Eleanor Rosalynn Smith Carter; 1977-1981

Born: 1927

Rosalynn Smith grew up in Plains, Georgia, the oldest of four children of an auto mechanic and a seamstress. After losing her father at 14, she helped shoulder the household burdens while still graduating valedictorian of her high school class. She spent one year at college, then wed Plains' Annapolis midshipman Jimmy Carter in 1946. Rosalynn loved being a Navy wife, living in new places and starting a family (she eventually had four children). She was crushed when Jimmy was called back to Plains in 1953 to run his family's peanut farm. But she pitched in at the office and eventually ran the operation while Jimmy rose in Georgia politics. When he became Governor in 1971, she led the effort to overhaul the state's mental health system. By the time he became President, the Carters were used to working as partners.

As First Lady Rosalynn broke new ground by attending her husband's cabinet meetings and acting as his emissary to foreign heads of state during a 1977 solo mission to Central and South America. Expanding on her earlier work in mental health, Rosalynn chaired a Presidential Commission that spurred passage of the Mental Health Systems Act of 1977. And she worked for a variety of other causes, ranging from women's rights to the problems of the elderly to the plight of refugees in Thailand. After leaving the White House, she has continued her activism at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Thirty-Ninth President
Jimmy Carter