When Gerald Ford’s voice gave out on election night in 1976, Betty Ford read his concession speech. Courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford Library.
Three First Ladies were represented at the National Women’s Conference in Houston in November 1977: from left, Liz Carpenter, press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson, is shown with Rosalynn Carter and Betty Ford. Courtesy of the Carter Presidential Library.
After her first White House year, Nancy Reagan increased her involvement in programs to combat use of illegal drugs. Courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Library.
Although she frequently poked fun at her own appearance, Barbara Bush oversaw a White House that released very flattering photographs of her and her family. Courtesy of the George Bush Library and Museum.
Hillary Clinton frequently felt the need to emphasize her domestic side during her time in the White House. Courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
Laura Bush maintained high popularity ratings while her husband’s poll numbers sank. Courtesy of First Lady Laura Bush’s office.
When Senator Hillary Clinton nearly won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2008, many Americans changed their minds about whether a woman could be elected chief executive. © Getty Images.
As First Lady, Michelle Obama billed herself as mom in chief to two young daughters, but many Americans focused on her fashionable wardrobe and her athleticism. Courtesy of the White House website, www.whitehouse.gov.
The country’s disillusionment with government influenced the new First Lady. The United States’ recent military involvement in Vietnam and the rumors of doctored casualty reports and other concealments, Spiro Agnew’s “nolo contendere” response to charges that he had accepted bribes, and Richard Nixon’s alleged complicity in the Watergate crimes committed during his 1972 campaign all added to a consensus that honesty had value but that in government it was rare. Betty Ford explained that she felt a need to be open: “I tried to be honest,” she later wrote. “I tried not to dodge subjects. I felt the people had a right to know where I stood.”12
In discussions with reporters, she spoke with disarming frankness about her children, her own health problems, and how she felt about being a political wife. When she hired a press secretary, she gave her two assignments, one of which was to provide “honest answers.”13 This was no new guise contrived to “sell” a First Lady. Betty Ford had always had a reputation for candor, and she had already shocked reporters when, as wife of the vice president, she gave as explanation for her drowsiness: “I take a Valium every day.”14 In the fishbowl at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, her announcements simply received more attention, and rather than rendering her gauche or stupid, they made her enormously popular. In short order, Betty Ford made honesty something chic—and reticence, passé. Helen Thomas, veteran UPI reporter, echoed her colleagues when she pronounced Betty Ford a “real friend” of the press,15 and Rosalynn Carter, who succeeded Betty, credited her with “making it easier to talk.”16
This new approach became immediately evident when Betty Ford scheduled her first press conference less than a month after Gerald’s swearing in. Helen McCain Smith, press secretary to Pat Nixon, had stayed on to help in the transition, but this event in no way resembled Pat’s encounters with the fourth estate. One hundred and fifty reporters heard a slightly nervous Betty Ford announce that she intended to work for substantive changes, especially in the campaign for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. This was quite a different exchange than the one in March 1933, when fewer than three dozen reporters attended Eleanor Roosevelt’s first press conference and heard her promise to avoid substantive issues and never comment on pending legislation. In Betty Ford, feminists finally had a First Lady who worked for them openly, rather than discreetly behind the scenes.
Surprises continued when a reporter asked how the new First Lady stood on abortion, and she described her position as “definitely closer” to that of Nelson Rockefeller, who supported the Supreme Court’s decision leaving the matter up to the woman and her physician, than to that of Senator James Buckley who thought the Court had gone too far. Reporters could hardly fail to notice that Gerald Ford would have answered differently.17 In Alabama, a a few days later, Betty Ford spoke to the fears of many American mothers when she speculated that her children had probably experimented with marijuana.18 Later, she raised some eyebrows when she confessed that she had often been “tempted to split” her ticket.19
For the rest of her time in the White House, Betty Ford showed no signs of abandoning the stands she took in those first few weeks, and she became closely identified with the Equal Rights Amendment. First introduced in Congress in 1923, the version approved in 1972 was short and simple: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Pat Nixon, First Lady at the time Congress acted, kept a good distance from the amendment, insisting that she favored equal rights and equal pay but that she saw no need for federal action to guarantee either one.20 Pat Nixon’s view had, in fact, been the common one before about 1970; even some self-identified feminists had opposed the amendment because of the fear that it would wipe out the hard-won protective legislation for women workers—laws that shielded women from having to lift heavy loads, work night shifts, and undertake hazardous tasks.
By 1970, however, the situation had changed because federal courts had begun to void those state laws as discriminatory. Working against the ERA while claiming to protect women’s interests no longer made sense. The anti-ERA movement, increasingly visible and vocal in the 1970s under the direction of Phyllis Schlafly, used different arguments, including the charge that such an amendment was unnecessary (since several states had passed their own equal rights measures) or unwise (because women would then be expected to move into dangerous or unpleasant areas—including the armed forces and unisex toilets). Feminists responded to the opposition by making the Equal Rights Amendment the focus of their campaign, just as their grandmothers had singled out suffrage.
