by Carl Sferrazza Anthony
A pro-choice Republican feminist, who used her first lady role to help transform our culture.
It would be easy to say that Betty Ford has one great claim to fame, as the leader of the national movement for substance abuse recovery because of the famous southern California treatment center that bears her name. Given the celebrity-soaked media, the pipsqueak actress Lindsay Lohan now seems to have more association with the name "Betty Ford" than does the woman herself. In reality, alcohol and drug treatment is but one in a number of issues that Mrs. Ford became a world-recognized trailblazer of by simply being herself – which is to say, speaking out honestly and rationally.
With her death at 93 on Friday, Betty Ford should command respect not for the coincidence of being married to the only President who was never even elected as a Vice President, or that she survived cancer, alcoholism and chronic osteopathic pain to become the third longest-living First Lady in history (Bess Truman died at 97, Lady Bird Johnson at 94) but rather for what she did with the public role she was thrust into and the values of justice and compassion she lived with all her years.
It might also be easy to label her a middle-American, middle-class political housewife who burst into prominence. As a child, however, she told me that Eleanor Roosevelt and her frank public opinion on a variety of political issues was just as important a role model for her as her own mother, who'd introduced her to the needs of disabled children. Volunteering as a young teenager in local clinics and hospitals where those with disabilities were treated, she taught them confidence and grace through the movement of dance, which she'd already had considerable training in. That passion drove her to pursue the rigor of training with the then-radical theories of modern dance with the legendary Martha Graham herself. She supported herself in a Greenwich Village walk-up by working as a print ad model. Later she saw to it that the modern dance movement leader was given the respect shown the traditional performing arts with a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In the brief sweet spot of the so-called "Me Decade" that marked her tenure as First Lady, an era that also saw the mainstreaming of "personality" and traditional gossip columns with the creation of People magazine, Betty Ford deftly managed to shape her public persona directly from her private person, drawing on real experiences from a life never intended to be nationally broadcast. When she had breast cancer and a mastectomy, she went against tradition to publicly disclose the details because she recognized the visibility of her persona might save the lives of millions of other women who were living with it undetected until it was too late. She spoke openly about the value she'd gained from seeking the professional services of a mental health therapist and broke another taboo, hoping to reduce some of the stigma that had been socialized against it. She discussed her first marriage and divorce.
Her support on a variety of other women's health-related issues, including lupus and a woman's right to make decisions about their own bodies (she was careful to never endorse or criticize abortion but to instead support a woman's right to that choice) was at the core of her conscience, stemming from an ironclad belief in the equality of women and men. This conviction also emerged from personal experience. Before, during and after her first marriage, she had earned her own living, from a women's clothing buyer for a large department store to an assembly-line, frozen-food factory worker.
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