Many people consider the president's wife a dangerous woman. Overeducated and overopinionated, she holds far too much influence with her husband.
Further, she is a strong-willed social reformer bent on redefining the role of women in America.Although the first lady regularly attends Foundry Methodist Church in Washington, she has become a lightning rod for religious extremists.
And she has a very popular cat named . . . Siam.
Siam?
Did I mention it's 1877? The woman in question is Lucy Webb Hayes, the devout, well-bred, Ohio-born wife of President Rutherford B. Hayes.
Lucy Hayes was just one of many president's wives who prove that tensions between a first lady and conservative religious leaders are hardly unique to the Clinton administration.
Most presidential wives have reflected the broader religious contributions made by American women - immunizing children, improving public education, addressing health care, church involvement and teaching Sunday School.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, christened in the Methodist Church when she was 2 months old, frequently cites John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, as one who shaped her spiritually and politically.
"The practical method of trying to live as a Christian in a difficult, challenging world, was very appealing to me," she has said.
At 13, Hillary Rodham joined a group of girls from her church that was organized to baby-sit children of migrant farm workers, a move biographers say sparked her career interest in children's advocacy.
For most of America's first 150 years, women - with their less aggressive, more nurturing tendencies - were considered intuitively a step closer to God.
"You look at sermons, you look at popular writings, women's advice books, etiquette books," says Edith Mayo, curator of the Division of Social History and the First Ladies Collection at the Museum of American History in Washington. "This is a very powerful tradition."
Mayo said that since the days of Martha Washington, our presidents' wives have been significant models regarding morals and personal faith, especially as it applied to service of the poor.
Reared an Episcopalian, Martha Custis was one of the richest widows in Virginia, yet during the American Revolution, as the wife of Gen. George Washington, she often shocked other women of her social status by mending the uniforms of the enlisted men.
Not only did Martha offer assistance to the rank and file, she targeted the poorest soldiers in her husband's camp and then recruited other women to help her make clothes for them.
In her private life, family worship was a part of her regular routine, and in her older years, Martha often retired early so her granddaughter could read scripture to her before bedtime.
Mayo said that presidential wives typically become guardians of the disadvantaged, and, by doing so, "they actually are following a long and very honored tradition of women's spiritual activities in the community by extending the nurturing beyond the home and into the larger home which is the community or the nation.
"That was a very esteemed role that women played all through the 19th century, and it almost always grew out of religious motivations," Mayo said.
Of the 45 presidential wives, more than 30 have been associated with the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian or Baptist denominations.
Five were preachers' daughters - Abigail Adams, Abigail Fillmore, Carrie Harrison, Jane Pierce and Ellen Axson, who married a preacher's son, Woodrow Wilson.
On the other hand, at least three first ladies - Mary Lincoln, Florence Harding and Nancy Reagan - dabbled in astrology, to mixed reviews by the American public.
Jane Pierce, wife of Franklin Pierce, was a religious extremist who felt that God punished her through the deaths of her three sons.
While Lou Hoover left the Episcopal Church to become a Quaker after she married Herbert, Dolley Payne was actually expelled from the Friends Church for marrying James Madison, an Episcopalian.
Anna Harrison, wife of William Henry Harrison, was an active member of her little church in South Bend, Ind., and even got in the habit of inviting the entire congregation to dinner on Sundays right after the morning service.
Several first ladies taught Sunday School, including Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter and Carrie Harrison, wife of Benjamin Harrison.
In 1890, 6-year-old Harry Truman entered the Sunday School classroom at the Presbyterian church in Independence, Mo., and met 5-year-old Bess Wallace, the woman he would eventually marry.
According to historians, William McKinley met Ida Saxton at a church picnic and visited her regularly on Sunday mornings when he was on his way to the Methodist church and she was on her way to teach Sunday School at the Presbyterian church in Canton, Ohio.
A religion writer for a Protestant weekly called The Independent is credited with coining the term "first lady." As she witnessed the inauguration of Rutherford Hayes, Mary Clemmer Ames wondered if Lucy Hayes might change her hair, her fashion and her nature in Washington's social climate.
The writer pondered whether John Wesley's discipline would vanish as Lucy Hayes adopted the life of "the first lady of the land."
Vitriolic attacks have cost Hillary Clinton her public image at times, but in the 1820s such assaults cost Rachel Jackson her life.
In fact, first ladies' battles date back to the founding of America, when Abigail Adams was accused of being too outspoken, too concerned with women's rights and too influential in her husband's decisions.
But without question, Rachel Jackson's was the most tragic case in American history.
Rachel Jackson was a genuinely pious woman, in the best, 1820s sense of the word. She attended Sunday services, went to prayer meetings, read the Bible daily and lead the family in singing hymns.
She told her closest friends, "I assure you, I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God than to live in that palace in Washington."
Her first marriage was disastrous, and after her husband abandoned her, he sent word he'd secured a divorce. She and Andrew Jackson, whom she had known for years, eventually married only to discover later their vows were not valid because her first husband never really divorced her.
The circumstances were rectified, but as Andrew Jackson rose in national prominence, accounts of the "adulterous affair" became twisted until it was a central issue in the 1828 presidential campaign. One political opponent distributed a pamphlet that read, "Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?"
Rachel collapsed and died of a heart attack just weeks after the election, a death historians link directly to the attacks by religious leaders.
"I can forgive all who have wronged me," Jackson told friends at her funeral. "But I will have to pray fervently that I may have grace to enable me to forget or forgive any enemy who has ever maligned that blessed one who is now safe from all suffering and sorrow, whom they tried to put to shame for my sake."
