Katie Rogers, White House Correspondent at The New York Times, on the Transformation of the Modern First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, and What It Might Look Like When We Have a First Gentleman

One of my personal favorite subjects to study is First Ladies—I am completely compelled by these women, regardless of party affiliation, and I’ve read just about every book on them as a group, as well as many individual biographies of these dynamic women. Today on the show I have with me Katie Rogers, White House correspondent for The New York Times, to discuss her first book, the fantastic American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden, which is out February 27. In the book, Katie delves into the transformation of the modern First Lady. The role of First Lady has definitely changed from Martha Washington to Dr. Jill Biden, but even more granularly, it has changed so much from the 1990s and Barbara Bush and Hillary Clinton to the present day, in particular Dr. Biden’s refusal to give up her role as an educator in favor of being First Lady full-time, as all of her predecessors have done. In the book and in our conversation today, Katie gets into how we ask so much of our First Ladies yet give them no proper blueprint on how to do their job. (We also don’t pay them, and there’s no barometer of what a successful First Lady is or does.) We talk about what will happen when the U.S. finally elects a female president, and what the role of First Gentleman, if that is what he is called, will look like. There is so much depth to this conversation—I can all but promise you that you won’t look at the role of the First Lady the same ever again. Katie has worked at The Times since 2014 and has been a White House correspondent since 2018, covering two presidential administrations and writing extensively about domestic policy, foreign policy, and, perhaps most interestingly to me, the complicated dynamics of First Families. Before writing for The Times, Katie was a reporter at The Guardian and The Washington Post. I am excited for you to meet her and learn from her in this episode.

American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden by Katie Rogers