three years after her husband, at the age of 70, and was buried next to him in the Mount Vernon estate to this day. Read more...

Born in New York City to an affluent and politically dominant family, she became an orphan at the age of 8 and was raised by her grandmother. At 15 she was sent to London to study languages and arts in a private school, where her headmistress Marie Souvestre inspired her political and social awareness. After returning to New York, she married her distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who later became the 32nd president of The United States. By his side, she was a politically active First Lady for no less than 12 years. The couple had six children. In addition to advising her husband in his political career, she was an active member of various organizations promoting equal rights for women, racial and social justice. Her vast activity is said to have been boosted after finding out about her husband’s affair: she decided to stay by his side but availed herself to independent activism, and her own affairs with both women and men. She was the author of several books, contributed content to many publications and radio shows, including the popular newspaper column “My Day,” which was published six days a week for 26 years, and delivered many speeches during her nationwide travels. At 62 she was appointed to the first US delegation to the United Nations, where she was central in creating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Until her death, she was involved in policy making, notably chairing the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Read more...

Jackie Kennedy, aka Jackie O, was born as Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in 1929 to a wealthy New York family. She started writing and publishing at an early age, and at 12 she won the Vogue magazine contest to work in Paris, but had to decline it due to her mother’s opposition. A few years later, she lived for a period in Paris while studying for her B.A. in French Literature. At 22 she started working for Washington Times-Herald, publishing a column of photo-interviews with city residents. Among her interviewees was John F. Kennedy (JFK), whom she married at the age of 24 years old. In 1960 John was elected as the 35th US president, and 31 years old Jacky Kennedy became one of the nations’ youngest First Ladies. Her time in the White House was marked by high publicity. She restored the residency and later hosted a televised tour, which was watched by 80 million viewers and won her an Emmy Award. Her main contribution was in raising the recognition of the arts in the White House – hosting jazz and ballet performances, appointing the first in-house curator and establishing a Fine Arts Committee. She also made a notable contribution to the fashion world, presenting new trends such as the pillbox hat, oversize sunglasses, and headscarves. Her marriage to Kennedy was notoriously clouded by his infidelity, as was the case with her parents’ marriage. At 34 she lost both her newborn child to lung disease and her husband in a historical assassination. Five years later she married Greek Aristotle Onassis, one of the wealthiest men in the world, who was 23 years older than her. Her nickname then changed to Jackie O. She spent her last two decades as an editor in American publishing houses, and died of cancer at 64, then buried beside her first husband in Arlington National Cemetery. Read more...

Abigail Smith was born and raised in Massachusetts. Her father was a liberal minister, her mother was a member of the famous Quincy family mother, and she had two sisters. At a time when women were not allowed to receive a formal education, she was homeschooled and satisfied her appetite for knowledge at the family’s library, forming progressive views. After a two-year courtship, she married John Adams, a country lawyer, and became his closest advisor and partner. They settled in the house John had inherited from his father in Braintree, MA. When his practice expanded, John had to frequently travel while Abigail managed their finances, investments, household, and growing family. For a while, they even moved to Boston next to his practice. Between 1784 and 1788, Abigail joined John in his diplomatic missions in Paris and London. On March 4th, 1797, John became the second president of the United States, and she was the first lady. They lived in the Presidential Mansion in Philadelphia and later in the White House in Washington, DC. She was a politically active first lady, made frequent public appearances, and was involved in the decision-making process, paving the way for future first ladies to be proactive figures. When John lost presidential re-election, the family retired to Peacefield in Quincy in 1800. During his frequent travels before and during the presidency, the couple corresponded in more than 1100 letters, where Abigail demonstrated her talent for writing and opinionated spirit. In one of those letters, she urges her husband to consider women’s rights in the new legislation after independence, warning that if not given equal representation: “women will rebel.” He dismissed her suggestion by writing back that it makes him laugh, but her words “remember the ladies” became an iconic feminist slogan. Before her death, she wrote a will favoring her female relatives. It was an act of protest against the laws prohibiting married women from owning assets. Read more...