“If Jerry Ford can’t control his own wife, how can he run the country?”. The fellow party members of the 38th President of the US were not so wrong. Elisabeth Ann Bloomer, who is better known as Betty Ford, passed away last Friday at the age of 93. In her life, she has always gone against the tide. In the Seventies she fought against the Prohibition and addictions and campaigned for women’s rights. But let’s go back to the beginning.
In August 1974 her husband, as vice-president, replaced President Richard Nixon, who had resigned because of the Watergate scandal. Just a month later Betty found out she had breast cancer and she said that publicly, sharing her experience with American people. This is the reason why she became an example for many women.
A housewife and mother of four children, the First Lady had liberal and feminist ideas. She was in favour with abortion and said that, if she had been younger, she would have smoked marijuana and that she would not have been surprised if her daughter Susan had had sex before marriage. But, above all, she struggled so that gender equality was constitutionally recognised.
After Gerald Ford’s defeat by Jimmy Carter in the 1977 Presidential elections, she delivered her husband’s concession speech. That was, maybe, a way to punish her for her statements that were not so in line with republican ideas. Fortunately, there were those who wore pins saying “Vote for Betty Ford’s husband”.
In 1978 she had one more strong trial of strength. She spoke publicly about her addiction to alcohol and opioid analgesics begun in 1964, and was then admitted in a rehab centre. Some years later she said: “I think a lot of women go through this. Their husbands have fascinating jobs, their children start to turn into independent people and the women begin to feel useless, empty”.
After that difficult moment, tanks to the financial and political support of Senator Firestone, she established the Betty Ford Center, a recovery hospital offering treatment for alcohol and other drug addictions on the basis of a an approach that combines traditional medicine and psychology.
It is a new and effective approach which, unfortunately, is not popular in Europe.
According to the “New York Times” Betty Ford was a “First Lady who struggled and inspired”. Americans remember her as the first “fighting” First lady. She said she was “an ordinary woman who was called onstage at an extraordinary time.”
On the inside: