American Womanhood is Complicated. This Book Shows How Through the Media’s Intense Focus on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Book review by Stephanie K. Bohnak

In May 2023, the National First Ladies Library & Museum at the First Ladies National Historic Site in Canton, Ohio opened a new exhibit, “Beyond Camelot: The Life and Legacy of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.” Set to run through April 2024, the exhibit not only exceeded community expectations, but far exceeded even the staff’s expectations, making the featured exhibit a smash success for the organization. As the only site in the world dedicated to first ladies history, we saw over a 50% increase in visitation, much of this due to a first lady of the United States who remains as popular, as imitated and as fascinating as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Love her or hate her, JKO remains a worthy subject of investigation. Thus, Dr. Karen Dunak is no exception to this rule, challenging our popular perceptions of the 35th first lady in Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life, published November 2024.
Intensive, highly researched, and with an academic tinge, Dr. Dunak’s Our Jackie is a work that reconsiders the popular notions of womanhood throughout the mid-century and examines the media’s influence on women like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In fact, Dunak argues that during her time as first lady, JKO’s interaction with and framing by American media “reflected the opportunities available to women in public as well as the limitations they encountered.” Segmented into eight detailed chapters alongside a contextualizing introduction, prologue, and conclusion, Dr. Dunak’s work is one that also aptly leans into a burgeoning aspect of feminist historiography, one that gives historical women the same formality as male historical figures. Within her Author’s Note, she states that she is “not interested” in referring to Mrs. Onassis as just “Jackie,” as scholars would never dare to address male subjects in history by their first names. In addressing this outright, Dunak further sets the standard for how scholars should address women in history, but even more so when analyzing a first lady of the United States.
Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life further explores this subsect of women’s history and “uncovers the complicated expectation that American women contended with then and continue to navigate well into the 21st century.” Although many are familiar with the media’s fascination with the 35th first lady, Dunak’s work attempts to explore a new lens through which Americans view JKO. Our Jackie skillfully assesses the “way in which media framed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis over the course of her public life.” These assessments uncover an inherent antagonism that hyper-analyzes women’s public actions and autonomy, something especially relevant in today’s digital coverage of high-profile and political women in American society.
Rather than attempt to “reveal” her as many other scholars have done, Karen Dunak uses JKO as an anchor to further uncover what American womanhood looks like during the mid-century, arguing that “Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was a person, but she also served as a symbol of broader cultural expectations.” Within this framework, the author suggests that JKO was as complicated as the eras in which she lived very publicly, thus the media representation of her also reflects the views and “expectations assumed of and navigated by American women” for almost half of a century.
“Considerations of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in American mass media and culture suggested particular concerns about women, their place in public life, and the extent of their authority in determining how they might inhabit that space.”
—Karen M. Dunak, author
Although coverage of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was rampant during the 1960 presidential campaign, it was her rise as first lady that marked a distinct shift in her legacy. Featured in Time Magazine’s January 20, 1961 issue, the incumbent first lady was vastly aware of this shift in status; she reflected that she had thus turned into a piece of public property, stating, “It’s really frightening to lose your anonymity at age 31.” Yet despite this lack of anonymity, the future first lady was a politically savvy and bright woman who had grown astute at “gauging expectations and paving a way to do as she wished with minimum pushback.”
Skillfully straddling both the domestic and public nature of her role, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy embodied American womanhood in a unique way. Alongside being a wife, a mother, and a hostess, she also traveled independently and acted as a goodwill ambassador internationally. She also cultivated the arts and culture of Washington, D.C., and still achieved one of her most revered projects, the historic restoration of the White House.
Dr. Dunak argues that even as first lady, Kennedy became an aesthetic model to which American women aspired, writing that “media coverage of and public response to the first lady demonstrated the potential power and appeal of a public woman expertly expressing and defending distinct views on topics related to art, history, and cultural development and exchange.” In her own right, Jacqueline Kennedy navigated this space so that she could pursue her own interests and projects that not only allowed her personal autonomy, but also benefited her husband’s image and career. Thus, her ability to both serve her personal interests while still bettering someone else’s contributed to a positive media framing which permitted a nuanced understanding of womanhood in the 1960s. Although Mrs. Kennedy may have been the model for American womanhood, each step was closely chronicled; should she ever behave in a way that appeared self-serving, she drew negative media attention as many other first ladies have done as well throughout modern history.
