Ellen Axson Wilson grew up in Rome, Georgia. Her family was socially prominent and well to do. Both her grandfathers were Presbyterian ministers, but Ellen showed little interest in following the examples of her mother and grandmothers. Her father declared her to be too “obstreperous and independent” for her own good, and she had a rebellious streak in her. Her dream was to go to New York and become an artist.
Ellen attended a local women’s college. After her mother died, she took care of her three younger siblings. She was just beginning to work out details of running the family and becoming a serious art student when Woodrow Wilson came along. He called her Eileen, and pursued her with a writing campaign consisting of what one historian has called “among the greatest love letters in the English language.”
They were eventually married, but not before Woodrow completed his graduate studies and Ellen went to New York to study art. She lived in a boardinghouse on West Eleventh Street and attended art classes nearby. She also enrolled in the New York Art Students’ League. While in New York, she taught two nights a week in a missionary school.
They married on June 24, 1885, and boarded with another family for the first year of their marriage. Wilson was earning $1,500 a year, and Ellen gave up her art classes for home economics classes. In their second year of marriage, they were able to rent a house of their own, which was fortunate as Ellen gave birth to two girls in 25 months. Two years later, she gave birth to a third daughter. Wilson had wanted a boy, but tried to be cheerful, writing his wife that he was “glad---almost as at the thought of having a boy.”
Ellen and Woodrow had something of a partnership in their marriage, although Ellen was the junior partner and stayed in the background. She was a skilled hostess who worked to further Woodrow’s career, but she also translated German texts for him and worked out administrative arrangements for him to submit to the Princeton faculty. All the while, she continued to paint and sell her work.
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