Jacqueline Kennedy

"I'm 62 now, and I've been in the public eye for more than 30 years," Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis told a friend in 1991. "I can't believe anybody still cares about me or is interested in what I do." How wrong she was.

When she stepped into the spotlight she was just 31, the youngest American First Lady of the 20th century. She lived in the White House only from 1961 to 1963, yet remained an object of admiration, and even obsession, until the day she died.

Part of the fascination with Jackie was due to timing: television exploded as a mass medium at the precise moment she and John F. Kennedy, and their children became Americas First Family. We could see them on TV; we loved what we saw; we wanted to see them again. Later, after the assassinations of JFK and Robert Kennedy, she provided a place to focus everyone's grief.

She was more, though, than a pretty face on the small screen or the queen in a sad fairy tale. As a modern Supermum, she raised Caroline and John into exemplary adults, avoiding the potholes many of their cousins hit. Just as feminism arrived, she went to work as a book editor, bringing her lunch from home and sitting in a windowless office until she earned her way as the corporate ladder. She kept on trying at romance, too, marrying Aristotle Onassis and, after he died, settling into a comfortable relationship with financier Maurice Templesman.

This past spring a tribute to Jackie Kennedy, the modern woman—plus some spectacular clothes she wore in the White House—was exhibited at New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, before it traveled to Boston. "It's an opportunity," says guest curator Hamish Bowles, "to explore the style and the substance of a woman who defined a generation."