A popular image of Jacqueline Kennedy just months after her marriage, as she lights candles for the first dinner party she hosted with her husband, with guests including his U.S. Senate colleague John Sherman Cooper (Kentucky – R).

In photographs and a television interview from the fall of 1953 and the spring of 1954, the 24-year old newlywed Mrs. John F. Kennedy seemed to be the quintessentially submissive and serene Fifties Housewife.

Jackie Onassis, early 1980s.

In 1981, by the time she was a single, working 51 year old editor, Mrs. Onassis felt confident enough to laughingly record on audio tape her uncertainty about hosting her first dinner party as a new wife – a markedly different tone than the formal oral history tape recordings she made two decades before, which were publicly released in 2011.

Her actions changed history and she lived more than half her life as the world’s most famous woman, but even the highly individualistic Jackie Onassis was shaped by the societal expectations that defined the different eras that she lived through.

Financial anxiety during the Depression was a factor in the divorce of Jackie Kennedy’s parents and may have contributed to her own lifelong worries about it.

Despite coming from a family that once held considerable wealth, for example, Jackie’s father took a precipitous income loss during the Great Depression and her rich but tightfisted maternal grandfather frequently reminded his daughter, after her separation, that his support of her and her two daughters could was not conditional on her not returning to Bouvier.

Jackie Bouvier with Hoochie a Scottish Terrier, at the height of the Great Depression, 1932.

Some biographers have traced her anxiety about living without a large cushion of money to this early period of her life.

While the scale of wealth was far vaster than those of average American households, the economic crisis from 1929 to 1938 also similarly affected most of her contemporaries.

Arriving in 1949 for a year of her college education and travel in Europe just four years after the end of World War II, Jackie Bouvier’s perspective on military conflict, Cold War communism, refugee relief, and national independence movements were formed as she lived in and explored postwar France, Germany, Austria, England, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Spain, and Holland.

As a student in postwar Europe, Jackie Bouvier handwashed her laundry and endured all other deprivations still faced by much of the population.

Despite her access to the wealthy and powerful European social scene, she also lived without central heat, shared a bathroom and washed her own clothes as the postwar deprivations continued to affect Europeans.

The promise of gender equality begun by the incidents of 1968 that are generally recognized as the start of the “Women’s Lib” movement first clearly began to manifest by the late Seventies, with a shift in societal attitudes towards, and even the appearance of women in workplace.

A working woman of the Seventies.

At that point, again single after two widowhoods, with both her children away at school, Jackie Kennedy Onassis returned to an office to take her first job in over twenty years and worked her way up in a senior position, always looking like the quintessential liberated woman – in pants.

In the Fifties, however, the woman who had written in her high school yearbook that her ambition was “not to be a housewife” transformed into precisely just that. Like millions of young brides who married World War II servicemen, she embraced all the facets of a domestic management.

The newlyweds Jack and Jackie Kennedy leaving their wedding reception, heading out to begin their honeymoon.

In the weeks after the Kennedys returned from their September 1953 wedding, they made do living in JFK’s tiny Boston apartment, the Cape Cod home of his parents and the suburban Washington estate of her stepfather and mother.

In January of 1954, they rented a narrow, three-story brick townhouse at 3321 Dent Place in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown section to make their own.

The new Mrs. JFK planned breakfast and dinner menus for her and her husband, then walked to local markets to shop for food.

She bought and borrowed furniture, constantly re-arranging and decorating to create a meticulous home atmosphere.

Although she had a part-time domestic worker who cooked the meals and cleaned the house, she was an attentive housekeeper, applying her famous motto uttered to a secretary, “It’s all in the details.”

Jackie Bouvier at her desk during her career as a newspaper columnist.

To transition into the role of Fifties Housewife, however, the former Miss Bouvier had to relinquish a career as a newspaper columnist and feature journalist.

As her new husband half-jokingly quipped to her in front of guests at their rehearsal dinner, “There’s going to be only one writer in this family Jackie  – and it’s not you!”

However disturbing it is to now recognize, a defining element of 1950s American life was the entrenched socialization of women to simply accept without question their submissive position to men.

It was no accident.

Wartime propoganda made clear that women were working in jobs until men returned to resume them.

Driven by economics, it was actually part of the government’s agenda towards the end of World War II to ensure there were enough jobs for returning servicemen. Older propaganda posters exhorting women to wartime work were replaced with ones promising an idyllic family life once the war was over – as long as husbands had jobs to support their families and wives took care of their home and children.

