question

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:52 AM -0400 7/13/04, James A. Landau wrote:
>In a message dated Mon, 12 Jul 2004 10:46:19 -0400
>Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
>What happens when the pastor is a woman, and married?  Is there a
>label for her husband?  (I know the same question would arise for the
>husband of a (female) president or governor, and I think the answer
>is that there's no such label, because there's no role of "first
>gentleman" or whatever, but I just wanted to confirm this intuition.)
>
>When referring to the White House, it is NOT true that the "First Lady" is
>the wife of the President.  The FIrst Lady is the official hostess
>of the United
>States government, which means she is the woman who does the formal welcoming
>of the guests when the President, in his/her role as Head of State, hosts an
>official event (e.g. a state dinner).
>
>If the President is male and married, then by default his wife acts as First
>Lady.  If the President is male and single, then some female relative acts as
>First Lady.  When the bachelor James Buchanan was President, his niece Harriet
>Lane acted as First Lady.
>
>So what happens should we have a female President?  At official functions she
>will be the First Lady, as well as Head of State, Chief Executive, and
>Commander-in-Chief.  Furthermore, if she is married, her husband
>will act as the
>official host at official functions.  Undoubtedly many journalists
>will use the
>title "First Gentleman", but we will have to wait and see whether it
>catches on.
>
I beg to differ, at least in part.  By saying 'it is NOT true that
the "First Lady" is the wife of the President', you are taking "First
Lady" to be a technical term, whose definition is given by experts in
the relevant field. (Cf. Putnam on the division of linguistic labor.)
I'm not sure this is tenable, at least for the normal use of the
expression.  For the vast majority of speakers, I'd wager, the wife
of a male President, Governor, etc. who declines to serve as hostess*
is nevertheless First Lady, simply by virtue of being married to the
executive in question.  And a female President (or Governor, etc.) is
not (also) First Lady.  There may well be a technical sense or
context in which your definition (on which hostess role trumps spouse
status) is respected, but it appears that such a sense is not
directly reflected in current dictionary entries; thus the AHD4 has:

The wife or hostess of the chief executive of a country, state, or city.

This disjunction does indeed allow for a gap-filler in the case of
unmarried male executives with non-wife hostesses, but also
encompasses non-hostess wives for what I take to be "faute de mieux"
situations of the Buchanan type.   At the same time, it excludes
(correctly, I would submit) female executives who serve as hostesses
in their spare time.  Further, it is because the
spouse-of-[presupposed-male]-chief-executive is the standard
denotation of "First Lady" that the "First Gentleman" title was
analogically derived.

Larry

*One example might be Abigail Bartlet of "The West Wing" who is not a
"hostess" in the traditional sense but is indeed "First Lady" and
referred to as such.  Of course, all of this presupposes we know what
it means to be "an official hostess".