Girl First: The World of First Girl Sarah Polk

Whereas the Girls’s Rights conference was happening at Seneca Falls in 1848, First Girl Sarah Childress Polk was wielding affect unprecedented for a girl in Washington, D.C. But, whereas historical past remembers the ladies of the conference, it has all however forgotten Sarah Polk. Now, in her riveting biography, Amy S. Greenberg brings Sarah’s story into vivid focus. We see Sarah because the daughter of a frontiersman who raised her to debate politics and enterprise with males; we see the savvy and appeal she brandished with a view to assist her good however unlikeable husband, James Okay. Polk, ascend to the White Home. We watch as she workouts actually extraordinary energy as First Girl: quietly manipulating elected officers, shaping international coverage, and directing a marketing campaign in assist of America’s expansionist conflict in opposition to Mexico. And we meet lots of the enslaved women and men whose tough labor made Sarah’s political success doable.

Sarah Polk’s life spanned practically everything of the nineteenth-century. However her personal legacy, which profoundly remodeled the South, continues to endure. Complete, nuanced, and brimming with invaluable perception,
Girl First is a revelation of our twelfth First Girl’s complicated however important half in American feminism.