Lucy Hayes

Lucy Hayes arrived at the White House in 1877 already unusual among First Ladies: she held an actual college degree, graduating from Ohio Wesleyan Female College in 1850 as valedictorian of her class, at a time when most American women never attended one. Raised by an abolitionist mother in Chillicothe, Ohio, she brought those convictions into her marriage to Rutherford B. Hayes, nursing wounded soldiers alongside him in Civil War camps and hospitals and pressing him, gently but persistently, toward positions on temperance and education that shaped his later political identity as much as his own instincts did.

As First Lady she banned the serving of wine and liquor at White House functions, a decision Hayes made for mixed reasons — genuine temperance conviction alongside a wish to avoid friction with dry voters in his own party — but one the press and public pinned entirely on Lucy, christening her "Lemonade Lucy" in the newspapers. She also kept alive the White House Easter egg roll after Congress banned egg-rolling on the Capitol lawn in 1876, inviting local children onto the White House grounds instead and starting a tradition that outlasted every administration since.

After leaving Washington in 1881, Hayes threw herself into causes she had only advocated quietly as First Lady, serving as president of the Woman's Home Missionary Society and continuing to champion women's higher education at a moment when it remained genuinely contested. She died at Spiegel Grove, the Hayes family's Ohio estate, in June 1889, having spent her eight years out of office more publicly active than many of her years inside the White House had allowed.