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Her full name was Eleanor Rosalynn Smith Carter and she was born in Plains, Georgia on August 18, 1927. Her father was Wilburn Edgar Smith, who was a town councilman, auto mechanic, school bus driver and store clerk. He died when Rosalynn was 13. Her mother was Frances Allethea Murray, known as "Allie". Allie had good genes, living to a ripe old age of 95 and reading the 21st century before passing away on died April 1, 2000. After the death of her husband, followed by the death a year later of her mother, Allie was responsible for not only her four children but her elderly father, and she took on numerous jobs to support them - sewing, dairy farming, working in a grocery store, school cafeteria and U.S. Postal Office. She continued to work in a Plains, Georgia flower shop even during the initial days of the Carter presidency.
Rosalynn was the eldest of four children. She had two brothers and one sister: Murray Smith (May 5, 1929 - November 20, 2003), Jerrold Smith (January 19, 1932- January 26, 2003) and Lillian Allethea Smith Wall (born 1936). She is 5'5' tall, has hazel eyes and was raised as a Methodist, but became a Baptist, the faith of her husband. She attended elementary school and high school in Plains and spent two years at Georgia Southwestern College, in Americus, Georgia from 1944-1946. Following the death of her father, she did her part to assist in supporting her family, working at a local hairdresser's shop.
On July 7, 1946, 18 year old Rosalyn married 21 year old Jimmy Carter at the Plains Methodist Church. He was a recent graduate of Annapolis Naval Academy. They met through her friend, his sister, Ruth Carter. Rosalynn refused Carter's initial marriage proposal of December 1945, considering it too soon in their dating, but accepted his second proposal two months later. As a navy engineer and commissioned officer, Carter's career dictated the life and location of the family. For the first seven years of the marriage, they lived in Norfolk, Virginia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New London, Connecticut, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, San Diego, California, and Provincetown, Massachusetts.
The Carters had four children, three sons and one daughter: John William "Jack" Carter (born 1947), James Earl "Chip" Carter (born 1950), Donnel Jeffrey "Jeff" Carter (born 1952), Amy Lynn Carter Wentzel (born 1967).
In 1953, upon the death of his father, the Carters returned to Plains, Georgia to assume management of the family's peanut farming business. According to Jimmy, Rosalynn was upset with him for quitting the Navy and it was a stressful time in their marriage. She successfully assumed the financial management of the agribusiness without drawing a salary, while raising her four sons and young daughter. She also subsequently helped Jimmy Carter campaign for his unsuccessful runs for state senator in 1962 and governor in 1966, and his successful run for the latter position in 1970.
As First Lady of Georgia, Rosalynn Carter assumed the traditional role of a governor's spouse as hostess, and also supervised the landscaping of the grounds, authored a book about the governor's mansion, and took responsibility for the financial accounting of the operations there. Her primary focus was in overhauling the state's mental health system. First exposed to an individual with a developmental disability as a young girl, and then made aware of how the state dealt with aid to those with mental and physical disability during the 1970 campaign, Rosalynn Carter became committed to the issue. As a member of the Governor's Commission to Improve Services to the Mentally and Emotionally Handicapped in 1971, she continued to keep the issue in front of the state government and subsequently oversaw the initiation of reforms. She also served as Honorary Chairperson of the Georgia Special Olympics from 1971 to 1975 and volunteered at an Atlanta hospital. All these activities provided Rosalynn Carter with a professional background on bridging legislative solutions to the issues facing the mentally ill.
In 1976, her husband won the Democratic nomination for President. For about two years prior to his candidacy, Rosalynn Carter traveled throughout the United States to help raise the public profile of her husband. She actively sought media coverage for her husband's candidacy, sometimes appearing unannounced at local radio or television stations to speak about his views on the issues. She also became the first candidate's wife to declare a campaign promise of her own: if she became First Lady, she would assume the responsibility for guiding legislative reform on behalf of the nation's mentally ill.
At the 1977 Inauguration, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter revived an Inaugural precedent performed only by Thomas Jefferson in 1801; after the swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol Building, they walked down Pennsylvania Avenue back to the White House. Wishing to make the Inaugural Ball a more populist celebration, they also reduced the cost of tickets.
