Bill and I last saw the Carters in July 2021, when we traveled to Plains, Georgia, for their seventy-fifth wedding anniversary. Frail and well into their nineties, they gathered hundreds of family, friends, and supporters at the local school that also houses the National Park Service site commemorating their life stories. They had finally given up building houses with Habitat for Humanity but were still engaged in the global humanitarian work of the Carter Center. Inside a classroom, Bill and I greeted Rosalynn, who was using a walker, and Jimmy, who was in a wheelchair and wore a gardenia in his jacket’s buttonhole. They both expressed their appreciation for us coming and told us to be sure to look around at the exhibits while we were there.
Once I sat and thought about the web of connections that I had enjoyed with my fellow First Ladies over the years, I started to see that sliver of my life as an almost Forrest Gump–like walk through modern American women’s history. Jackie and Lady Bird were perhaps the last of the traditional First Ladies who disavowed—in public, at least—any hand in their husbands’ work. (It’s worth noting, however, that a 2021 biography of Lady Bird and her behind-the-scenes politicking was subtitled Hiding in Plain Sight. And historians credit Jackie with quietly cultivating improved diplomatic relations between her husband and the leaders of France, the Soviet Union, Pakistan, and India.) From these two women, I savored small kindnesses that were huge to me in difficult times. Jackie endorsed Bill in 1992, and over the course of that campaign, I got to know the transcendent woman I had admired for so long. I wasn’t First Lady for more than a couple of days when I placed an SOS call to Jackie in New York City. Already, the White House was overwhelming and isolating with its bustle of staff, security, and press. I had no idea how to make life normal for Chelsea—and for me. Jackie didn’t hesitate: Come to lunch, we’ll talk. Six days after the inauguration, I was at her doorstep. Her Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan was literally decorated with books, a design trick I subsequently tried to copy with the mountains of books that Bill and I own, but they never look as elegant as Jackie’s. We ate lunch at a table beside her living room window overlooking Central Park. Jackie was generous with moral support, practical advice, and her wicked sense of humor, especially her droll impersonations of certain political figures. (Who? I’ll never tell.) Don’t let the Secret Service agents overprotect Chelsea, she advised, recalling how agents would try to keep her young son John Jr. from falling off his bike. “But that’s a part of growing up,” she wisely insisted. Another tip was to use Camp David as much as possible, because there’s much more freedom and privacy there.
It was a darker time of uncertainty for me when Lady Bird reached out with her own style of moral support. She had been watching TV on December 19, 1998, and caught coverage of me in the Rose Garden, joining Al Gore and a crowd of congressional Democrats in a show of solidarity with Bill after the Republican-led House voted that day to impeach him. I was holding my marriage together with wisps of faith, but I knew Bill was a good man and a great president, so I joined the fight to keep him in office. Not long after that, I got a letter from Lady Bird: “You made my day! When I saw you with the President on television with you by his side (was it the South Lawn?), reminding us of the country’s progress… and how far we have yet to go, I sent a prayer your way.” Like Jackie, Lady Bird had lived with the background noise of whispers about her marriage. She understood the pressure I was under, and her words were a uniquely powerful sort of kindness, just when I needed it.
After Jackie died in May 1994, her son John F. Kennedy Jr. sent Bill and me a handwritten letter—and the great gift of knowing that we had given something back to Jackie when she needed it. The letter, on stationery monogrammed “JFK,” was dated June 5, 1994, two weeks after Bill and I stood with John and his sister, Caroline, as their mother was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery beside their father. The former First Son wrote, in part:
It seems like ages ago since we last met at Arlington—the day, though, remains vivid in memory. I’ve been rolling these words around in my head, not quite ready to part with them. But time rolls on and I’m not getting any more eloquent, so it’s time I share them.
I wanted you both to understand how much your burgeoning friendship with my mother meant to her.
Since she left Washington, I believe she resisted ever connecting with it emotionally—or the institutional demands of being a former First Lady. It had much to do with the memories stirred and her desire to resist being cast in a lifelong role that didn’t quite fit. However, she seemed profoundly happy and relieved to allow herself to reconnect with it through you.
