\n<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to remember now, due to both the rosy hues of time and the personalities and pratfalls of subsequent First Ladies, but Rosalynn Carter, wife of Jimmy Carter, the 39th<\/sup> president of the United States, was one tough customer. History has smoothed her edges so that many recall her, vaguely, as a sweet but sturdy Southern woman\u2014if not a belle, then someone who seemed nice enough but was in no way a world-beater, nothing like the forever-thwarted Hillary Clinton or the supremely confident Michelle Obama.\u00a0<\/p>\n Part of this misguided legacy has to do with geographical bias. Rosalynn Carter\u2014who passed away Sunday at the age of 96 after having been diagnosed with dementia\u2014came from small-town Georgia, like her husband, and upon their taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, political Washington came down with a bad case of what the writer Nicholas Lemann has called rubophobia. The Carters were dismissed as rednecks, pure and simple. They spoke with Southern accents. They had run a\u00a0peanut farm.<\/em> Rosalynn\u00a0wore the\u00a0same<\/em> dress<\/a> she had worn to her husband\u2019s 1971 Georgia gubernatorial ball for his presidential f\u00eate in 1977. (Worse, it came from someplace called Jason\u2019s in someplace called Americus, Georgia.) The couple banned hard liquor from White House dinners. \u201cI just don\u2019t want to,\u201d Rosalynn told a skeptical reporter for\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>. \u201cNot for religious reasons. I just don\u2019t want to. Besides, I\u2019m saving the taxpayers\u2019 money.\u201d In fact, the Carters were big on praying too, and, perhaps worse, in the eyes of their detractors, they were sincere in their faith. Maybe it\u2019s no wonder that the excesses of the Reagan years came as something of a relief in the Carters\u2019 wake, and why Rosalynn\u2019s fuddy-duddy reputation persists.<\/p>\n But she never was that, really. It is useful to recall that in 1977 and 1979 a Gallup poll designated<\/a> Rosalynn the most popular woman in the world among Americans, and in 1980 she tied for the same honor with Mother Teresa, whose reputation has since suffered\u00a0blows.<\/a> Reading over several biographical accounts in recent days, what has come through most is how Rosalynn Carter managed to be both partner and individual. She was a woman of a generation that could (almost but not quite) operate independently, a bridge between the First Ladies who were silent helpmates and those who could (almost) act as individuals in their own right. Though it isn\u2019t frequently noted, the Carters\u00a0presaged the package deal<\/a> later offered by Bill and Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n She was the right person at the right time for that\u00a0societal shift. Eleanor Rosalynn Smith (pronounced \u201cRose<\/em>-a-lynn,\u201d never \u201cRoz-a-lynn\u201d) grew up in modest circumstances in Plains, Georgia, wearing clothes made by her dressmaker mother. She was devoted to her father, an auto mechanic and bus driver, who encouraged her to excel in high school, which she did, and to go on to college and find wider horizons. He died of leukemia when Rosalynn was 13, and she was driven to fulfill his ambitions for her. (\u201cMy childhood really ended at that moment,\u201d she would later write in her autobiography,\u00a0First Lady from Plains,<\/em> of the moment he told her about his illness.)<\/p>\n The road to that wider world appeared in the form of a US Naval Academy student by the name of James Earl Carter Jr., whom she started dating in 1945. (They had met years before, when Carter was three, and his mother, an enterprising nurse who came to be known as \u201cMiz\u201d Lillian, helped\u00a0deliver Rosalynn.)<\/a> Their love-at-almost-first-sight story became a staple of news reports from the time Jimmy started running for public office, and, by the time he was elected president, was part of a romantic gloss that feature writers so adore. The tale has staying power because it was true. Yes, Rosalynn was royally\u00a0peeved when, in 1953, Jimmy gave up his naval career (and the travels she loved) to run the family\u2019s peanut farm in Plains after Carter\u2019s father died. However, that was the beginning of the collaboration that eventually landed Jimmy in the Georgia State Senate and then the governor\u2019s mansion. \u201cWe developed a partnership when we were working in the farm supply business, and it continued when Jimmy got involved in politics,\u201d Rosalynn\u00a0told the Associated Press<\/a>. \u201cI knew more on paper about the business than he did. He would take my advice about things.\u201d Jimmy didn\u2019t argue. \u201cThe\u00a0best thing I ever did<\/a> was marrying Rosalynn,\u201d he said in a Carter Center interview in 2015. \u201cThat\u2019s the pinnacle of my life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n