First published in hardcover asThe Women in Lincoln's Life,this paperback is a revised and expanded version with a foreword by Frank Williams, chairman of the prestigious Lincoln Forum, sidebars, and an appendix on the Lincoln-Rutledge romance and engagement.
Abraham Lincoln was no ladies' man. Part of his awkwardness with women was due to his lanky, rough appearance, but he also floundered in no small part due to the emotional burdens he bore after the death of his mother when he was only nine years old, the death of his sister when he was eighteen, and the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge, shortly after they had become engaged (a point that author H. Donald Winkler explores and asserts).
As a result, Lincoln cultivated an emotional barrier that antagonized some women who tried to be close to him. He may even have been incapable of loving anyone as he did Ann Rutledge, and so he fumbled his way through other courtships and two rejected proposals of marriage. Then he stumbled into an unlikely relationship with aristocratic Mary Todd. Their tumultuous twenty-three years together were the scuttlebutt of Springfield and the gossip of Washington.
Yet there were other women in Lincoln's life, and Winkler cites thirty of them in this book. Though they were not always romantic relationships, they affected his personally and professionally. And despite his awkwardness, these relationships were as positive for the women as they were for Lincoln himself.
The tumultuous experiences Abraham Lincoln had with women have long been chronicled. Lincoln's Ladies attempts to answer the questions of how he was affected by the women in his life and how he affected them. Abandoned through death by his mother, his sister, and his sweetheart, Ann Rutledge, Lincoln found it difficult to relate to women and developed an emotional barrier that often antagonized them. Abstract and cool, he feared intimacy and marriage and, following Ann Rutledge's untimely death, was incapable of loving anyone the way he had loved her, probably the only woman with whom he shared a deep and wonderful love. Lincoln fumbled his way through other courtships and was turned down at least twice. He then stumbled into a strange relationship with Mary Todd--one culminated by marriage through her trickery and his sense of honor. Lincoln's marriage to her was his greatest tragedy, "a burning, scorching hell as terrible as death and as gloomy as the grave," said William Herndon, Lincoln's partner and biographer. According to H. Donald Winkler, Lincoln's emotions and motivations were shaped from a mixture of crippling and energizing experiences associated with women, experiences that profoundly affected his personal and professional lives. Lincoln's Ladies explores the impact of more than thirty women on his life. Not overlooked, however, are the positive impacts of women on Lincoln and he on them, especially his stepmother, who probably was the first person to treat him with respect and glimpse his potential.
