dlofting
Sergeant Major
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2013
- Location
- Vancouver, BC, Canada
From the Washington Post and novelist Louis Bayard
Edited.
Mary Todd Lincoln, to be clear, whose arraignment in the court of mid-19th-century public opinion enrolls her in a vexed sorority with today’s first ladies and female politicians. Her example reminds us, in case we needed reminding, that America has never known quite what to do with women who enter the public sphere.
It was Mary’s particular misfortune to be the woman to one particular man. Indeed, of all the mysteries that have enveloped Abraham Lincoln, his choice of a life mate has been, for both his contemporaries and for later generations of scholars, the least soluble. Lincoln himself, writing to an acquaintance a week after his wedding, declared his marriage “a matter of profound wonder,” and scholars have been wondering ever since. What drew Lincoln to such a complex and mercurial creature? What kept him from seeing all the black moods and emotional cloudbursts she would rain down on him? He had already called off their wedding once. Was he simply too chivalrous to do it again?"
For the rest of the article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...erm=.9c8c91b32739&wpisrc=nl_everything&wpmm=1
Edited.
Mary Todd Lincoln, to be clear, whose arraignment in the court of mid-19th-century public opinion enrolls her in a vexed sorority with today’s first ladies and female politicians. Her example reminds us, in case we needed reminding, that America has never known quite what to do with women who enter the public sphere.
It was Mary’s particular misfortune to be the woman to one particular man. Indeed, of all the mysteries that have enveloped Abraham Lincoln, his choice of a life mate has been, for both his contemporaries and for later generations of scholars, the least soluble. Lincoln himself, writing to an acquaintance a week after his wedding, declared his marriage “a matter of profound wonder,” and scholars have been wondering ever since. What drew Lincoln to such a complex and mercurial creature? What kept him from seeing all the black moods and emotional cloudbursts she would rain down on him? He had already called off their wedding once. Was he simply too chivalrous to do it again?"
For the rest of the article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...erm=.9c8c91b32739&wpisrc=nl_everything&wpmm=1
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