First Ladies 101: An Awakening Decades in the Making

Professor Stacy A. Cordery – eyewitness to the birth of a historical field – educates the next generation about the power and influence of presidential spouses.

Professor and author Stacy A. Cordery teaches a class on America’s first ladies at Iowa State University. (Photo courtesy of Cordery)

At the beginning of the semester, it’s not unusual for Professor Stacy A. Cordery to scan the new batch of students and suspect there may be a few who show up thinking her Iowa State University history course on America’s first ladies is going to be an easy class.

“I can’t fault them,” Cordery quips to me one early summer afternoon over Zoom.  

And, it’s not because her class is easy. Ironically, it’s because it’s the same assumption she made as a young undergraduate at University of Texas in Austin in the fall of 1982. It was her senior year and Cordery was a theater major. 

She laughs again and explains.

“I was looking around for an easy class, because I was an actor and I needed to be on the stage,” she says, overdramatizing the last half of that sentence. She found a class in the then printed course catalog called First Ladies in U.S. History. “I thought…