Scholars Honor the ‘Father’ of First Ladies Studies in New Monograph

FLARE publication pays tribute to Lewis L. Gould and traces the origins of a new academic discipline.

Lewis L. Gould, the Eugene C. Barker Centennial Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Texas at Austin, was honored in a newly released monograph The Founding of First Ladies Studies: A Tribute to Lewis L. Gould. Gould is credited as the founder of First Ladies Studies. He was the first to offer a college history course on first ladies and later authored several books on first ladies. (Photo courtesy of First Ladies Association for Research and Education)

In the early 1980s, Lewis L. Gould, then the chair of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin, described himself as a “typical male political historian” writing about men. He was, as he recalls, immersed in the rivalry between former Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft that ultimately led to what he describes as the “Republican rupture” in the election of 1912.

It was in his research of the rivalry, though, that another set of tensions between the politicians’ wives drew his fo…