Our guest is Rebecca Boggs Roberts, award-winning educator, author, speaker, and historian. We talk about her new biography, UNTOLD POWER: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson.
Edith Wilson dated and then married Woodrow Wilson while he served as president of the United States in 1915. In her new biography, Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson, author Rebecca Boggs Roberts – daughter of the late NPR founding mother Cokie Roberts – explores Wilson's influential role in her husband's administration. But as Roberts tells NPR's Steve Inskeep, at a time when women didn't yet have the right to vote, Wilson often hid her political contributions from the spotlight.