When Sarah Childress Polk became first lady of the United States in 1845, women couldn’t vote, serve as ministers, write legislation, or speak freely at political meetings. If married, they couldn’t own property and were considered their husbands’ property. Marital rape was not recognized, and fathers gained custody of children in divorce.
During the Polks’ four years in the White House, women in upstate New York began demanding equal rights, including property and voting. Sarah Polk, celebrated as pious and deferential, opposed the women’s rights movement. Yet she wielded enormous political power in Washington. Her career demonstrates that political power doesn’t always come from voting or holding office, but from wealth, connections, and influence hidden from public view.
Sarah Childress was born in 1803 on the Tennessee frontier. Without her 1824 marriage to James K. Polk, her name would likely have been forgotten, like that of most nineteenth-century women. Rumor had it Andrew Jackson encouraged Polk to court Sarah. He hardly needed urging: she was charming, well-connected, wealthy, and unusually well educated. Her prosperous father recognized her intelligence and sent her to Salem Academy, the premier women’s school in the South. James admired her sharp mind and outgoing personality.
Sarah was in many ways a conventional Southern woman: a strict Presbyterian, she accepted hierarchy as divinely ordained—white above Black, men above women. Yet she was also unusual. She was the only first lady who neither bore nor adopted a child (she and James were happy as a unit of two) and she delighted in politics, not only policies but the gossip, coalition-building, and elections that drove party life. She inherited this interest from her father and brother, who both took her views seriously, and shared it with James, who eagerly drew her deeper into his political world. Her wealth, education, and political connections gave her the confidence to grasp the power he offered her, even as she asserted that women belonged to a separate sphere from men, and that politics were firmly within the male sphere.
James joked that Sarah only agreed to marry him because he promised to run for Congress. He did and unlike most wives, Sarah accompanied him to Washington. Sarah thrived in Washington’s rough boardinghouse environment. She transformed their living space into a political salon, renting rooms specifically for entertaining James’s colleagues. She became friends with many of those men, who confided in her things they might not tell another man.