Dangerous Independence

The radical, bold, and timelessly free life of America’s first and only openly gay First Lady could not stay forgotten for long

Rose Cleveland—sister of President Grover—was the United States’ first and only openly gay First Lady, and that’s only about the fifth-most-interesting thing about her. She was bold when her era told her to be timid, and unapologetically brainy in a Gilded Age that valued glitz. She was a successful literary critic, translator, editor, fashion influencer, suffragist, celebrity, and romance novelist. She ran a seven-hundred-acre commercial farm in Maine and a citrus grove in Florida. She delighted and unsettled nearly everyone she met and her life was so full that the fourteen months she spent as White House hostess were among the most boring of her life. She could hardly wait to hand over Blue Room receiving-line duties and get back to the private sphere: her writing, her many hobbies, her travel, and her women.

In Dangerous Independence, Rebecca Boggs Roberts draws from intimate letters and a rich trove of research, bringing her cinematic narrative skill and sly sense of humor to the story of a woman lightyears ahead of her time. Inside and outside the White House, Rose Cleveland’s activism laid the groundwork for women’s suffrage, a dream that came to fruition just two years after her death. Her heroic nursing saved countless lives during World War I, even as it cost her her own. In her romantic relationships—fluid, full of grace, and unabashedly lesbian—she emerges as a great queer icon for our times. This book is the story of one brave and rebellious woman, but also of a brief window when American women redefined who they were and what they could be.