By the time Betty Ford turned the weight of her position to the issue, the amendment stood before the states, waiting for the final three to ratify (of the thirty-eight necessary). When time came for votes in states considered likely to approve the amendment (Illinois, Missouri, North Dakota, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona), the president’s wife got on the telephone and lobbied wavering legislators for their votes. Her press secretary, Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, reported that Betty used a very gentle approach, but that she could be persuasive. “I realize you’re under a lot of pressure from the voters today,” she told one woman legislator from a rural district in Missouri, “but I’m just calling to let you know that the President and I are considerably interested…. I think the ERA is so important.”21 The president’s wife installed a separate telephone line in the White House for her lobbying because, as she later explained, “there’s a law or something about that sort of thing.”22
First Ladies had been twisting arms since Abigail Adams went after funds for furnishing the White House, but never before had the action been quite so open, so widely reported, or directed at a decidedly feminist cause. When questioned about the propriety of intruding in state politics, Betty’s press secretary insisted this was a national issue since an amendment to the Constitution was at stake. To those who thought such activism inappropriate, Betty Ford replied: “[I] will stick to my guns,”23 and she did, even when mail ran three to one against her24 and pickets marched in front of the White House waving “Stop ERA” signs.25 She appeared undaunted by letters to the editors of major newspapers charging her with “arm twisting tactics … [which are] unseemly at best,”26 or by more dramatic objections, such as that of a group of black-clad figures who paraded in front of the White House and then were shown on evening television, chanting in unison: “Betty Ford is trying to press a second-rate manhood on American women.”27
In spite of her efforts, the Equal Rights Amendment failed ratification by the requisite numb
er of states, and Betty Ford directed the remainder of her work on behalf of women to getting them appointed to important jobs. It is impossible to calculate exactly her influence; but in light of the president’s own pronouncements, his record is interesting. In his abbreviated presidency, he named twenty-one women to posts requiring Senate approval. Another forty-five selected by his predecessors remained in their jobs, bringing the total to sixty-six, far higher than it had ever been.28 Some of the Ford appointments were at high levels, including several commission heads, important judgeships, and a cabinet member: Carla Anderson Hills, as secretary of Housing and Urban Development after March 10, 1975. Betty did not have the pleasure of seeing her husband appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court. Gerald Ford filled only one vacancy on the high tribunal and that went to John Paul Stevens in December 1975.
In addition to her work on women’s issues, Betty Ford devoted considerable attention to the arts, especially dance. She had begun dancing when she was eight years old and during two summers she had studied with Martha Graham at Bennington College. After graduating from high school, she had rejected college and Grand Rapids in favor of New York City and more dance. Although she never made Graham’s top troupe and had to support herself partly by modeling for the John Powers Agency, she retained a lifelong interest in dance. In middle age, when she was advised by a psychotherapist to take time for something she enjoyed, she chose dance.
Art enthusiasts welcomed an advocate in the White House and predicted she would help them,29 but First Lady Ford gave less to the arts in the next few years than she got from her association with them. Innumerable photographs of her attending dance programs and meeting with artists gave the public an image of a healthy, active president’s wife involved in a noncontroversial area. In fact, her association with dance far outshadowed much of her other hard work. When she accompanied the president to China, she had wanted to avoid the “peeking in the kitchen pots” coverage that Pat Nixon had received in 1972, and she consulted with Chinese specialists so she would be informed. What television crews preferred to catch, however, was her visit to a school, where the Ford team had coached the children. Betty, whom the New York Times described as “Not a Robot at All,” delighted them all by clapping her hands and dancing with them.30
That kind of coverage, publicizing an attractive, energetic First Lady, achieved immediate rewards, and in 1975, the National Academy of Design named Betty Ford a Fellow, the first president’s wife to be so honored since the group singled out Eleanor Roosevelt in 1934. In making the award, the photographer Ansel Adams called Betty “the most refreshing character we’ve had in public life for sometime,” (and he significantly did not limit the field to women).31
In many ways a very traditional wife, Betty Ford crossed lines to appeal to feminists and to less independent-minded housewives. In conversations, she frequently emphasized her traditional values, telling a legislator on one occasion that she was no “wild-eyed Liberal” and that she enjoyed “being a wife and mother as much as anyone.” “But,” she would continue, “that is not the point … women should have equal opportunities.”32 She refused to bow to Phyllis Schlafly’s claims of being chief protector of mothers’ interests and would point out that Phyllis’s six children outnumbered her own brood by only two. In describing “liberation” as “inwardly happy,” she found friends in both the feminist and more traditional camps. Her whole life history spoke to the experience of women who, like herself, had never worked a day outside their own homes after their marriages. But her outspoken support of women’s issues gained approval from others who could not imagine adulthood without careers of their own. Her candor in dealing with her own experiences—drug dependence, cancer surgery, psychotherapy, and her children’s experimentation with illegal drugs—won the admiration of women who were tired of hearing about “super perfect” families in the White House.
Before she had held the job six months, Betty Ford’s hope that she would be remembered “in a very kind way as a constructive wife of the President”33 was assured. Her unfortunate bout with cancer aroused admiration for her courage, and her popularity cut across social and economic lines. She played a cameo role on the Mary Tyler Moore show and topped the Gallup Poll of “Most Admired Women”34 (although Good Housekeeping readers had rated her less favorably, causing a spokesperson for the magazine to explain early in the Ford administration that “feminist types” did not appeal to all Americans.)35 Betty Ford also led a list compiled by five “opinionmakers” as “best epitomizing the word ‘class,’ “—outranking old-timers Princess Grace of Monaco, Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, and Katharine Hepburn. The woman almost unknown to the public three years earlier had made large strides, and 1976 campaign buttons supporting “Betty’s husband for President” showed just how valuable an active presidential wife could be.
Betty Ford’s Democratic counterpart in the 1976 election proved a formidable opponent, but unlike Betty (or any of the preceding four First Ladies), Rosalynn Smith Carter was a newcomer to Washington. Had she trained at the center of national politics, she might have formed a loyal support system among reporters and other oldtimers, but her apprenticeship had been limited to the Georgia governor’s mansion and to a long campaign across the nation.
That background did not stop her, however, from compiling a remarkable list of accomplishments in just four years, and she did it as the most traditional of wives. “Jimmy and I were always partners,” she would announce, and then proceed to act in such a way that historians would describe her as “surrogate, confidante, and joint policymaker.”36 Abigail McCarthy, the perceptive observer of political wives, attributed Rosalynn Carter’s special combination of supportive wifeliness and independent strength to her southern roots, and she had much in common, McCarthy pointed out, with the heroine of Ellen Glasgow’s novel, The Vein of Iron.37
Rosalynn was fifty years old at the time of Jimmy’s inauguration in January 1977. Her life up to that point had been divided roughly into thirds, with the initial segment ending at age thirteen when her father died. Like most of her immediate predecessors, she experienced the death of a parent before she had reached adulthood, and for her the loss was traumatic. “He thought I could do anything,” she later recalled;38 and since she was the oldest of his four children, she took his deathbed request to “look after Mother for me” more to heart than did the others.39 Her mother added to Rosalynn’s sense of responsibility by relying on her almost as another adult. “I was devastated,” Rosalynn wrote. “My childhood really ended at that moment.”40
Her education, however, was just beginning. A seventh grade teacher who was “young” and “beautiful” and “[who] I thought knew more than anyone I had ever met … was extremely interested in current events and prodded us to read the newspapers and listen to the radio, to stretch our minds about our country and the world … . I began … to discover a world of interesting people and faraway places.”41 High school graduation came first—with Rosalynn delivering the valedictory for her class of eleven—and then two years at a nearby junior college. Her real education began, however, when at eighteen, she married the local boy who had already distinguished himself by being nominated to the U.S. Naval Academy. Jimmy Carter, ready for his first naval assignment, was her ticket out of Georgia.
For a curious and energetic young wife, having a husband whose assignments took them to Norfolk, Virginia, then Hawaii, and finally Connecticut offered opportunities that she could only have dreamed of in tiny Plains, Georgia. While Jimmy was frequently on duty at sea for days or even weeks at a time, Rosalynn managed a household that eventually included three sons born within five years. When her husband came home, she worked with him through courses in the “Great Books” and in classical music. She learned the hula in Hawaii and memorized Shakespeare in Virginia, but most importantly she developed confidence that she could do things for herself. “[Jimmy] assumed that I could manage well and always made me feel he was proud of me. So I was forced to discove
r that I could do the things that had to be done.”42
The absence of close friends increased Rosalynn’s emotional dependence on her husband. Plains had “literally no other girls … my age,” she told an interviewer,43 and the naval assignments, each lasting only a few years, gave little opportunity to forge strong friendships. Her days were filled with housekeeping. “I was the total wife and mother,” she later wrote, washing, ironing, cooking and mopping floors, but she was doing it all on her own, without the supervision of either mother or mother-in-law. The new independence suited her, and she recalled, “I was more content than I had been in years.”44
The third (but first political) segment of Rosalynn Carter’s life began inauspiciously when she reluctantly returned to live in Georgia. In 1953, her father-in-law died, and Jimmy decided that his younger brother Billy, still in high school, needed help running the family businesses. Rosalynn disliked relinquishing the independence that she had gained but in “the only major disagreement” of their marriage, she lost. Or in the short run, it seemed that she had. She returned to Plains with Jimmy and their three sons. Very quickly she realized that the town had not changed but she had. With the confidence she had acquired away from home, she set out to explore the opportunities she had not recognized before. She played golf, took dancing lessons, and went off with friends on a trip to New Orleans. Even she had to admit she was “enjoying this life.”45
More significantly, she became involved in some of the issues that affected the small town—issues that often had direct and personal implications but on the local level seemed solvable. Jimmy’s appointment to the school board put the Carters in the middle of the integration struggle, or, as Rosalynn described their position, off to a minority side of it. “Though we were both raised in the South and had accepted segregation as children,” she wrote, “Jimmy and I had traveled enough to see a different way of life … [and] I could count … on two hands, [the people] with whom Jimmy and I could talk openly about the issue.”46
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