FLOTUS: First Ladies of the United States

FLOTUS: Elizabeth "Betty" Ford Part II

Health and breast cancer awareness

Weeks after Ford became First Lady; she underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer on September 28, 1974, after having been diagnosed with the disease. Ford decided to be open about her illness because "There had been so many cover-ups during Watergate that we wanted to be sure there would be no cover-up in the Ford administration." Her openness about her cancer and treatment raised the visibility of a disease that Americans had previously been reluctant to talk about.

"When other women have this same operation, it doesn't make any headlines," she told Time. "But the fact that I was the wife of the President put it in the headlines and brought before the public this particular experience I was going through. It made a lot of women realize that it could happen to them. I'm sure I've saved at least one person—maybe more."

Adding to heightened public awareness of breast cancer were reports that several weeks after Ford's cancer surgery, Happy Rockefeller, the wife of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, also had a mastectomy. The spike in women self-examining after Ford went public with the diagnosis led to an increase in reported cases of breast cancer, a phenomenon known as the "Betty Ford blip".

According to Tasha N. Dubriwny, the massive media coverage of Ford's mastectomy was constrained by stereotypical gender roles, particularly the need for breast cancer patients to maintain their femininity. Betty Ford was portrayed as an ideal patient within a success narrative that presented the key sequences of her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in a progressive, linear fashion that inspired optimism. Her coverage minimized the complexity of breast cancer as a disease and ignored the debates surrounding best treatment practices. It amounted to an aestheticization of breast cancer and her coverage became the major discursive model for looking at all breast cancer survivors.

After her mastectomy, Ford received chemotherapy treatments and saw regular checkups. White House Physician William M. Lukash claimed in a March 1975 statement that Ford was suffering no side effects from her chemotherapy.

In March 1975, Ford temporarily cut back her schedule after suffering a flareup of her chronic arthritis.

The arts

As First Lady, Ford was an advocate of the arts. She successfully lobbied her husband to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to choreographer and dancer Martha Graham in 1976. She received an award from Parsons The New School for Design in recognition of her style.

State dinners

Despite the brevity of her husband's presidency (roughly two and a half years), he hosted 33 state dinners, the fifth most state dinners of any United States president. The first of these came only a week into Ford's presidency, hosting King Hussein of Jordan on August 16, 1974. Once she became First Lady, it fell to Ford to arrange this already-scheduled dinner. She found out about this upcoming dinner and her responsibility for planning it through a phone call she received within 24 hours after her husband's swearing-in as president. As previously mentioned, the Fords had hosted a state dinner for King Hussein months earlier, during Gerald Ford's vice presidency, on March 12, 1974, after President Nixon asked then-Vice President Ford to take over for him in hosting a planned dinner for the King. At the first state dinner that she arranged as First Lady, Ford revived dancing as an activity of White House state dinners. The Nixons had previously removed dancing from the state dinners during Nixon's presidency. At the state dinners of the Ford presidency, the president and First Lady always led off the dancing, and dancing often lasted beyond midnight.

The Fords opted to have an eclectic array of guests at their state dinners, including notable celebrities from the entertainment industry. The Fords' children often also attended the dinners they hosted.