As with all modern First Ladies, photographs of Betty Ford are easy to find on the Internet. One striking image, taken January 19, 1977 by White House photographer David Hume Kennerly, shows Ford on her last day as First Lady, striking a dancer’s pose atop the Cabinet room table. Smiling at the camera and balanced on her stocking feet, Betty Ford looks happy, taken away from her husband’s political woes and her manifold health problems. This joyful picture, however, went unpublished for fifteen years – the photographer feared that this moment of freedom might be misattributed to Ford’s drug addiction.
During her husband’s presidency, it had never been a secret that Betty Ford had been a professional dancer and dance instructor. People knew she’d been a student of Martha Graham, a performer in Carnegie Hall, a teacher of dance and fashion to disabled children in Grand Rapids before her marriage. But today – fifty years after her husband’s presidency and more than a decade after Betty Ford’s death in 2011 – dancing is no longer part of Betty Ford’s story. When we think of Betty Ford, we might remember her feminist activism, her campaign against breast cancer, and the other worthy causes to which she was devoted. Significantly, as the last First Lady before the rise of the Christian right, her time in the White House marks perhaps the last time in American history that a Republican woman in the public eye could be so unapologetically feminist. But there was, always, more to her than that. Which begs the question: What was the relationship between her activism and her identity as a dancer?
It’s too cute to say that “Betty Ford was a feminist because she was a dancer.” But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that a woman so conscious of freedom and movement, of breaking social boundaries and taking the stage herself, would be so forthright a figure in the public eye throughout her life. She took to the national stage as First Lady, enjoying approval ratings higher than her husband’s, embracing causes that would be impossible to imagine for a Republican First Lady today. This was fitting. Forty years earlier she had reached beyond the boundaries of Midwestern respectability to take the stage in Carnegie Hall. Perhaps it’s no wonder she then broke so many boundaries as First Lady.