With his signature boyish charm, John added a postscript:
P.S. Sorry for the smudges. Being left-handed in the sweltering New York summer has its drawbacks.
Bill and I have hung on to that letter all these years. And still, today, I mourn not having more time with Jackie.
When I think of my friendships with the vastly different women who had walked their own paths into the same house, the same crucible, political party is nowhere in the frame. Up close, I got to see Betty Ford’s personal dedication to the treatment of addiction. She once led me on a private tour of the Betty Ford Clinic in California, and it was dazzling how she knew everyone by name. “Treatment saved my life,” she told me. “I want to save other people’s lives.” And so, she did. In August 1993, Betty even generously offered us her family’s house in Beaver Creek, Colorado, where Chelsea and I hiked and went to the Bolshoi Ballet performance during the Vail Dance Festival and Bill played golf with Jerry Ford, Jack Nicklaus, and others. Betty knew how important it was to get out of Washington to breathe now and then.
After the September 11 attacks brought war with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Laura Bush invited me to join her as co-chair of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council, bringing aid, education, and opportunity to Afghan women and girls. It’s a commitment she and I still pursue. I had many disagreements with her husband while serving as a senator, but she and I found common ground around the Afghan women.
My relationship with Michelle Obama was never a sure thing. It had to grow, little by little, from the wounds of the tough 2008 Democratic primary fight between her husband and me. I came to appreciate that Michelle doesn’t brush things off as easily as Barack does, and so the relationship that she and I forged during the time I served President Obama as secretary of state was all the more meaningful to me. Michelle and I never addressed any personal tension. Our relationship just naturally warmed as we came to know each other. I like to think that she saw my loyalty and effectiveness as secretary and grew to trust that I wanted not only for Barack and his administration to succeed but for her and her girls to succeed as well. In a phone conversation before the family moved to Washington, Michelle and I talked through how Bill and I had picked a school for Chelsea sixteen years earlier and what she was thinking about for Sasha and Malia. Once they were settled in the White House, Michelle asked me to lunch in the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the White House. At a small table looking out over the Truman Balcony, we bonded over the challenges of raising a family in a fishbowl and over her plans to use her platform as First Lady to promote child health through nutrition and exercise. (She was practicing what both she and her husband preached about healthy eating and exercise. I agreed with them in principle but fell short in practice. Lunch was delicious but portion-controlled, and I remember getting back to my office at the State Department in urgent need of a snack.) I was touched when Michelle later asked Chelsea to come talk with her daughters about living in the White House, sharing her experiences being a teenager in the spotlight followed by Secret Service agents to parties.
Michelle was one of the most passionate and most impactful cheerleaders for my bid to succeed her husband. She campaigned her heart out for me in 2016. The last time I saw her that year was at an election eve rally of tens of thousands of people at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. After all the speeches and ovations and even an appearance by Bruce Springsteen, I hugged Michelle and Barack and thanked them both. He whispered, “You got this.” It was tough seeing Michelle for the first time after that, which was at Donald Trump’s inauguration. In the joyless blur of moving through that January day, Michelle and I never got to speak on the Capitol’s west front during the ceremony. But when our eyes met in the middle of the proceedings, we shared a look that hovered somewhere between disbelief and dread. We had already seen the ugly racism he was unleashing, and my heart broke for Michelle and her girls, for all the little girls. By failing to defeat Trump, I had let them all down.
It made news when I all but stopped wearing skirts as First Lady when I started running for the Senate in 1999. Michelle Obama’s summer vacation shorts (shorts!) aboard Air Force One also made news. Or, as she called it, “a huge stink.” When Jill Biden took the mantle, she got flak not for her clothes but for her preference to be called Dr. and not Mrs. Biden, as if her hard-earned advanced degree in education, which she puts to use every day in her day job—unprecedented for a presidential spouse—as a community college professor, were nothing but an uppity ornament. The Wall Street Journal had the nerve to call Jill’s preferred title “fraudulent, even comic.” Two steps forward, one step back. I was a partner in my law firm and building a college fund for Chelsea when Bill was elected president. I thought I could continue to practice law alongside my hostessing, traveling, and advocacy duties as First Lady, just as I had done as First Lady of Arkansas. I broached the idea with Bill’s advisors. You would think I had proposed painting the White House in pink stripes. The notion was so far-fetched to them that it was shot down immediately. When I look now at Jill and how she has held on to this separate piece of her identity and found such fulfillment in it, I wonder: If I were the shoulda-coulda-woulda type, would I wish I had pushed Bill’s team harder to let me keep being a lawyer? (Given that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff had to give up being a lawyer when his wife, Kamala Harris, became vice president, I think the answer would have been the same: no, because of the potential for conflicts of interest.)