Fifties gadgety promised to return women to household management.

The mid-century flush of discretionary income was a manufacturing and marketing boom. New color magazine advertisements and T.V. ads with peppy jingles sold every modernistic gadget imaginable, promising such an effortless life for housewives that staying at home all day seemed an ideal existence.

Jackie Bouvier was not immune to any of this, all the while knowing that the more mundane tasks would be dispensed of by her maid.

The one Fifties Housewife role she embraced with a vengeance, however, was that of “devoted wife.”

For the newlywed Jackie Bouvier no role was more important than being a devoted Mrs. John F. Kennedy.

She saw that his shirts, ties, suits and shoes were cleaned and ready, choosing his clothes so his daily appearance at the office had variety while always making him look more distinguished, ending the previously haphazard impression he made.

She made sure he was regularly served his favorite drink of lime daiquiris and his favorite soup of Clam Chowder.

Jackie made their household a haven from stress. She bought him a paint set and coaxed him to relax in front of a canvas in their small brick yard patio. She chose book titles in the genres of history and biography that they would both read, and then discuss.

Jackie Kennedy posed at Georgetown University.

She even took continuing education American History courses at nearby Georgetown University and began an intensive round of reading on the Founding Fathers, Civil War and World War I so she could debate her husband on those favorite subjects of his.

Mrs. JFK limited the guests who might share their free weekend time to those “Jack,” as she always called her husband, could be himself, his closest friend Lem Billings and his brother-confidante Bobby Kennedy and his wife Ethel, rather than any friends of hers.

Much more, however, was going on beneath the surface.

Overlooked almost entirely in biographies and other studies of her life, however, is just how enmeshed she became even as a newlywed in the business of her new husband, a United States Senator.

Contrary to popular perception, Jackie Kennedy was interested in foreign policy before her marriage and continued to read and discuss such issues that came across Senator Kennedy’s desk.

The notion of a traditional Fifties wife’s “duty” to her husband offered a deceptively wide opportunity for Jackie Kennedy to engage in the larger world without seeming to defy conventional boundaries.

Without any children to yet care for, the new Mrs. Kennedy was a frequent presence in her husband’s Senate office.

Others working at the U.S. Capitol Building would see her carrying in cloth-covered bowls of hot lunch or joining him for lunch in his office.

Within the private confines of his office, however, Jackie Kennedy was also working with him.

Proficient in Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and capable of reading German and Polish, she speedily read and responded to mail coming for the Senator in foreign languages, rather than his staff having to send them out first for translation.

With a particular interest in French colonialism in Indochina begun while a Sorbonne student in Paris, she continued to translate and write abstract summaries from military and political journals on the growing dilemma in Vietnam, as she had for JFK before they married. Documentary evidence also proves that he asked her to draft some of his public statements and speeches.

Jackie Kennedy makes herself comfortable at the Senator’s desk; she familiarized herself with the important issues he faced to become conversant with him – highly political, but in the context of being a traditionally dutiful wife.

Entirely contrary to the conventional wisdom that Jackie Kennedy had no interest in politics, she especially relished exploring the issues and personalities that were then shaping national policy not only with her husband but with his colleagues.

More natural to both Jack and Jackie were the intimate dinner parties they would soon begin hosting, especially with interesting and powerful guests that were genuine friends, like  journalist Joseph Alsop, diplomat David Ormsby-Gore and senator John Sherman Cooper.

On the video at the end of the pictures in this article, Jacqueline Onassis recalls the incidents of the first dinner party as hostess, tape-recorded in 1981.

The Kennedys with the legendary Democratic “hostess with the mostest” Perle Mesta at one of her mammoth parties during the 1956 convention. Mesta called Jackie a “beatnik.” She was never invited to the Kennedy White House.

While neither Kennedy got excited about going to the gargantuan galas that marked the social life of the capital city in that era, they notably appeared at a May 1954 “April in Paris Ball” fundraiser in New York, the Senator’s wife even posing as a model with other celebrities to generate tickets sales to the event.

As the wife of a U.S. Senator, the new Mrs. Kennedy also made her dutiful appearances with other such spouses, a group known as “The Senate Ladies,” which came together to do volunteer work.

The first gathering of 1954 took place at the home of the Senate Majority Leader, hosted by his wife around portable tables set up in their garage, where cookies in the shape of Texas were served.

A very young Jackie Kennedy, seated at the end of the right row, next to Lady Bird Johnson, in the nurse outfit always worn when The Senate Ladies gathered to roll bandages for the Red Cross.

