Former first lady Betty Ford’s charming and honest push for women’s rights
Former US first lady Betty Ford, who openly revealed her struggles with cancer and alcohol, was born 100 years ago.
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IN all her candid observations, former US First Lady Betty Ford’s reflections after successful addiction treatment likely resonated with a multitude of mothers across the world.
In 1964, after 16 years of marriage and four children, she had seen a psychiatrist twice a week because “I’d lost my feeling of self-worth” .
“I think a lot of women go through this,” she said. “Their husbands have fascinating jobs, their children start to turn into independent people and the women begin to feel useless, empty.”
Ford, who was born 100 years ago tomorrow, further addressed her self-doubt in a 1987 autobiography, Betty: A Glad Awakening.
“Some of the pain I was trying to wipe out was emotional,” she wrote of taking up to 20 pain killers a day for neck and back injuries, later exacerbated by alcohol.
“On one hand, I loved being ‘the wife of’; on the other hand, I was convinced that the more important Jerry became, the less important I became.”
Born Elizabeth Anne Bloomer on April 8, 1918, in Chicago, Illinois, she was the third child and only daughter of Hortense and William Bloomer, a travelling salesman for machinery companies. From age two she grew up at Grand Rapids, Michigan, where at eight she began dance lessons. After the 1929 stock market crash, she earned money as a model and children’s dance teacher. She also entertained and worked with children with disabilities at the Mary Free Bed Home for Crippled Children, while studying at the Calla Travis Dance Studio, graduating in 1935.
When Ford was 16, her father died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage while working under his car, although the garage doors were open. Ford graduated from high school in 1936 and wanted to study dance in New York, but her mother objected, insisting she wait until she turned 20.
Ford then spent two summers at Bennington School of Dance in Vermont, studying with choreographer Martha Graham. Accepted as a student by Graham, Ford moved to New York where she also worked as a model and performed at Carnegie Hall with Graham’s auxiliary troupe. In 1942 she married childhood acquaintance William Warren, an insurance salesman who became an alcoholic and suffered poor health. Ford nursed him for two years before filing for divorce in 1947. Months later she began dating Gerald Ford, a former University of Michigan footballer and politically ambitious lawyer. Ford later described him as “probably the most eligible bachelor in Grand Rapids”.
Born Elizabeth Anne Bloomer on April 8, 1918, in Chicago, Illinois, she was the third child and only daughter of Hortense and William Bloomer, a travelling salesman for machinery companies. From age two she grew up at Grand Rapids, Michigan, where at eight she began dance lessons. After the 1929 stock market crash, she earned money as a model and children’s dance teacher. She also entertained and worked with children with disabilities at the Mary Free Bed Home for Crippled Children, while studying at the Calla Travis Dance Studio, graduating in 1935.
When Ford was 16, her father died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage while working under his car, although the garage doors were open. Ford graduated from high school in 1936 and wanted to study dance in New York, but her mother objected, insisting she wait until she turned 20.
Ford then spent two summers at Bennington School of Dance in Vermont, studying with choreographer Martha Graham. Accepted as a student by Graham, Ford moved to New York where she also worked as a model and performed at Carnegie Hall with Graham’s auxiliary troupe. In 1942 she married childhood acquaintance William Warren, an insurance salesman who became an alcoholic and suffered poor health. Ford nursed him for two years before filing for divorce in 1947. Months later she began dating Gerald Ford, a former University of Michigan footballer and politically ambitious lawyer. Ford later described him as “probably the most eligible bachelor in Grand Rapids”.
When he proposed in February 1948, she later wrote: “He’s a very shy man and he really didn’t tell me he loved me. He just told me he’d like to marry me — I took him up on it immediately.” They married in October 1948, during his successful campaign for a Republican Congress seat. Weeks later they left Grand Rapids: “We came to Washington for two years and stayed for 28,” Ford explained. Their son Michael was born in 1950, with John in 1952, Steven in 1956, and Susan in 1957.
As her husband pursued his political career, Ford increasingly resented being left at home to manage their children alone. An addiction to painkillers began after she injured her neck in 1964, when she also began seeing a psychiatrist.
Gerald agreed 1972 would be his last political campaign, but in 1973 President Richard Nixon named him vice-president. When Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, Gerald succeeded to the presidency in August 1974, serving until January 1977. Weeks after Ford became US First Lady, she underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer. Her openness about her illness raised awareness of a disease Americans had been reluctant to talk about, with increased self-examination creating the “Betty Ford blip” of increased breast cancer diagnoses.
Ford received 55,800 cards after her operation and earned admiration for her blunt honesty: when an interviewer asked how she would handle her daughter having a premarital affair, or her kids smoking marijuana, she said she’d talk with them about it.
She also encouraged her husband to designate 1975 as International Women’s Year, arguing in an address on gender equity that while “many new opportunities are open to women, too many are available only to the lucky few. Many barriers continue to the paths of most women, even on the most basic issue of equal pay for equal work. This year is not the time to cheer the visible few, but to work for the invisible many, whose lives are still restricted by custom and code ... the formal and informal restrictions that confine women.”
In 1978 her family confronted Ford about her drug and alcohol use. When a doctor told her she was a “drunk”, Gerald later admitted his wife had been “mad as hell”. She underwent treatment at Long Beach Naval Hospital in California, and in 1982 founded the Betty Ford Clinic, a rehabilitation centre later used by celebrities including Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli and Mary Tyler Moore. Gerald Ford died in 2006, and Betty in 2011.
Originally published as Former first lady Betty Ford’s charming and honest push for women’s rights
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