I recently had a look at notes from the First Ladies’ Symposium on Children of the Americas that I convened in Miami in 1994 as a companion to Bill’s first Summit of the Americas. We both saw rich opportunities for working with our neighbor countries of North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean on region-wide health and prosperity policies. On one handwritten page, someone on my staff (I don’t recognize the handwriting all these years later) noted that some of my counterparts from “Belize et al. object to 1st lady label and role—[because we] are professionals.” And so our annual conferences came to be called the clunky “Wives of Heads of State and of Government of the Americas.” Today, I think California governor Gavin Newsom’s wife, the award-winning filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, hit the nail on the head when she coined for herself the title “First Partner.”
Good for Jill—for Dr. Biden—and Jennifer for pushing open that door to presidential and gubernatorial wives maintaining their individual and professional identities. I expect we will see more of that ahead. We need to model and normalize women—all women—as autonomous individuals. That shouldn’t have to be said. But, well, there’s Dobbs, the decision where the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade after fifty years. We’re fighting for women’s basic rights to privacy and autonomy all over again.
Here in the world of the “formers,” I wonder if there isn’t more that the few of us can do together in our afterlife. First Ladies typically leave the White House with much higher public approval than their husbands. Harness that popularity with the kinship that Laura Bush identified and that I experienced, and just think of the multiplier effect. (With apologies to Jason Carter, I’ll use “kinship” over “sisterhood” if only to make a path for a future First Gentleman.) The ex-presidents get a lot of ink for joining forces to raise money for disaster relief or promote COVID vaccines. Imagine the power of former First Ladies—Democrat and Republican, Melania included—linking arms as mothers, grandmothers, and women. Working together as allies for America’s children. Standing together to stare down hate, protect democracy, and secure those children’s futures.
Imagine.
Will it happen? Probably not. I am not Pollyannaish when it comes to the people in this blood sport of politics. I know that pulling off this kind of united front by even just five women would be a feat of scheduling, logistics, ego, and marital dynamics. But when, today, so much in that realm feels turned upside down and torn inside out, I will take any sign of decency and normalcy as cause for hope—like reporting in the New York Times last February that, even after all the ugliness of the 2020 election and January 6, 2021, Jill sent Melania a birthday card that April. And Melania reciprocated two months later when Jill turned seventy. It’s not nothing. Not when all of us, as families and communities and as a nation, have been so battered in recent years. Any reminder that we’re all human and we’re all in this together—I’ll take it.
PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST
It was hot. At least 90 degrees Fahrenheit at 11:30 a.m. In the dead of winter. I stood sweating in my straw hat and light cotton shalwar kameez as the sun climbed above the baking desert in the Little Rann of Kutch, nearly four hours by car northwest of the city of Ahmedabad in India. It was February 2023, and I was looking at a salt pan—a shallow pool for evaporating water—and talking with women harvesting the crystals left behind when the water disappeared. I’m not an especially tall woman, but next to me these salt farmers were tiny. Each was wearing a unique and colorfully layered sari that stood out like a flag flapping in the wind. I watched as they tossed the edges of their saris over their shoulders and dragged enormous rakes—bigger than they were tall—back and forth across the pans. It looked cumbersome, but they managed it with finesse.
India is the third-largest producer of salt after the United States and China, and these women and their families are a big reason for that. They take pride in their work, but the conditions are grueling—and dangerous. The heat is tremendous and getting worse every year. It can now reach over 120 degrees in the summer. The risk of heat exhaustion and stroke is ever present. The women I met told me that it’s also causing nausea, nosebleeds, and miscarriages. Higher temperatures are forcing these farmers to change their hours, starting before dawn to beat the sun, taking longer breaks in the middle of the day, and losing pay as a result.