Following the tragic assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s position as a public figure was intensified by the “specter of her husband and what his memory came to mean to the nation.” The nature of her fame became far more complicated than expected, and her life was chronicled extensively. In the months following her husband’s death, representations of the former first lady focused almost entirely on her transition from “wife to widow, on the tragedy that had befallen her, and on her efforts to soldier on for the sake of her children, her husband’s memory, and a country in mourning.” Thus, Jacqueline Kennedy never seemed to receive relief from public curiosity and media attention that had dominated her life during her White House years despite her attempts to reclaim her sense of self in the years following the assassination. As a result, public sentiment surrounding the widowed Mrs. Kennedy became increasingly critical throughout the 1960s, which Dr. Dunak argues, “revealed cultural anxiety about an independent woman dedicated to pursuits and interests beyond the familial or domestic.”
In the year following John F. Kennedy’s death, public views of his wife restrained her to that of a widow. When it appeared that she was destined to marry again (as marriage was thought to be the only avenue to true happiness for the American woman), her romantic life became a focus for mass media, and the American public appeared to believe they had a significant stake in who she was permitted to romance. Dr. Dunak suggests that despite raising her children as a single mother with means, who could come and goes as she pleased, the former “model” of womanhood “living a life according to her predilections caused pushback and concern,” especially as Mrs. Kennedy retained her independence into the late 1960s.
By the end of the decade, Jacqueline Kennedy was considered the most famous woman in the world, and media fascination with the former first lady intensified. She was “spied upon, hounded, and sometimes bullied by a demanding press and curious public.” Upon moving to New York City, it appeared that there would be no respite for the model of American womanhood, as she and her children regularly endured overeager reporters, endless letters and phone calls, and even a bomb threat to their apartment in 1965. The parade of media criticism only intensified when Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis in 1968: this “Fallen Queen’s” image was further warped as the media and public speculated about her motivation in marrying her second husband. In this sense, Dr. Dunak suggests that the competing views about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in media “reflected the divided nature of coverage received by women featured prominently in American public life.”
For guests who visited the “Beyond Camelot” exhibit at the First Ladies National Historic Site, many left with a new appreciation for this dynamic individual. Guests were surprised at how well-educated, how philanthropic Mrs. Onassis was, and more importantly, how human she was. Often, guests had been led to believe in the popular misconception that Mrs. Kennedy’s story ended when her first husband was assassinated in November 1963. Even following the death of her second husband in 1975, Mrs. Onassis was gifted with the privilege to have agency over her own life, allowing her to engage in historic preservation and driving her to an editorial career centered around her love of literature. When she died in 1994, John F. Kennedy Jr. addressed the media in saying that his mother, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis “was surrounded by her friends and her family and her books, and the people and the things that she loved. And she did it in her own way, and in her own terms,” further solidifying her legacy as an independent, educated, cultured, and creative woman.
“She often followed a path of her own choosing, enduring the ebbs and flows of assessment about her much as she did the transition from campaign wife to first lady and then beyond. Response to her may have reflected broader ideas about American womanhood. But she was just being herself.”
—Karen M. Dunak, author
Karen Dunak closes her scholarly work by identifying Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as a true icon, especially following her death. Remembered for her “grace, dignity, style, class,” the qualities most often associated with the late Mrs. Onassis are ones that reveal a public image rather than insight into the full person. Since 1960, JKO had served as a symbolic representation for what womanhood should look like, and when she died that representation grew to also resemble the nation itself in this era. Mrs. Onassis remained a symbol of the New Frontier, the “living embodiment of the Camelot ideal she had initiated” following her first husband’s death, and in her own death, was brought back to the present, which celebrated not only her fashion, but her historical and cultural contributions throughout the decades that followed her time as first lady of the United States.
It would appear that later in life, specifically throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Mrs. Onassis finally found some measure of privacy and peace. Even in her death, her wish for privacy was finally acknowledged, as her funeral was not open to the public. Yet, as someone who regularly shares the history of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis both at the First Ladies National Historic Site and on the road, I feel inclined to agree with Dr. Karen Dunak that “in so many retrospectives on her life, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is more a symbol than a woman of flesh and blood.”
Ideal for researchers in women’s history, popular cultural history, and media history, Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life is a refreshing take on the ever-famous Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, further humanizing the former first lady of the United States. Dunak's assessment of how first ladies like JKO are portrayed and treated in public media is enlightening and relevant in our contemporary understanding of what it means to be first lady of the United States and the legacies that follow, especially in modern media.