Yet other women criticized the First Lady’s appearance. Her friend Elizabeth Blair Lee said that Elizabeth Todd Edwards “is ten times better looking than [her sister] Mrs. Lincoln.” The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child remarked that Mary Lincoln “looks more like a dowdy washerwoman” than “the ‘representative of fashion.’ ” To Child, the First Lady’s face seemed “mean, and vulgar,” and she pitied Lincoln for “having a fool for a wife.” The only thing “she cares for is flattery, and dress, and parties. Willis’s Home Journal abounds with fulsome compliments about her stylish dressing, her gayeties &c. This is not becoming, when the people are suffering and sacrificing so much.” When Child read about Mrs. Lincoln’s shopping trips, she exclaimed: “So this is what the people are taxed for! to deck out this vulgar doll with foreign frippery. And oppressed millions must groan on, lest her ‘noble native State’ [Kentucky] should take offence, if Government made use of the beneficent power God has so miraculously placed in its hands.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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