Then there is the constant exposure to salt and salt water. Just imagine having a cut or scrape on your foot, then having to submerge that foot in salt water while you work all day, and the next, and the next. A quick rinse with salt water might debride a wound and help it heal. But extended contact with salt water prevents small infections from healing, turning them into large ones. It causes boils on the farmers’ skin. Many go blind from the searing sun reflecting off the vast white expanse of salt and sand. The average salt farmer lives to just sixty years old.
Rann means “desert” in Gujarati. Little Rann is a stretch of salt marshes that was underwater until about two centuries ago, when a series of earthquakes raised it above sea level. Now, the area is submerged only during the monsoon season between June and October, when the rains replenish the saline groundwater. This ecological idiosyncrasy means that the Rann is rich in salt—a commodity so prized that in centuries past it was equal in value to gold.
Before making this trip, I’d been briefed on the basic operations of the salt flats. But the briefings couldn’t capture what daily work looks like for the women who have farmed these salt marshes for generations. Each autumn, as the monsoon rains ebb and the waters recede, they travel on foot into the still-wet desert, carrying everything they will need for the season—including all their food and potable water. They build huts to live in for the next six to eight months, set up equipment, and prepare for the harvest.
The work starts with drilling down to the briny groundwater that the flooding has left behind and pumping it up to the surface. Then they manually dig ten to twenty rectangular pans in the mud and fill them with the groundwater until it’s the ideal level of salinity for farming (the women told me they can tell when it’s right by the taste). Over the next month or two, the water slowly evaporates. The farmers spend that time raking or plowing the pans up to twelve times a day to bring small crystals to the surface where they can grow larger. Finally, after months of raking, the big salt crystals are ready to be carried away in arms or on top of heads in big metal pans. And they do all this in scorching desert heat.
After they finished raking, one of the women showed me a crystal of salt. Another said it was difficult to get water to drink during the day. They showed me blisters on their feet and hands from the heat and salt. I listened carefully, wanting to remember everything.
There are few places where the urgency of the climate crisis is more evident than the salt flats at Little Rann and few people more impacted by rising global temperatures than the farmers who labor there.
I was in India that winter to announce a $50 million climate resilience fund for women. What better place to do it than where climate change is impossible to ignore? I’d heard about the punishing working conditions in the salt flats and wanted to see them for myself. The women I met in the desert that day offer a preview of the challenges ahead for many millions of people around the world and the determination that will be needed to meet this crisis.
I was also there because I believe that to understand a complex policy problem you need to understand the people most affected. You need to listen to their stories, see their struggles, and hear their hopes.
A lot of good people go into public service to “change the world.” I certainly did. We dream about finding big solutions to big problems. Reality is often more prosaic. You make whatever progress you can, whenever you can. Still, there’s a magnetic pull toward lofty goals and ambitious plans, the kinds of accomplishments that history remembers. Sometimes, though, if you’re too focused on grand strategy and transformative policies, you can lose sight of the very people you meant to help in the first place. When you’re at the pinnacle of power, negotiating treaties or writing legislation, the everyday experiences of regular people can feel awfully far away.
That’s why I wanted to meet the women salt farmers. It’s not enough to read about the impact of climate change or even to talk to scientists and activists. The salt farmers in Little Rann are on the front lines of the crisis. They are enduring—and adapting to—the extreme consequences of our warming planet. Throughout my career, as a lawyer, First Lady, senator, and secretary of state, I’ve learned that showing up is how you learn. You have to talk with people face-to-face. It’s also how you show that you take their concerns seriously.