“I was struck by how very, very young she was,” recalled Lady Bird Johnson of this, their first meeting.

Apart from her youth and even the enormous wealth of her new husband’s family, Jackie Kennedy was already something of a national celebrity, courtesy of her media savvy father-in-law, former U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph P. Kennedy.

As soon as his son’s engagement to Miss Bouvier was official, he bid her to the family’s Cape Cod compound where she discovered she was expected to pose with the junior Senator, photographed in endless images: playing tennis and football, exploring the home’s broad porches, studying framed family pictures.

Jackie Bouvier looking out to sea from the porch of her future in-laws in one of the engagement picture taken by Life magazine.

Such private moments were shared with a family far vaster than the large Kennedy clan itself: the nation itself.

They appeared in the largest circulation weekly magazine, Life,  as a cover story.

Joe Kennedy’s long-range determination to get his son elected as the nation’s first Irish Catholic President, however, didn’t end with the massive media coverage of Jack and Jackie Kennedy’s wedding.

Over the next seven years, he fueled a constant publicity campaign with help from his network of powerful magazine publishers, newspaper editors, and television executives.

Weeks after the media blitz of the wedding, Jack and Jackie were interviewed about their honeymoon on the popular CBS program, “Person to Person.”

Here is an abbreviated version of it:

Thousands of appealing photographs of the iconic couple were also no accident.

Despite her very real anxiety about posing for photographs, Mrs. Kennedy agreed to pose for several 1950s fashion spreads using political wives as models.

Usually intended for national publications, most of the photographers hired to record the various turning points of Kennedy’s rise towards the presidency had world-class reputations, including Ed Clark, Jacques Lowe, Richard Avedon and Mark Shaw.

On occasion, Mrs. Kennedy reluctantly agreed to pose in new fashion styles of upcoming seasons in popular women’s magazines. She later said she “completely despised” doing this.

The very first series of images taken of Jackie and Jack as Fifties newlyweds, however, turned out to also be the first big assignment for Baltimore photographer Orlando Suero.

The images were taken over a period of five days by the young photographer working for the Three Lions Picture Agency. Despite the hundreds of images resulting from the twenty or so sessions, only a handful were finally published in the popular women’s magazine McCall’s.

The 1954 photo series shows a more open Jackie Kennedy.

Unlike many of the later photo sessions, those by Suero project a more uninhibited Jackie Kennedy, unafraid even of displaying a vulnerability she would very soon after find need to shield, protecting herself not only from emotional hurt but public curiosity.

Jackie Kennedy’s appreciative thank you letter to the photographer, provides some detail about their time together:

“I have just seen McCall’s and so has Jack and we are so happy… They are the only pictures I’ve ever seen of me where I don’t look like something out of a horror movie. If I’d realized what a wonderful photographer you were… I never would have been the jittery subject I was. Poor Orlando! Remember I wouldn’t even eat a Good Humor. I was so lens-shy.”

Four days before Christmas in 1954, Jackie Kennedy and her brother-in-law watch as her husband is transported from New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery after spinal surgery, to be flown to his parents’ Florida home for months of convalescing.

By the time the pictures were published in October, however, Jack Kennedy lay in a hospital undergoing risky spinal surgery, his wife dazed as she faced the reality of either living with a disabled husband or even losing him.

The idyllic newlywed life was over and the ensuing traumas of the next several years fundamentally changed their marital dynamic.

Jackie suffered a miscarriage. Jack became more flagrant with his adultery. Jackie suffered a stillborn birth. It was a dark period; credible sources claim Mrs. Kennedy wanted a divorce.

Jackie Kennedy rides in a parade open-car during his 1958 Senate re-election campaign.

Only after the healthy birth of their daughter in 1957 and then Jackie Kennedy’s embracing a public role in JFK’s 1958 Senate reelection campaign did an equilibrium between them.

Both events were a prelude for the hectic but happy time that restored more of the political partnership they’d enjoyed during their newlywed year.

By 1960, Jackie Kennedy insisted on having both a covert and overt part in JFK’s presidential campaign, her efforts proving vital to his winning New York and thus the election. And their second child, a son, was born healthy.

Standing outside the last of their four consecutive homes before the White House, the Kennedys pose for a photo series made in preparation for his 1960 presidential campaign.

Even had they not endured the darker times, the romantic period of their newlywed year could never have lasted simply by the fact that all marriages change and evolve.

Still, there was one aspect of Jackie Kennedy’s existence as a Fifties Housewife that she held onto for the rest of her life.

