Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, October 16, 1993                   TAG: 9310160078
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: STAUNTON                                LENGTH: Medium

HILLARY, ELEANOR HAD EARLIER MODEL

A woman known for bending the ears of congressmen to advocate social reform. A woman the president's press secretary called "a better politician than her husband."

Not Hillary Rodham Clinton. This was 80 years ago, a generation before Eleanor Roosevelt. A time when women weren't thought worthy of casting votes.

Ellen Axson Wilson was in the White House for only the first 17 months of Woodrow Wilson's presidency, which ran from 1913 to 1921. She died from a kidney ailment in 1914 at age 54.

"In this brief tenure, she anticipated a woman like Eleanor Roosevelt and set a precedent for future first ladies to use their influence in causes of human need," said Frances W. Saunders, whose biography of Ellen Wilson was published in 1985.

Ellen Wilson inspected government offices and found conditions "unsanitary," lacking the bathrooms, light, space and air essential to workers' health. She worked to eradicate the substandard conditions and was a founding member and stockholder in the Sanitary Housing Co. She took congressmen to segregated alley slums to show them the appalling conditions under which blacks were living.

She advocated education for women and used proceeds from the sale of her artwork to establish a scholarship at a home for needy children in her hometown of Rome, Ga. However, while her daughters spoke out for women's suffrage, Ellen Wilson remained publicly neutral so as not to oppose her husband's anti-suffrage position. After she died, he became an advocate of women's right to vote.

This was the snapshot that feminist author Ann Firor Scott had when her book, "Making the Invisible Women Visible," was published in 1984. She wrote that Ellen Wilson made it into the volume of notable women by marrying Woodrow Wilson, but "might have gotten there on her own if she had never married."

Ellen Wilson was the only president's wife to be trained as an artist, but she laid aside a promising art career for her husband's sake.

Shortly before the inaugural ceremonies, her one-woman show of 50 landscapes opened in Philadelphia. Previously, her work had won juried exhibitions under an assumed name. A studio was built for her at the White House, but she never got to use it.

Thirty-five of her paintings are being shown this month at the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace and Museum.

As part of the museum's focus on Wilson's first wife, Saunders, Scott and other scholars spoke at a recent symposium in Staunton.

Scott said she delved deeper into Ellen Wilson's life and those of her contemporaries to prepare her lecture.

"I set out upon this study expecting to find Ellen Wilson to be an incipient feminist or at least a consistent reformer," she told the symposium audience. "The evidence does not support that hypothesis."

Ellen Wilson, she said, was an unusually bright and well-educated woman who, during vital years in the emancipation of American women, chose to put all of her energy into supporting her husband's goals and career instead of becoming a reformer.

"She took a very strong hand in shaping her husband's career, but always in ways that were invisible to outsiders," Scott said.

Saunders defended Ellen Wilson's accomplishments in the context of the period in which she lived, when, as Scott acknowledged, women were not expected to appear in public and certainly not to speak in public or express opinions.

"As first lady, Ellen's impact went unrecognized, partly because she was ahead of her time."

Another reason is that the second Mrs. Wilson, Edith, was better-known and lived until 1961. She became controversial after taking over much of the president's power when he became ill late in his second term.

"Edith didn't mind keeping it a state secret that Woodrow had had another wife," Saunders said.

Pat Hobbs, curator of the Woodrow Wilson Birthplace and Museum, said, "Ellen didn't live long enough to have a big impact. We don't know ultimately what she could have accomplished, but she took an initial step other first ladies prior to her time did not take."