history | Stephanie Rutt

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November 17, 2025 · 11:23 am

The Office of the First Lady

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” Eleanor Roosevelt

I believe if Eleanor Roosevelt were here, she’d have a word or two to say about President Trump demolishing the East Wing of the White House. Built in 1902, it served as the official office for First Ladies. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32^nd president of the United States, was the first to professionalize the East Wing using it as a base of operations for her activism. She used the East Wing to expand the role of the first lady specifically to highlight women’s issues and organizations from the Girl Scouts to the Women’s Trade Union League. Her first news conference, March 6, 1933, featured 35 reporters, all of them women helping to elevate the role of women in national and political life as well as in journalism. (The 19^th, Haines, Becker, October 22, 2025)

Since then, all of our first ladies have gifted the American public with initiatives in support of causes they championed. Following Roosevelt, First Ladies Bess Turman, Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy were deeply involved in White House restoration with Jacqueline Kennedy founding the White House Historical Association in 1961. First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, championed the “War on Poverty” initiative and programs like Head Start. First Lady Pat Nixon engaged in much volunteerism visiting schools, orphanages, and hospitals.

First Lady Betty Ford reportedly said, “If the White House West Wing is the ‘mind’ of the nation, then the East Wing, the traditional power center for First Ladies, is the ‘Heart.’” (4NBCWashington, Darlene Superville, October 26, 2025) She and First Lady Roselyn Carter were strong advocates for mental health reform. First Lady Nancy Regan is remembered for her “Just Say No’’ antidrug abuse program. First Ladies Barbara Bush focused on literacy, Hillary Clinton on healthcare reform, Laura Bush also on literacy and women’s health. Michele Obama is known for her “Let’s Move!” initiative to combat childhood obesity, Melania Trump for her BE BEST program focusing on child welfare, and Jill Biden for her advocacy for military families.

Anita McBride, chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush, described the East Wing as a place of “purpose and service” and “tearing down those walls doesn’t diminish the significance of the work we accomplished there.” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, policy director for first lady Michelle Obama, said the demolition was a “symbolic blow” to the East Wing’s legacy as a place where women made history. In an interview she said, “The East Wing was this physical space that had seen the role of the first lady evolve from a social hostess into a powerful advocate on a range of issues.” (4NBCWashington, Darlene Superville, October 26, 2025)

And here we come to the key issue. It’s not hard to understand why the very place the wives of presidents have used to create and foster their own initiatives, dreams, indeed, exercise some measure of power unique to them, would be the very place demolished. The Trump administration is primarily focused on the implementing Project 2025, created by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation along with many Trump loyalists, aiming to restructure and concentrate power in the executive branch to execute policy strongly influenced by Christian Nationalism ideals. They seek, “to impose a hierarchical, gendered, patriarchal vision of society.” (National Women’s Law Center, “Project 2025 and What it Means for Women, Families and Gender Justice,” September 17, 2024)

This increasing concentration of power in the executive branch, a hallmark of authoritarian regimes, is Trump’s modus operandi. With an overly compliant judicial branch and a majority yes-man legislative branch, he says it and it happens, even when it comes to demolishing a wing of the historic People’s House — even when over half of those very people don’t approve. And for women, the symbolism is clear. Go home. Fall in line with the traditional role we conservatives envision for you. You are not here to make history. You are here to create children and support your family. Trouble is women have dreams too, of course, and need our democratic republic, free from homogenization and the imposition of religious tyranny, to thrive and serve just as men always have.

So, I write today to highlight all the first ladies and the dreams they pursued in the East Wing of the White House in service to our great nation. Though their space has been so ruthlessly and disrespectfully demolished, the historical imprint each has made on our nation, the many lives they touched through their efforts, cannot be so easily dismissed, erased and forgotten. Thank you.

And to all girls and women going forward, I say: Be brave. Follow in the footsteps of Eleanor Roosevelt. Dare to create your own space for the beauty of your dreams and, in doing so, make a future that belongs to you, our nation, and the world.

Image by EyeEm@freepik.com
(a representation of demolition – not the East Wing)

“Give me your tired, your poor . . .”

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The images flickered. Faces. Smiling. Flashing across the screen and then gone too soon. The children just arriving on Ellis Island, a part of the Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, the Statue of Liberty. I wanted to replay the images, pause them. Take them in. “THIS is what we once were,” I whispered silently.

No more. When I saw the mural of the Statue of Liberty created by Judith de Leeuw and revealed in France just before the 4^th of July, I fully understood. Our great lady ashamed, covering her face, grieves her loss.

And so, she should. How starkly different those faces were just a few years ago after crossing our southern border. In Trump’s America, we showed zero-tolerance. Instead of laughter, cries pierced the stale air, raw and shrill, from the shock of being taken from loved ones and put in makeshift cages. Children. In cages. Roughly 4,600 of them separated.

The Biden administration instituted a task force to reunite the children with their parents or relatives but Trump rescinded it, even with hundreds still searching, as part of his first executive order. Today, the policy continues. In June of this year, CNN reported that approximately 500 migrant children had already been taken from their homes and put in government custody. The cries resume now though largely hushed from the public ear.

And our grieving great lady reminds us, “This is NOT who we once were.”

Designed by Frederic Auguste Barthold, the statue was a gift from France to commemorate the centennial of the American Declaration of Independence and dedicated by President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886. However, it may surprise some to learn that the well-known words on the statue welcoming immigrants, taken from “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, were not added until 1903, nearly two decades after the statue was unveiled.

The original inspiration for the monument was not immigration but emancipation, notably symbolized by the broken shackle and chains laying at our lady’s feet. Just after the Civil War, they were a visual representation of the end of slavery in the United States. Of course, this ideal has been slow to find a living space where our African American brothers and sisters may breathe free.

Courageously, in the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, the “good trouble” continues for the tempest-tost in search of a home in this land where each “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The broken shackle and chains echo across time the great dream herald by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

But in Trump’s America, these echoes are fading, almost silent now, in what can only be called a targeted attempt to white-wash history. Juneteenth Day was snubbed. Federal agencies continue to eliminate or obscure the contributions of Black heroes such as the Tuskegee Airman and Harriet Tubman. Diversity, equity, inclusion are dirty words now needing to be eradicated in order to create a more perfect, colorblind, union. Trump even had the bronze bust of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. removed from the Oval Office which had been there since 2009.

And again, our grieving great lady reminds us, “This is NOT what we once aspired to be.”

And the broken shackle and chains, which have come to speak for all forms of oppression, also represented the hope of women who, at the time, were fighting for the right to vote. Only two women were invited to the unveiling of the statue which sparked protests by suffragists. American abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, cursing the irony of a female figure representing liberty, described the whole affair as “the sarcasm of the 19^th century.”

But, undaunted, the suffragists chartered a boat to sail around the harbor to protest. And our lady must have smiled as she knew that soon, on the teeming shore, she would become the focal point for discussions on gender equality.

Today in Trump’s America, many older women, in particular, are desperately trying to lift the lamp and shine a light on what is quickly being lost – some of the very freedoms those suffragists, and many others since, so courageously fought to obtain for us. Their efforts left all women with the greatest of gifts: most notably, choice. Choice to live a life of our choosing.

And so, we see it’s no accident that the Statue of Liberty is a woman, a depiction of Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, offering her torch to guide all who flee oppression.

Americans, will we choose freedom or Trump’s American autocracy? Will we help our great lady to lift her torch high once again and light the way for all of us and for those to come?

I pray so for in all her glory, welcoming those children of long ago, our great lady reminds us, “THIS is what we once were.”