Philanthropist Catherine Filene Shouse was the only woman who could claim to have met every U.S. president from Calvin Coolidge to Bill Clinton and document friendships with Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt and Edna St. Vincent Millay. She was also the subject of Ann W. Caldwell’s lecture at Brandeis on Thursday. Caldwell is President Emerita of the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute of Health Professions and is currently working on a biography of Shouse’s remarkable life.

Throughout Shouse’s life, from 1896 to 1994, “there were not many years in which she did not do something significant,” Caldwell noted. “The first platform she created while still an undergraduate … was an Intercollegiate Conference on Careers for Women,” followed by a publication of her book, “Careers for Women.” Shouse, who went by “Kay” in her adult life, would go on to become widely involved in philanthropy and social programs, including a German Youth program to de-Nazify children after World War II and the donation of her country estate, Wolf Trap Farm, as a national park.

“I think I’m drawn to Kay Shouse’s life first because I knew her” — the two had met through Wheaton College’s alumni network — “but also because the subject of women in power interests me,” Caldwell shared, noting, “Power is too often prescribed to women in the pejorative.” She added that Shouse’s power was expressed in numerous ways, including her agency and independence with money and property. “Wolf Trap was all Kay’s, her idea and her stage, though she often publicly demurred,” and her “CEO-like approach, backed by her financial support” made her unique, Caldwell added. Furthermore, “she was never reluctant to exercise power, nor was she hesitant to use her family’s powerful name and fortune”; Shouse’s father, Lincoln Filene, was the head of the Filene Department Store company.

Even as a young girl, Shouse was accustomed to high-brow social connections, including “Louis Brandeis, … a good friend and the family lawyer.” Caldwell stressed, however, that “Kay’s relationship to power was not merely derivative or associative; she was ambitious herself.”

Shouse was born in Boston and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1918. Caldwell asserted that D.C. was fitting for Shouse, since it was “a place where power was distributed and redistributed freely.” As a result, “her power was magnetized there in a way it might never have been had she remained in Boston. Her family expectations, the well-known Filene name and the tightly structured nature of Boston’s society could have constrained her to a more conventional life.” What Shouse brought from Boston, though, was patriotism and New England pragmatism, according to Caldwell. Aside from her work to benefit the German youth and her donation of Wolf Trap, Caldwell attributes Shouse’s “simple belief that if you were invited to the White House, no matter what the circumstance, you went. In a word, when the president asks, you say yes.” As to her pragmatism, Caldwell cited that “she once exhibited that when she drove herself, dressed in a long, elegant evening dress from Wolf Trap to a Washington embassy in a pick-up truck because it was the only transportation available at Wolf Trap.” One additional trait of Shouse’s, Caldwell shared, was her “unconscious affinity for the privileges and prerogative of the wealth; some would call it entitlement.”

Shouse put a lot of work into creating an identity for herself. Caldwell identified the results of Shouse’s self-construction: “She thought of herself as a rebel, and in some sense, she was. … She loved fast cars, airplanes, smoking, cocktails and sexual freedom, but she never strayed all that far from the establishment in either Boston or Washington.”

Caldwell hypothesized that Shouse was “strategically nonpartisan” in order to maintain her influence and centrality, though her second husband, Jouett Shouse, was a conservative Democrat who served as a U.S. Congressman and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. He is known to have “led the Liberty League in opposition to the New Deal and FDR.” She exemplified this nonpartisanship in her shifting public belief in feminism. In the 1920s, “Kay did not consider herself a feminist. She publicly disavowed that label. … She [later] mused that perhaps she had been a feminist after all, but simply did not realize it at the time.”

On another front, “Kay never identified with her Jewish heritage, and the Filenes were highly assimilated. As one person said of the German Jews who immigrated at the end of the 19th century, ‘They were Americans first, Germans second, and Jews third, if at all.’ … Kay identified herself as Episcopalian when she enrolled at Wheaton College, and married twice, both times to Protestants, in Christian ceremonies.”

Following the line of Shouse’s carefully constructed identity, Caldwell called even the nature of Shouse’s independence and agency into question. Staying true to her rebellious character, “[Shouse] managed her own assets, and ignored her father’s more conservative advice,” and told her acquaintances in D.C. that she was “disowned” as a result of their ideological differences, though this was ultimately not true. Instead, she continued to freely spend her father’s money, whether on herself or on her philanthropic interests. “She never experienced the family’s struggles in poverty that her father did in the decades before her birth,” and Lincoln Filene never forced his daughter through that experience, despite any differences in opinion they might have had.

This is not to say that her personality was not, indeed, strong: “Kay took flying lessons at Amelia Earhart’s urging. … She liked flying almost as much as fast cars.” Kay had a chauffeur, but Caldwell noted that one could often see the “chauffeur riding as a passenger.”

Armed with the knowledge of all that Shouse did with her life, the admirable and the not-so-admirable deeds, Caldwell told the audience that she continues to have difficulty deciding how she feels about the legendary woman. “There are some days I can’t stand her, and some days I find her remarkable,” she said.