In order to write about Black History month, I started down a rabbit hole that took me around and about all over the place, landing at one point on the phenomenal, amazing, admirable, extraordinary Betty Bloomer, who became Betty Warren, and still later (after her divorce from husband numero uno) became Betty Ford.
As Betty Bloomer, she left Michigan to work as a model and dancer in New York City, where she was good enough to be accepted into and dance with the Martha Graham Company, including a performance at Carnegie Hall. Still, her mother was worried and Betty returned to Michigan where – if she really, really wanted to return to NYC in six months – she was promised she could, with full support. Life intervened, however, and the rest is, as they say, history. Literally.
Betty Ford. The rabbit hole leading me to this fascinating human began because her husband, then President Gerald Ford, recognized Black History month for the first time, in 1976. Ford, by the way (history nerd alert!!), was the only president in U.S. history to occupy the vice-presidency and the presidency without having been elected to either job. Betty Ford. The wife of a Republican, Betty Ford was adamantly and openly pro-choice, pro-ERA, pro-gender equity. She once ran a dance school (hello, so cool!), speaking openly about her addiction issues – and those of her family – and she was transparently honest about her breast cancer diagnosis while in the White House, raising awareness and changing the conversation around women’s health and that specific issue forever, and for the better.
She founded the Betty Ford Center, where addicts of all kinds get treatment to this day, and Betty Bloomer Warren Ford was also, post-First-Lady-hood (?) involved with numerous HIV/AIDs causes. Go Betty.
Her feminism came from watching her mother struggle to find and keep work, raising three children after Betty’s father died at age fifty-nine, possibly of suicide. It was also informed by her own struggle for independence after marrying young to a man who, it quickly became apparent, was an alcoholic, and whose alcoholism and diabetes put him in a coma just as she was petitioning for a divorce. She got one, after working and waiting several years (living upstairs in her soon to be ex-in-laws house, must’ve been a blast!), meeting Gerald Ford in 1947, about a month before her divorce was final, marrying the future president in ’48.
She was famously candid about her life, and her opinions, very different from the strictly buttoned lips of Lady Bird and (poor) Pat Nixon. Her candor about all aspects of her life helped others, and – via the Betty Ford Center – still does today.
Go Betty.
