The most visible Republican feminist

It was because of Betty Ford that I asked my mother the meaning of the word prosthesis. It’s a new body part, she told me. Why, I asked, did the president’s wife need a new body part? Because she had cancer. Where, I wondered, do you go to find a new body part? I pictured a store of some sort, but in my imagination the inventory at the store was mainly legs, standing on end, toes pointed toward the ceiling the way they were in the pantyhose displays at Famous Barr. There were lots of amputees roaming around my childhood for some reason, so once I learned the meaning of the word prosthesis, every time I saw a picture of the country’s first lady, I focused on her legs. You could barely tell that they were not the ones with which she’d been born. I was impressed.

Betty Ford died last Friday at the age of 93. I thought it was odd that I knew nothing of this until yesterday morning. I click on and off of MSN dozens of times a day on my way to and from the Internet, and I didn’t see a single banner headline. Nor did I notice anything on the section where the other, less urgent headlines linger. There wasn’t a word on Facebook. There’s probably a lot that could be read into the lack of instant fanfare over her departure – the most persistent of which in my mind is that she bled and blurred into and out of a few too many categories for the technicians who have taken over the newsroom to wrap their heads around.

But it strikes me, most persistently, as tasteful. The politicians are busy with their own summer stock theater production, and the celebrities are desperately looking for a new disaster with which to affiliate themselves – Haiti is getting to be old news, after all – and the rest of the country seems occupied with the Casey Anthony verdict. So the woman who apparently did a lot of the heavy lifting toward inserting the word “breast” into the everyday vernacular died out there in the California desert and was, for the most part, left alone. The ghouls, for once, were too busy with other things.

Of the very few remembrances of Betty Ford that I heard, there’s one comment that wrote itself in ink: Betty Ford was the most visible Republican feminist. And what, asked the reporter doing the interview, could today’s Republican women learn from the legacy of Betty Ford? Like a bottle rocket shot into a drizzly evening, the answer sort of collapsed on itself. Which is fine with me, really, because even though I don’t know any of these people personally, I have a hard time even imagining the likes of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann even … you know, there’s really no point in even finishing that sentence, so I won’t.

My favorite part of the Betty Ford legacy is her mission to help people dry out and sober up. It’s interesting to me that at some point the mere mention of her name – Betty Ford – came to mean that the battle against the pills and the drink and the smoke and the needle was on. Talk about effective brand strategy. What strikes me about it is that it must have been really, really scandalous back then for someone to publicly acknowledge a substance abuse problem. Today, based on what little I know about it, it seems to me that Betty Ford’s issue was the most normal thing imaginable, and for descandalizing that particular area of human frailty I thank her. My husband’s been running the country, she seemed to say, and now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to rehab. What sane person wouldn’t be?