"Prewar theorists" believe that the first lady was mentioned in 1849. At that time, President Taylor praised Dolly Madison as "our first lady for half a century" when she died, but it was not generally accepted for a long time.
At 186 1, the New York Herald Tribune and the Sacramento United Daily called Mary Lincoln "the first lady". According to Betty Brory, a scholar who studies the first lady, this title was first used by British journalists when describing Varina, the wife of Jefferson Davis, and called Varina "the first lady of the Southern Alliance". For Americans, this background is inevitably ironic.
Many well-known scholars who study the president and the first lady regard 1877 as the year when the title of the first lady first appeared. Supporters of this theory claim that journalist Mary Ames mentioned Lucy Hayes in an article about Rutherford Hayes in The Independent and called her "the first lady of the country" when she traveled all over the country. Historian Stanley Pierce also used 1877 as the earliest time in American history dictionary, but he insisted that the word "first lady" was first used by Rutherford Hayes to describe Lucy Hayes at the inauguration ceremony. Post-war theorists insist that the term 19 was not widely used until the 1980s.
The 20th Century often attributed the popularity of this title to Charles Nudling 19 1 year's play The First Lady of the Country about Dolly Madison. Another drama, The First Lady, was written by Catherine Dayton and George Kaufman at 1935, which made the title more acceptable to the general audience.
The title of "First Lady" has been widely used by the public, the press and politics. In the 1960s, the word was even used to refer to influential or powerful women in all walks of life and spouses of government officials. Today, not only the United States, but also the spouses of male heads of government in other countries have begun to be called "first ladies". An interesting phenomenon is that in English, "first lady" used to be capitalized, but now it is generally lowercase, and it is capitalized only when it refers to a first lady directly or as a title.