The First Ladies charts an improbable alliance between educator-activist Mary McLeod Bethune and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as they navigate the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the approach of World War II. Their private bond becomes a public force, challenging racism and sexism while revealing the personal costs of leadership. Together, they turn friendship into a lever powerful enough to move policy—and conscience.
Major Themes
Friendship Across Racial Lines
Friendship Across Racial Lines anchors the novel, showing how an intimate bond between a Black leader and a white First Lady becomes both refuge and instrument. From a tense first luncheon to public acts like holding hands at conferences or sharing meals in segregated spaces, their relationship models the integrated world they seek and turns compassion into strategy. Gestures such as “breaking bread” and “holding hands” transform private trust into visible defiance.
Civil Rights and Racial Injustice
Civil Rights and Racial Injustice exposes the daily humiliations and mortal dangers of Jim Crow—“Whites Only” signs, economic exclusion, and lynching—and makes clear that progress requires sustained, organized pressure. Eleanor’s awakening deepens as she confronts the political hedging of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on anti-lynching legislation and champions Marian Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert, while allies like Walter White channel outrage into institutional action. The Lincoln Memorial emerges as a reclaimed symbol of promise, converting memory into mandate.
The Role and Power of Women
The Role and Power of Women highlights how women wield influence from underestimated spaces. Mary builds a college from scraps and navigates philanthropists; Eleanor crafts a public platform—columns, radio, and women-only press conferences—and leverages domestic rituals into political salons, while Sara Delano Roosevelt demonstrates private matriarchal sway. Emblems like Mary’s cane and Eleanor’s typewriter capture dignity and voice as forms of power in a patriarchal arena.
Political Activism and Strategy
Political Activism and Strategy argues that conscience must be coupled with craft. Mary’s party realignment and coalition-building, Eleanor’s “accidental” introductions and headline-making Tuskegee flight, and the formation of a “Black Cabinet” show how timing, optics, and alliances convert ideals into policy—even amid FDR’s meticulous calculus and opposition from figures like Steve Woodburn. The novel demystifies change-making as a disciplined, often incremental art.
Personal Sacrifice for Public Service
Personal Sacrifice for Public Service underscores the costs of visibility and duty: reconfigured marriages, ceaseless travel, health decline, and forfeited privacy. Eleanor’s transformation of a wounded marriage into a public partnership and Mary’s relentless pace reveal how service demands what the self might otherwise refuse. Their friendship itself draws fire and risk, making loyalty part of the work.
Supporting Themes
Education as Empowerment
Education as Empowerment frames learning as liberation and infrastructure for equality. Mary’s Bethune-Cookman College equips Black students to meet—and eventually remake—an exclusionary system, while Eleanor’s teaching amplifies girls’ ambitions beyond prescribed domestic roles. Both women treat classrooms as seedbeds for civic power, feeding the civil-rights and women-in-power themes.
Identity and Dignity
Identity and Dignity centers the right to self-definition under pressure. Mary insists on titles, respect, and her heritage, refusing erasure; Eleanor sheds imposed insecurities to inhabit a global platform. Their insistence on being fully seen fortifies courage for protest, sustains sacrifice, and makes their friendship a mutual affirmation against a culture of diminishment.
Theme Interactions
- Friendship Across Racial Lines → Civil Rights and Racial Injustice: Intimacy converts sympathy into urgency, turning principle into policy.
- The Role and Power of Women → Political Activism and Strategy: Underestimation becomes leverage; parlors, letters, and teas operate as parallel power corridors.
- Personal Sacrifice ↔ Friendship Across Racial Lines: Loyalty demands risk—social censure for Eleanor, strategic exposure for Mary—yet yields courage and resolve.
- Civil Rights and Racial Injustice ↔ Political Activism and Strategy: Moral necessity collides with electoral arithmetic (FDR), requiring optics, coalitions, and persistence.
- Education as Empowerment → Civil Rights and Women’s Power: Schools cultivate the competence and confidence that make advocacy durable.
- Identity and Dignity → All Themes: Self-respect stabilizes action, ensuring tactics do not eclipse purpose.
Character Embodiment
Mary McLeod Bethune Mary embodies strategic courage and educational uplift. As organizer, fundraiser, and coalition-builder, she fuses dignity with pragmatism, translating lived injustice into policy aims and modeling how institutional power can emerge from community roots.
Eleanor Roosevelt Eleanor personifies awakening turned advocacy. She transforms social access into a platform for the marginalized, reframing the First Lady’s role from ceremonial to catalytic while accepting personal and political costs to align power with principle.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt FDR represents the friction between moral ambition and political survival. His incrementalism forces Mary and Eleanor to refine tactics, illustrating how activists must navigate—and pressure—executive caution to achieve change.
Walter White White stands for institutionalized civil-rights advocacy, converting outrage into organized campaigns. His partnership with Mary and access through Eleanor show how insider channels and outside pressure can reinforce each other.
Sara Delano Roosevelt Sara manifests private, matriarchal power: influential, often invisible, and occasionally pivotal. Her presence illustrates how familial hierarchies can constrain or enable women’s public agency.
Steve Woodburn Woodburn personifies backlash and obstruction, sharpening the novel’s stakes. His resistance clarifies that progress invites counter-mobilization—and that strategy must anticipate and outmaneuver it.