Mentees Turned Scholars Reflect on the Dawn of First Ladies Studies and the Man Credited With Its Founding
New FLARE monograph honoring Lewis L. Gould shows how the historian inspired more women in a new academic field.
This is the second story in a two-part series about the release of the new monograph “The Founding of First Ladies Studies: A Tribute to Lewis L. Gould” published by the First Ladies Association for Research and Education. Read the first part here.
Stacy Cordery wasn’t really serious about history when she took a required undergraduate course about American first ladies at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1982.
She has told this story before. And, she hints at it again in the new monograph The Founding of First Ladies Studies: a Tribute to Lewis L. Gould published by the First Ladies Association for Research and Education that was released last week. She describes that fateful encounter with then Professor Gould and about a dozen other students in the classroom as a false pretense. A theater major at the time, Cordery (then Rozek) admits in a written tribute in the monograph that she had hoped she could check another box toward graduation in what she thought would be a “blow-off course.”
Some 40 years later after that first-ever first ladies college course was offered, Cordery and other scholars mentored by Gould can’t underscore enough the impact the Eugene C. Barker Centennial professor emeritus of American History at the University of Texas at Austin had on their careers and lives.
“There’s no one like Lewis Gould,” Cordery tells East Wing Magazine in a recent interview. “For me, he’s that one professor—that life-changing professor.”
For Gould, 86 and retired, he reflects on how that same honors class would lead him in a new life direction away from presidents to publish his own path-breaking works laying the foundation for the field of First Ladies Studies. They include American First Ladies: Their Lives and Their Legacies; Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Creating the Modern First Lady; Helen Taft: Our Musical First Lady; and Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment–the first and one of the few books on a first lady and a substantive issue rather than just a biography. In 1998, Gould was named editor of the Modern First Ladies series published by the University Press of Kansas, a set of volumes on first ladies contributed to by many of his students.
In the monograph’s epilogue he explains how he came to teach that very first college course on first ladies, coming to the conclusion in his own presidential research that “first ladies deserved such a course” and also serious academic consideration. During that time, they both recall how Gould once sent Cordery to the archives in search of letters from former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. That task made an impression on Gould who recalls in the epilogue that Cordery “did so with speed and efficiency” that made him realize he had a student with a “rare talent.”
But, it would be Cordery and other mentees that would attest in this monologue that it was Gould’s captivating teaching style, his vast historical knowledge and seemingly endless encouragement to his students that ultimately thrust them into the emerging field of First Ladies Studies.
Cordery fondly remembers from those college years how Gould taught her about historical empathy while she studied the professional relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Texan Anna Pennybacker.
“I had spent a not inconsiderable number of sentences describing Pennybacker’s slow decline into poor health,” Cordery writes in the monograph describing, that at the end her subject “existed principally on goat’s milk.”
To which Professor Gould advised at the time: “Not every detail … required telling.”
That lesson about maintaining a subject’s dignity would be just the beginning in her career that ultimately led Cordery to becoming a historian and professor teaching her own first ladies college course at Iowa State University, serving as bibliographer for the Canton, Ohio-based National First Ladies Library for 17 years and authoring several book chapters on first ladies and books including biographies of Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Juliette Gordon Low and her newest biography Becoming Elizabeth Arden: The Woman Behind the Global Beauty Empire.
In the spring of 1984, Myra Gutin, who had just earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Michigan, attended the historic convening of First Ladies Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter for the first national conference about first ladies at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
In the audience, she recalls being mesmerized as Gould, the keynote speaker, laid out the parameters for the field of First Ladies Studies.
“For those who may have encountered resistance to their work on first ladies, he gave us the basis for our arguments about the importance of our research,” Gutin, a professor emerita of communications at Rider University in New Jersey, writes in the monograph. She met with Gould at the conference and he encouraged her to write to him. She did and that touched off a 20-plus year mentorship and friendship.
“I do not believe that any of us who were doing research about first ladies in the 1980s and ‘90s realized that Lew’s pioneering efforts were giving rise to a new field of study,” writes Gutin, who went on to author The President’s Partner: The First Lady of Twentieth Century; Barbara Bush: Presidential Matriarch; other book chapters and articles on first ladies; to serving as a founding member and past president of the First Ladies Association for Research and Education; and responding to frequent media requests about first ladies. She is currently working on a biography of Betty Ford.
“I do not believe that any of us who were doing research about first ladies in the 1980s and ‘90s realized that Lew’s pioneering efforts were giving rise to a new field of study.”
—Myra Gutin, professor emerita of communication at Rider University in New Jersey
It was 1986 when Nancy Beck Young, then an aspiring graduate student, met Professor Gould in a history course about former President Lyndon Baines Johnson. She was most impacted by his high academic expectations and also his generosity. For Young, that came in the form of an offer to co-author two pieces of which she conducted all the research that required traveling. That experience, writes Young, “put in stark relief Lew’s generosity and support for many female graduate students who worked with him against the unintended chauvinism that still existed in the profession in the early 1990s.”
She went on to become the Moores Professor of History and director of the Center for Public History at the University of Houston and the author of several books including one she co-authored with Gould called Texas, Her Texas: The Life and Times of Frances Goff.
“I think the care Lew took in mentoring his students made all the difference in the world in ensuring our success,” Young says. “In other ways, I try to pay it forward with my own students.”
Another former student, Debbie Cottrell, encountered Gould when she set out to enroll in a master’s program, but changed course after following Gould’s encouragement to choose a Ph.D. program instead. It was Gould’s high standards and confidence in her that set her on a career path into teaching and administrative appointments to becoming president of Texas Lutheran University in 2019.
“Dr. Gould’s own passion for research on first ladies—and his clear belief in empowering women—definitely impacted my career at several turns, including my current position as president,” Cottrell says, adding that as an administrator there’s a need to understand how they use their roles to lead and influence. “Dr. Gould … helped all of us understand what can be learned from the leadership of first ladies.”
Unlike many of Gould’s mentees, Kristie Miller didn’t need to sit in his classroom to learn from him. In fact, she connected with him while she was immersed in her own research at the Library of Congress about her grandmother, pioneering politician Ruth Hanna McCormick. Miller wrote to him and he offered some pivotal advice via written correspondence—that she needed to be published in a journal before she tried to publish a book.
His support didn’t end there, he not only helped find a publication, but also reviewed her journal article that ultimately was published when Miller didn’t have a Ph.D.
“Dr. Gould gave me so much time and attention,” Miller says. “I was not even his student, but he basically offered me a long-distance class in writing history.”
Miller, an author, journalist and former teacher, went on to write Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson’s First Ladies; Isabella Greenway: An Enterprising Woman; and Ruth Hanna McCormick: A Life in Politics, 1880-1944. She was also co-editor of A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway, 1904-1953, and We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880-1960.
The show of appreciation for Gould expressed by his mentees is felt throughout their tributes in the monograph. But even more so is their reflection on how he indisputably laid the groundwork for First Ladies Studies through many of their contributions.
“It’s a young field,” Cordery explains, adding the monograph is also a first attempt to write their own history. “It pulls together some of the people who were deeply influenced by who we all see as the founder.”
The tributes, like sincere letters of gratitude, give Gould the opportunity while in his retirement to take in, with a sense of satisfaction, the fruits of his many labors.
East Wing Magazine is a member of the First Ladies Association for Research and Education.