What is some interesting trivia and facts about first lady Martha Washington?”
Martha Dandridge Custis Washington “I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else, there is certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from…” So in one of her surviving letters, Martha Washington confided to a niece that she did not entirely enjoy her role as first of First Ladies. She once conceded that “many younger and gayer women would be extremely pleased” in her place; she would “much rather be at home.” But when George Washington took his oath of office in New York City on April 30, 1789, and assumed the new duties of President of the United States, his wife brought to their position a tact and discretion developed over 58 years of life in Tidewater Virginia society. Oldest daughter of John and Frances Dandridge, she was born June 2, 1731, on a plantation near Williamsburg. Typical for a girl in an 18th-century family, her education was almost negligible except in domestic and social skills, but she learned all the arts of a well-ordered household and how t
Little-known facts about our First Ladies… Martha Washington, 1731-1802 George Washington’s wife was the first to be given the title “lady” by the press, as in “Lady Washington,” and the first wife of a president to appear on U.S. postage stamp. Abigail Adams, 1744-1818 John Adams’ wife urged her husband to “remember the ladies” when he was writing the nation’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. She also was the first woman to be both a president’s wife and the mother of a president, and the first to live in the White House. Martha Jefferson, 1748-1782 No known portrait exists of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, who died 18 years before her husband was elected president. Their daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph served as White House hostess, and was the first to give birth in the presidential mansion in Washington, D.C. Dolley Madison, 1768-1849 James Madison’s wife is the only first lady given an honorary seat on the floor of Congress, and was the first American to respond to telegraph me