In one of the few magazine spreads she agreed to pose for, Jackie Kennedy struck a look that as the quintessential Fifties Housewife.

She never lost her love of entertaining at dinner parties.

As important to her as the menus, flowers, candlelight and music was the choice of fascinating guests who promised the most stimulating conversation.

As First Lady she, of course, had to pull this off on a far larger scale with dozens of guests, but she also continued to entertain this way in private quarters, creating a private, family dining room on the second floor.

As a widow living on New York’s Fifth Avenue, she carried on alone, then with more dinner guests from the arts like Andy Warhol, Frederico Fellini, Diana Vreeland, Salvador Dali, Lauren Bacall.

As a second wife, she adapted this to the venue of al fresco dining on her husband’s Greek island, and widowed a second time, she did likewise  at her summer beach home on Martha’s Vineyard.

On the tape recording heard on the video at the end of the photo essay, it was presiding as hostess at intimate dinner parties that Mrs. Onassis most fondly remembered long years afterwards from her long ago life as the 195os newlywed Mrs. John F. Kennedy.

Jackie Kennedy as a Fifties Newlywed, Housewife & Hostess

The first home of newlyweds Jack and Jackie Kennedy was a narrow brick townhouse in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C.

Jacqueline Kennedy leaves her Dent Street house with her primary daytime companion, her elderly but spry poodle Gaullie.

Jackie Kennedy heads out for a day of errands with her poodle Gaullie.

With her poodle in tow, the new Mrs. Kennedy does some art gallery window shopping as she goes about neighborhood errands.

She and Gaullie pause to chat with a shopkeeper.

Posing with Gaullie to look over some flowers in front of the store.

Mrs. Kennedy talks with a craftsman about a picture frame she wants made.

Errands done, Jackie Kennedy and Gaullie head home.

In the spring of 1954, Jackie Kennedy took a series of American history courses; versed in European history she felt herself at a disadvantage with her husband’s expertise on U.S. history and determined to learn as much as he.

Jackie Kennedy posing on steps at Georgetown University.

After class, Jackie Kennedy waits to speak with her professor. He later helped her with research for her husband’s book, Profiles in Courage.

Jackie Kennedy in one of her American history classes.

Jackie Kennedy posing on the Georgetown campus. As Jackie Bouvier she had graduated from nearby George Washington University three years earlier, in 1951.

Jackie Kennedy posed at Georgetown University.

Striking a pose as the quintessentially submissive Fifties Housewife, Jackie Kennedy gets a smile from her husband as she pours his coffee.

Yet more coffee! Now seated to join the Senator for breakfast, Jackie Kennedy admitted that the extent of her morning food specialties were boiling eggs and toasting bread. She told a local reporter in this time period that she had a habit of burning the coffee.

The Kennedys review some of their wedding pictures.

Looking at more pictures – as more pictures are taken of them.

The couple lean over the railing of their bedroom, looking over their small back yard.

Jackie Kennedy strikes a more winsome pose on the balcony.

Mrs. Kennedy encouraged her husband to take up painting as a form of relaxation – when she added that Winston Churchill did this, he gave it a try.

Jackie Kennedy takes a closer look at her husband’s oil painting of some row houses; JFK did not turn out many finished canvases. Unlike those of Churchill and President Eisenhower, almost none outside of his family are known to exist.

All of the Suero images were, of course, posed. Some, like the one showing Jackie Kennedy gardening a bit were entirely staged; she was never known to have a green thumb.

Unlike many other future presidential couples, Jack and Jackie Kennedy did not have a habit of reading the newspaper together and then discussing or debating the top stories of the day.

Mrs. Kennedy adjusts a bowl strategically near a photo of members of her wedding party.

Meticulous decorator, Jackie Kennedy hangs a framed picture in the living room.

Jackie and sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy watch their husbands tossing a football.

Football game continuing into the street, Jackie Kennedy points to brother-in-law Bobby to strike a pose for her camera.

With a love of photography that increased during her year and a half working as a newspaper inquiring photographer, Jackie Kennedy snaps her husband, brother-in-law and sister-in-law.

Jackie snaps Jack and Ethel.

The Kennedys pose with Jack’s lifelong friend and confidante Lem Billings.

Weekdays, while her husband was at the office, Jackie Kennedy got in lots of Gaullie time.

Weekdays, while her husband was at the office, Jackie Kennedy got in lots of Gaullie time.

Jackie grooming Gaullie.

Checking on Gaullie outside.

