Topic: Edith Bolling Galt

Edith Bolling Galt Wilson (October 15, 1872 – December 28, 1961), second wife of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, was First Lady of the United States from 1915 to 1921. She has been labeled "the Secret President" and "the first woman to run the government" for the role she played when her husband suffered prolonged and disabling illness after a stroke in October 1919. Some even refer to her as "the first female president of the United States."

The circumstances of President Wilson's incapacitation, along with earlier situations when Presidents Lincoln and Garfield were each shot (but had not yet died) and both a heart attack and a stroke suffered at separate times by Eisenhower, who was only briefly incapacitated, each led to the adoption of the provision of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1965 which provides for how Presidential disability is to be determined and what actions are to follow.

Born in Wytheville, Virginia, the daughter of William Holcombe Bolling, a circuit court judge, and Sallie White Bolling, Edith was a descendant of the Plantagenets, of colonial Virginia settlers and the famous Native American, Pocahontas, through Pocahontas' granddaughter Jane Rolfe Bolling. Her paternal great-grandmother, Catherine Payne Bolling, was the daughter of Martha Dandridge Payne, whose father Nathaniel West Dandrige was a first cousin of Martha Dandridge Custis, wife of George Washington. She was the seventh of eleven children.