In RestructuredText, you can render a header row in a table like this (taken from the documentation :
+------------------------+------------+----------+----------+
| Header row, column 1 | Header 2 | Header 3 | Header 4 |
| (header rows optional) | | | |
+========================+============+==========+==========+
| body row 1, column 1 | column 2 | column 3 | column 4 |
+------------------------+------------+----------+----------+
| body row 2 | Cells may span columns. |
+------------------------+------------+---------------------+
| body row 3 | Cells may | - Table cells |
+------------------------+ span rows. | - contain |
| body row 4 | | - body elements. |
+------------------------+------------+---------------------+
Is it possible to do the something similar with the first column? An example, which clearly doesn't work, could be the following (note the double like at the end of column 1):
+------------------------++------------+----------+----------+
| Header row, column 1 || Header 2 | Header 3 | Header 4 |
| (header rows optional) || | | |
+========================++============+==========+==========+
| body row 1, column 1 || column 2 | column 3 | column 4 |
+------------------------++------------+----------+----------+
| body row 2 || Cells may span columns. |
+------------------------++------------+---------------------+
| body row 3 || Cells may | - Table cells |
+------------------------++ span rows. | - contain |
| body row 4 || | - body elements. |
+------------------------++------------+---------------------+
You may achieve this using list-table directive with option stub-columns. Or, you may even combine stub-columns with header-rows. See the http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#list-table for the details. Hereafter is a simple example:
.. list-table:: Sample list table
:widths: 10 20 20
:header-rows: 1
:stub-columns: 1
* -
- Column 1
- Column 2
* - Row 1
- Hello
- World!
* - Row 2
- Hello
- List Table!
* - Row 3
- This
- Works
An obvious disadvantage is that you need to maintain table content as a list, which may be not that much convenient as with regular simple tables. So, you might want to check out the csv-table directive here: https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#csv-table-1, which also has option stub-columns.
If you need to stick to regular tables syntax - sorry, I'm not sure this is possible. As a workaround - you can use strong emphasis for text in the first column :-)