At the 1954 “Bal De La Soie” annual April In Paris Ball on the twenty-first of that month, hosted at the Waldorf Astoria, Jacqueline Kennedy modelled in a runway parade of ten gowns designed for the event by leading Parisian couturier.

Mrs. Kennedy, like many women who came of age in the Fifties, was a lifelong smoker – but rarely permitted herself to be caught puffing around a photographer.

The Kennedys pose at a social event during a period of the Fifties when their marriage was at the breaking point, 1956.

The Kennedys on a rare night out in New York, at the Stork Club, on May 8, 1955.

Although there is evidence that Jackie Kennedy drafted some of his public statements and edited his outgoing correspondence, the earliest evidence that she edited his speeches began with his formal public announcement that he was seeking his party’s 1960 presidential nomination.

Although the Suero series of images of the Kennedy newlyweds were posed, the role Jackie Kennedy played using her writing skills in a variety of efforts helping the Senator was genuine.

Jack and Jackie at home in their Boston apartment, fall of 1953. By his third year as a U.S. Senator, Jack Kennedy was rarely ever home, usually out on the road campaigning for other candidates and soon enough his Senate re-election and then the presidency.

The young Senate wife and the freshman Senator walking across the West Front of the U.S. Capitol.

The Kennedys at the Capitol: a standard pose in the 40s, 50s and 60s, as congressional spouses began assuming a higher profile among constituents.

Although she usually worked at a desk, quietly by herself when she was up at her husband’s Senate office, Jackie Kennedy always checked with him for factual information when drafting responses to mail from non-English speaking constituents.

Before they married, Jackie Bouvier had used her linguistic skill by translating French military reports, and political journals focused on Indochina, in preparing for the Senator’s first major

Senator and Mrs. Kennedy having lunch together in the Senate Dining Room at the U.S. Capitol.

Jackie Kennedy takes in a Senate hearing on the McCarren immigration bill, with her sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy.

Among the reasons she later said she was often dashed up to Capitol Hill was when a public figure – usually a foreign diplomat or representative – was scheduled to speak or meet with her husband. The identity of the figure here, photographed in 1959, speaking to Senator Kennedy is unknown.

Although she didn’t work in Senator Kennedy’s Capitol Hill office as often each week in the later 50s, after the November 1957 birth of her daughter, she did continue to appear and work there – especially in the fall of 1959, as he began preparing for the 1960 presidential primaries.

At the end of the Senator’s workday, it was Jackie Kennedy who did the driving home – and was, according to some friends, always a less distracted motorist than her husband.

The Kennedys taking a stroll in winter around Georgetown; with many of their closest friends and some family members living nearby, they always just walked to other homes.

The Kennedy kitchen – where Jackie made no claim to culinary abilities. When dating Jack, however, she was known to flip burgers and hot dogs just fine.

Instead of finessing over the stove and oven, Jackie Kennedy worked with her cook on the menu, and did the shopping for the food.

Before a dinner party, Jacqueline Kennedy sorted through record albums, choosing music to set the mood for her guests. This image appears to have been taken in their Boston apartment.

Since most of her dinner guests were local friends and family, Jackie Kennedy informally phoned to invite them, rather than send any formal invitations.

In the early days of her marriage, before caterers were usually hired to take care of her entire dinner party needs, Jackie Kennedy strolled out during the late morning to pick out her own flowers for the evening.

Pausing at her table set for dinner guests.

Jackie Kennedy straightens the Senator’s tie before their guests arrive. She made an immediately visible change to his public persona by vetting his daily wardrobe.

Although he was known to hit the roof during the presidential years when the bills came in for some of his wife’s most expensive clothing, Jack Kennedy also often glowed with pride and bragged about her appearance.

Jacqueline Kennedy in her favorite role: hosting an intimate dinner party with stimulating guests and intimate friends, seen seated here with Robert and Ethel Kennedy, and Lem Billings among others.

After dinner, the Kennedys often liked to play games like charades; at larger events, Jackie Onassis laughingly recalled how the men and the women still separated from each other. In this picture, Bobby Kennedy pets a small black dog, not identified or known in the lore about the family.

John and Jacqueline Kennedy entertaining Senator John Sherman Cooper and his wife Laraine at dinner in their Georgetown home. This particular dinner party took place just before the 1960 presidential campaign.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis in one of the Suero series, capturing a more innocent and light-hearted young woman, before darker events changed her.

Categories: The Kennedys

Tags: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, John F Kennedy, U.S. Senate