On Tuesday, Sept. 24, just after noon, 15 first ladies from around the world gathered for a working lunch focused on public health in a top-floor conference room in Midtown Manhattan.
Their spouses were a few blocks away at the United Nations General Assembly, giving speeches about war, climate change and technology.
These women, along with one first daughter — Sara Rashid of Iraq — had their own agenda: To learn how to take on pressing issues and be effective in their roles. (Invitations have been extended to first gentlemen, but none have yet accepted.)
This was a biannual meeting of the Global First Ladies Alliance, a group that has helped train, educate and support 86 spouses of world leaders and over 200 of their senior staff members. The women gathered on this Tuesday were dressed in suits and patterned dresses, greeting one another with hugs or handshakes. They spent a few minutes chatting, then sat around a large table to get to work over a lunch of roast chicken and grilled kale salad. Security and staff members waited in rooms outside.
“We are energized and focused,” said Dr. Lucrecia Peinado, a former anesthesiologist and health administrator who is now the first lady of Guatemala.
The conversation focused on human papillomavirus vaccine advocacy (Merck is a sponsor of the group, as are the Ford Foundation, the PepsiCo Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and more) but drifted to other topics, such as the expectations placed on first ladies, ways to protect vulnerable populations and the recent successes of those gathered. Oluremi Tinubu, the first lady of Nigeria, shared how planting community gardens had proved an effective way to address food scarcity caused by droughts.
Dr. Peinado left inspired. “As first ladies, we definitely have what they call a soft power,” she said. “But sometimes it is not so soft if it actually makes things happen.”
Collective Action and Lasting Friendships
The Global First Ladies Alliance was started in 2009 by Cora Neumann, who has a doctorate in public health and development from Oxford University and works as a director of public health interventions for Native American communities in the United States.
The alliance serves as a sisterhood, a way for members of a small club to share their experiences. Michelle Obama participated in events affiliated with the group in 2013, as did Jill Biden in 2023 and 2024. Participants say the result has been collective action — and lasting friendships.
It has been so successful that in recent years first ladies have started to form regional networks in the Caribbean, Latin America and Europe. (A similar group for first ladies in Africa was formed in 2002.)
Above all, the alliance is a school, attended on a voluntary basis and learned about by word of mouth, Dr. Neumann said. “You come, you work, you sit down, you’re in class,” she said. “The first ladies who come are very serious about making an impact.”
The group holds a gathering in New York every year during the United Nations General Assembly; since 2023, it also has offered a four-day course, called the Global First Ladies Academy, in July at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
“It felt like graduate school,” Rossana Briceño, the first lady of Belize, said of the Columbia course, which she attended this summer. “We weren’t getting exams, but there was so much to process. It was intense.”
‘No Budget, No Staff, No Funding’
First spouses face unique challenges. They rarely are prepared for the role when they get it, said Monica Geingos, who was first lady of Namibia until earlier this year. “You have first ladies who come in as engineers, lawyers and doctors,” she said.
While Jill Biden, a trained educator, has continued to teach English at Northern Virginia Community College, “the majority choose or are asked not to keep their jobs to avoid any questions about ethics or conflicts of interest,” Dr. Neumann said.
Meaning that the job most find themselves in as first lady is “because of who they married,” Ms. Geingos said.
“We sometimes have no budget, no staff, no funding,” added Dr. Peinado of Guatemala, who assumed her position in January.
Dr. Neumann added that “there are first ladies who have their sister and cousin helping them because they have no budget or staff assigned to them.”
There is also no job description. “Even here, to this day, the office of the first lady is not written into the Constitution in America,” said Anita McBride, who served as chief of staff to Laura Bush and was involved in the alliance in the early days. (She is now the director of the First Ladies Initiative at the American University School of Public Affairs.) “There is no position, there is no salary, there is no statutory responsibility.”
And yet the responsibility is enormous. Dr. Neumann reminds first ladies that the issues they are dealing with are some of the most complex. “The first ladies deal with health, education, economic empowerment, gender based violence, all of these things,” she said. “Social issues are the hardest challenges to address and solve.”
A 10-step curriculum, which covers topics like resource mobilization and legacy building, is continuously developed, with contributions from former first ladies Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton, Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Obama, as well as Sarah Brown and Cherie Blair, both wives of former prime ministers of Britain.
There’s also communications training. “There is a great deal of pressure on first ladies not to make a false step, not to create controversy, not to say anything or do anything that will create backlash from the public,” said Katherine Jellison, a professor of history who studies first ladies at Ohio University and is not involved with the alliance.
Other topics are more philosophical, for example, what is the appropriate amount of influence to yield? The G.F.L.A. also does trainings for senior advisers of first ladies, and at a recent meeting one attendee received a round of applause for bringing up a dilemma many first ladies experience: “If you do too much work, you will be criticized,” she said. “If you don’t do the work, you are criticized.”
Discussing Things ‘You Can’t Even Tell Your Friends’
As at any school, there’s bonding among classmates.
“There are things we can’t talk about with anybody related to our personal lives, related to some challenges we have,” Ms. Geingos said. “You can’t even tell your friends, but you can tell another first lady because she understands.”
Also, Ms. Geingos added, “she’s not going to break confidence because she understands that part as well.”
Ms. Brown, the wife of Gordon Brown, the prime minister of Britain from 2007 to 2010, said she loved attending the gatherings. “Some of it was advice on how to live as normal of a life as you can and keeping your family together when you are living this extraordinary life,” she said.
But what impressed her even more was how the women could work together. “That is where the superpower is created,” she said. “It’s this collaboration together that makes first ladies a mighty force.”
Will a First Gentleman Ever RSVP Yes?
Since so many first ladies value the sisterhood the alliance creates, it raises the question: How should they embrace first gentlemen?
“Five years ago we played around with the name Global First Spouses Alliance, and we came to the conclusion that even when there are first men, it is still the first ladies who need support,” Dr. Neumann said. “The first gentlemen didn’t seem to have the same expectations in their roles.”
She added, however, that should there be more first gentlemen — currently, Mexico, Greece, Slovenia, Denmark and Tanzania are among the countries with female leaders — they would once again consider a name change.
Ms. Geingos believes that many first ladies would welcome more gentlemen among their ranks for at least one reason: “The trade off is that then we would have more female presidents.”
She added: “I had a young girl one day run up to me and said, ‘I want to be just like you.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t want you to be a first lady. I want you to be a president.’”
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