Pat Nixon, Reconsidered

When most people think of Pat Nixon, the U.S. First Lady from 1968-74, nothing much comes to mind beyond a blank smile and interchangeable outfits. She represents the passive, supportive role that was standard for First Ladies until figures like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama challenged it. Exhibits about her at the Nixon Presidential Library, claiming to focus on her achievements, function primarily as rotating wardrobe displays. Whoever she was beyond this image is now blurred by her husband’s infamous corruption, which now feels tame, even quaint, compared to the normalized depravity of the current occupant.

But a closer look at her life shows us that this picture is incomplete. Love or loathe her, to see her as just a stand-in for the passive American housewife is to overlook the extensive hardships of her early life and the resilience with which she faced them. Crucially, this image was forged at a time when female ambition and achievement was dismissed and discouraged. Now that American society seems to at least acknowledge, if not fully contend with, its inexhaustible layers of gendered double standards, we should reconsider what we think about Pat Nixon. 

She was born Thelma Ryan in Nevada, where her father worked as a miner, in 1912, eight years before the passage of the 19th Amendment. Her mother died when she was ten, making her at that age the sole caretaker for her father and brothers, who hardly supported her in return and would complain to her if there were wrinkles in their clothes rather than do their own laundry. She eventually delegated some of her daily responsibilities, refusing to cook for them if they came up short. She changed her name to Patricia (she was born on St. Patrick’s Day) at age eighteen, when her father died of tuberculosis, as if claiming a new identity with which to move on. 

Despite this ongoing grind of tragedy and obligation, which also included the maintenance of their failing family farm, she still excelled in high school, participating in a variety of extracurriculars, from theater to debate. She took extra full time work while enrolled at Fullerton Junior College, working as a “scrubwoman” - basically a janitor - at a bank in the early morning before classes began. Her whole life she felt a “sharp stab” when one morning a car full of her classmates saw her sweeping the sidewalk outside the bank and laughed at her. When she and her brothers would wash the dishes, they lowered the shades so their neighbors wouldn’t see them. But she eventually graduated from USC with honors, earning her teaching credentials and becoming the youngest teacher in the Whittier school system at the time, all before she even met Richard Nixon, her co-actor in a community theater musical. 

This is not to suggest that the image of the passive, supportive housewife was unfairly foisted on her. In fact, history shows that she actively cultivated it. During her husband’s early campaigns, she posed for photos to help him look like more of a “family man,” fitting the post-war nuclear family model. She abided his sexist, red-baiting attacks against Helena Gahagan Thomas (whom he called “pink down to her underwear”) in his 1950 Senate run. She was a literal prop on the set of the Checkers speech in 1952, sitting in an easy chair in a replica of a suburban home as the background to her husbands’s speech. The “Silent Majority,” his appeal to a kind of hard-won, familial domesticity, would hardly have been as effective if Pat didn’t somehow exemplify it. She was a willing model, in other words, of the image of femininity that generations of feminists have been fighting against, the image that has become so ingrained in our culture that women who don’t fit it, even extraordinary women like Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, struggle to succeed at the national level. 

But, ironically, because of this image, much of what is admirable and impressive about Pat’s own life is frequently overlooked. It goes without saying that her dexterity and determination in the face of poverty, with almost no financial or emotional support, would be emphasized, even celebrated, if she were a man. But because of the standards of the time, the expectations of a First Lady, they’ve been dismissed as irrelevant. They don’t fit the limitations of her public image. I can’t help but think that if she lived in a time or place where female achievement was encouraged, or at the very least recognized, she might not have taken such a secondary and vicarious path towards her ambitions. 

She may have felt the same: she was notably active in supporting more women to run for office, and lobbied (though unsuccessfully) for her husband to appoint more women to federal positions, including the Supreme Court. Even in her capacity as First Lady, she led small but significant initiatives towards greater inclusivity, such as implementing White House tours for people with blindness. While she was no groundbreaker, she was clearly conscious of the need to create greater space in society for all citizens to pursue their ambitions, space that would have changed her life completely had it been available to her. 

Indeed, she had, according to her schoolmates, political ambitions of her own when she was young. In 1940, when she finally agreed to marry Richard - after he had persisted for over two years in borderline creepy fashion, often waiting for her outside her apartment while she was on dates with other men - she was reluctant. Her daughter later wrote that, “Even as she consented, she was not sure she wanted to marry. She was 28 years old and had been independent for a long time.”

It’s true that Pat Nixon is still problematic. She’s easy to hate. But if we want to really change our culture from one that diminishes female achievement to one that normalizes it, we need to look beyond the women who are easy to celebrate, who we can find on Nasty Woman lunchboxes, and open ourselves to those we might consider enemies. This doesn’t mean that we should force false equivalencies or pretend that there are no unequivocally terrible women in public life (a certain current first daughter comes to mind). But we shouldn’t take everyone at face value. The most destructive aspect of a public image is that it kills anything that doesn’t conform to it, diminishes our ability to freely live out the contradictions and shades of gray that make us human. Even those who exemplify it the most might be living under its oppression. If we can free from that image even those who were responsible for propagating it, we would be well-equipped to free everyone from it. And Pat Nixon, given the hardships she confronted and overcame, which run directly counter to the smiling passivity that became her legacy, would be a good place to start.