The First Gentleman?

I'm working on a conference paper on Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes; or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868). I've been reading an article by Katherine Adams entitled "Freedom and Ballgowns: Elizabeth Keckley and the Work of Domesticity" for the paper, and I ran across a quotation that made me question the position of the "First Gentleman." Adams writes "The First Lady, and the home life for which she metonymically stands, enable the president perfectly to resemble (without himself being of) the ordinary citizenry. In total, the domestic spectacle of the White House provides a topological referent of those utopian values of freedom and equality invested in the head of the state." Although Adams is ostensibly writing about the presidency in the 19th century and specifically about Keckley's representation of Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln, I believe her statements are relevant to today's political situation.

If the First Lady is a symbol of normalcy for the president and a symbol of domesticity, what would the "First Gentleman" represent? If we need to see the president with a "normal" home life, does this begin to explain why we have yet to see a woman run for president? Does it also begin to explain why Hillary Rodham Clinton was so demonized while she was First Lady? Is our need to see the nuclear family represented in the White House so great that we cannot accept that the best candidate may be a woman? I would argue that we're largely unprepared to see a woman ordering military leaders to go to war. We're equally unprepared to see a man on television explaining the theme behind the White House's decorations for the 2006 holiday season (which the First Lady's do every year). We may have made progress in our individual homes, evidenced by the fact that about 10 to 15% of husbands now stay at home while their wives bring home the bacon. But it seems as though we're still following a 19th--and perhaps even 18th--century construct: the President runs the country while the First Lady is in charge of domestic responsibilities, such as redecorating the White House and planning receptions.

And what would we call the husband of the first female president, assuming she had a husband?