Weeks later, Andrew Jackson entered the White House a devastated widower.
All first ladies have known the pain of intense and personal criticism.
Former first lady Rosalynn Carter said religious faith is a key element to surviving national politics:
"I think if you are deeply rooted in your faith before you get there, it is a lot easier. I was always so thankful for growing up in the church."
She said, "You seek guidance from God to do what's right and best. You have to do that constantly because criticisms are constant."
In 1877 in the midst of America's mostly bitterly contested presidential election, Lucy Hayes entered the White House as the first president's wife to hold a college degree, and Democrats painted her as an overeducated, uptight religious zealot who manipulated her husband and turned into a shrew on the subject of alcohol.
In fact, Lucy was a humorous though deeply religious woman who vehemently opposed slavery, privately opposed alcohol and consistently dedicated her efforts toward veterans' needs, orphans' homes and concerns of the desperately poor.
"Lemonade Lucy" is remembered primarily for a temperance policy in the White House that actually caused her great personal frustration. She had a love-hate relationship with religious leaders who headed the temperance movement. They alternately insulted Lucy, thanked her, rejected her and honored her.
Americans failed to understand that President Hayes demanded the White House's no-liquor policy, not Lucy, because he believed in it personally and - politically - got tired of hearing stories about the previous (Grant) administration and Cabinet members too drunk even by noon to address legislative concerns.
Lucy believed in temperance as it applied to her own life. She believed in not serving liquor but refused - as temperance leaders demanded - to espouse her beliefs in social events and in public speeches because she had many friends who did not share her belief in temperance.
When John F. Kennedy was elected, Jacqueline Kennedy faced an outcry from some Protestants who insisted the pope would now be influencing presidential policies. In fact, while John Kennedy was the first Catholic president, Jackie was not the first Catholic first lady. Julia Gardiner Tyler grew up an Episcopalian but converted to Catholicism.
Many first ladies have been criticized for their efforts at social reform.
Abigail Adams, the daughter of a Congregational minister, became a strong foe of slavery. She wrote to John Adams in September 1774, "I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me."
Abigail enrolled one of her two black servants in the local schools, and when a townsman objected, she replied, "I have not thought it any disgrace to myself to take him into my parlour and teach him both to read and write . . . I hope we shall go to heaven together."
Jane Appleton, the wife of President Franklin Pierce, had much in common with Job, the Old Testament character whose spiritual life represents tragedy upon tragedy.
The daughter of a Congregationalist minister who was also president of Bowdoin College, she was obsessed with religion.
Her relatives, who took a dim view of politics as a profession, had doubts about Franklin Pierce because his father was governor of New Hampshire.
Jane held rigid, Calvinistic, legalistic views. Hers was not a faith of service or joy of spirit. Frail health and the deaths of two of her boys further convinced her of God's wrath against the evil of politics.
When her husband received his party's presidential nomination, she fainted, then rallied to fervently pray every day that he would lose the general election.
Upon learning her husband would become the nation's 14th president, she sank into a frightening depression and waited for the wrath of God to come against her.
Tragedy did strike: Just weeks before the inauguration, their only remaining child, 10-year-old Bennie, was killed before their eyes in a train derailment.
Jane Pierce - living in a palace she hated, living a life she felt God hated and living without the three boys who gave her life color and meaning - "was but a shadow in the White House," according to one biographer.
When she died Dec. 2, 1863, a more merciful passing is hard to imagine.
The grand columns of the White House do not protect those inside from mortality, but election to the highest office does ensure that when the nation's first family faces death, it is a public event. Several presidential families lost children either just before moving into the mansion or during their stay there.
Despite the tragic experience of Jane Pierce, many first ladies have revealed remarkable grace and resolve in the face of personal devastation.
Six of the women lost their husbands in office - Anna Harrison, Mary Lincoln, Lucretia Garfield, Ida McKinley, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy, whom historians credit with demonstrating great personal and spiritual strength as she guided America through its national mourning of her slain husband.
At least 15 first ladies knew the anguish of losing a child. Martha Washington lost her first husband and both children, Anna Harrison lost seven of her eight children by the time of her own death, and Lucy Hayes was forced to send one son's body to Cincinnati for burial while she tended her husband in his military camp during the Civil War.
Yet, in their darkest times - "the most bitter hour," Hayes wrote - many of these women recorded their spiritual views in the face of loss.
On Feb. 1, 1848, former president John Quincy Adams collapsed at his desk in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served 17 years as a congressman following his term in the White House.
He was carried to the speaker's room, and his wife, Louisa, rushed to his side. He was 81, and he died two days later.
She wrote to her sister, Harriet, "When I arrived there and found him speechless and dying and without a moment of returning sense to show that he knew I was near him . . . Dear Harriet, they tell me that it was the act of the Almighty, but oh, can anything compensate for the agony of this last parting on earth, after 50 years of union, without the pleasure of indulging the feelings which all hold sacred at such moments?"
Grace Coolidge wrote a poem titled "The Open Door" five years after the death of Calvin Coolidge Jr. It said, in part:
The memory of your smile, when young,
Reveals His face...
That I might glimpse
Approaching from afar
The glories of His grace.
A few days before her death in July 1849, Dolley Madison received a visit from a niece who began to complain over a minor grievance.
Dolley, who probably realized her life was about to end, revealed her Quaker upbringing by saying to her niece, "My dear, do not trouble about it; there is nothing in this world worth really caring for. Yes, believe me, I, who have lived so long, repeat to you, there is nothing in this world here below worth caring for . . . "