There was a moment in Bill’s first campaign for president in 1992 that dramatized how important a personal touch can be. It came during a town hall–style debate with President George H. W. Bush, the Republican incumbent, and Ross Perot, an independent. A woman stood up to ask the three candidates a question: “How has the national debt personally affected each of your lives? And if it hasn’t, how can you honestly find a cure for the economic problems of the common people if you have no experience in what’s ailing them?” Bush was a good man with a big heart, but he was also reserved and patrician. He had been president for nearly four years, grappling every day with the arcana of policy and details of diplomacy. If you’re not careful, you can forget how far the White House is from people’s kitchen tables. On the stage that night, Bush had trouble remembering how to talk in simple, human terms about the concerns of families who were hurting in a tough recession. But that was where Bill excelled. When it was his turn, he walked over to the woman and asked if she knew people who’d lost their jobs and lost their homes. He said that as the governor of a small state, “when people lose their jobs there’s a good chance I’ll know them by their names. When a factory closes, I know the people who ran it. When the businesses go bankrupt, I know them.” The contrast between the two answers helped win the election.
Bill’s slogan in that campaign was “Putting People First.” It’s an ethos both of us have tried to hold to ever since. When I was a senator, I spent countless days crisscrossing rural Upstate New York, stopping in tiny towns, touring factories and farms, and visiting far-flung military bases. I wanted to stay connected to my constituents and to understand how the challenges we debated in Washington affected their lives, from war and peace to the economy and climate change. Were the men and women of the Tenth Mountain Division getting the right kind of body armor when they deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan from Fort Drum outside of Watertown? What would it take to help small businesses in the Finger Lakes and Adirondacks get online and into e-commerce for the first time? How could we make sure firefighters in New York City received the medical care they needed in the years after 9/11 as they became sick from the toxic fumes at Ground Zero? The details mattered because the people mattered.
When I became secretary of state, I often found myself in glittering palaces and marbled halls. But I also made time to talk with activists and dissidents and to get out of capital cities and meet people in small villages. Veteran diplomats scratched their heads when I insisted on talking about everyday problems like how smoke from open fires and dirty stoves was poisoning people (especially women and children) across the developing world. That wasn’t the kind of thing secretaries of state usually worried about. But I knew that household air pollution was responsible for more than twice as many premature deaths as malaria and tuberculosis combined. And I believed that if America put people first, the world would notice. So we organized a public-private partnership that distributed millions of clean cookstoves to families across the world. On a visit to Chennai, India, in 2011, a group of women showed me what a difference the new stoves made. They burned hotter, needed less fuel, and produced far less dangerous smoke than the old stoves. It was a small detour in terms of global diplomacy but a big deal in the lives of these women.
Like so many lessons, this is one I learned from Eleanor Roosevelt. She was an accomplished diplomat and led the negotiations in Paris that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. She wrangled representatives from fifty-eight nations through hundreds of meetings and thousands of hours of haggling over the text. It was so grueling that at one point, a negotiator from Panama reminded his colleagues that diplomats had human rights, too. The result was a historic diplomatic accomplishment. But Eleanor never forgot that human rights only meant something if they extended from the halls of power to the homes of people. “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home,” she said. In “the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.”
A highlight of my trip to India was the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), an organization I’ve supported since I first visited India in 1995 as First Lady. Both a trade union and a women’s movement, SEWA was founded in 1972 by Elaben “Ela” Bhatt, one of the twentieth century’s most effective political and labor organizers. After obtaining her law degree, Ela decided she could do more good as an organizer than by practicing law. She organized thousands of self-employed textile workers who, because they worked from home, were not protected by India’s labor laws. And because they were women, they were often oppressed, disrespected, and lacked bargaining power over wages and working conditions. She encountered stiff opposition from powerful men but kept pressing her mission, becoming known as the “gentle revolutionary.”
SEWA members were some of the poorest, least educated, and most shunned women in India. Some had entered into arranged marriages and lived in purdah—strict isolation within their own homes, never seen by men outside the immediate family—until their husbands died, were disabled, or left, and the women had to shoulder the burden of supporting their families. Many struggled day-to-day to survive. SEWA offered these women modest loans to enable them to earn their own income, taught them how to read, and gave them lessons in running small shops and businesses. This model became known as “microloans.”
In person, Ela was soft-spoken, which belied her forceful advocacy for the women of SEWA. She was a practitioner of Gandhian nonviolence and always stressed the importance of peaceful struggle against injustice. I quickly grew to consider her a friend—and role model. As secretary of state, I was thrilled to present her with an award honoring individuals who contribute to justice and equality around the world. She often said, “Poverty and violence are not God made, they are man made,” and she believed that we could unmake them.