Rosalynn Carter publicly admitted that the President consulted her and sought her advice on his domestic and foreign affairs decisions, speeches and appointments. Her unprecedented attendance at Cabinet meetings raised some eyebrows. She and the President maintained a Wednesday business lunch in the Oval Office to discuss Administration policy on issues that she had taken an interest in. She was not averse to disagreeing with the President's final decisions. She was critical of her husband for not making decisions or announcements with a sense of timing that always served the Administration's political purposes.
Rosalynn Carter was the first First Lady to maintain her office in the East Wing, the traditional office space reserved for the social, correspondence, scheduling and projects staff of the presidential spouse. She frequently worked directly with Cabinet members, including the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia Harris and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Joseph Califano. In 1979, congressional appropriation was enacted for a staff for the First Lady.
She worked as the Active Honorary Chair of the President's Commission on Mental Health, which began on February 17, 1977. The First Lady oversaw an advisory board of twenty commissioners composed of social workers, medical experts, lobbyists and psychiatrists who toured the nation, holding public hearings, consulting hundreds of community activists, doctors, legislators, and former mental health patients, while also developing thirty task forces, staffed by over 450 volunteers, concentrating on specialized issues and holding their conference gathering in the White House State Dining Room. The commission prepared recommendations in a final report, suggesting that a 1963 act be overhauled to strengthen community center services, erase state-federal overlaps and create changes to health insurance coverage, public housing, Medicaid and Medicare and state support for the most chronically mentally ill. She advocated for a bill of rights protecting the mentally ill from discrimination.After touring the National Institute of Mental Health, she was also able to initiate increases in federal research grants. The Commission drew up a formal document with numerous recommendations for federal implementation of the most sweeping reform of mental health legislation in almost thirty years. The Administration submitted the Mental Health Systems Act and Rosalynn Carter testified on its behalf before the Senate Subcommittee on Health, on May 15, 1979. It was passed and funded in September 1980.
Her second most involved project involved aiding senior citizens in need. The First Lady assembled a task force to inventory federal programs for the elderly. She conferred frequently with the president's counselor on aging, and worked with the Gray Panthers as well as Congressman Claude Pepper, chair of the House Select Committee on Aging. She also lobbied Congress for passage of the Age Discrimination Act to do away with mandatory age retirement within the federal workplace, and to raise the limit to seventy in the private sector. She further lobbied for the Older American Act, a funding increase in elderly services, as well as the Rural Clinics Act and Social Security reform to benefit seniors. Rosalynn Carter presided over the White House Conference on Aging.
Rosalynn Carter also promoted community voluntarism, using Washington, D.C. as her own example of her own hometown and supporting the Green Door, a self-help daytime program for the mentally challenged, and successfully urging civic groups and local businesses to provide a variety of donations to improve and maintain D.C. General Hospital. She also helped in getting an at-risk youth program, Project Propinquity, a footing within the federal government and enlisted the financial support of business leaders to help the program qualify for matching federal funds.
Like her two Republican predecessors, Rosalynn Carter also supported the Equal Rights Amendment and she made appearances in those states where ratification was still pending. She also supported the controversial 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision of the Supreme Court, but opposed federal funding for abortion. As the incumbent First Lady, she joined former First Ladies Lady Bird Johnson and Betty Ford in Houston, Texas for the opening session of the Women's Conference in 1977. She pressed to have minority women involved at higher levels in the president's re-election staff. She urged the Attorney General to join her call for a woman on the Supreme Court and phoned him to suggest the nomination of Judge Stephanie Seymour for an Oklahoma court. She asked her staff to assemble a roster of qualified women for presidential appointments.
In June of 1977, Rosalynn Carter visited Jamaica, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela as the President's personal representative, holding substantive meetings with Central and South American policy leaders on issues that included human rights, arms reduction, demilitarization, beef exports, pilot training, drug trafficking, nuclear energy and weaponry. After each day's talks, she filed a report with the U.S. State Department. At many of her meetings the First Lady spoke in Spanish, having just previously completed an intensive language course. Throughout the breaks of the "Camp David Accords," peace talks negotiated by the President between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Rosalynn Carter was present to provide support and advice for her husband. She represented the President at the inaugurations of new Bolivian and Ecuadorian presidents, as well as the funeral of Pope Paul VI. She was also the American representative who greeted Pope John Paul II when he made his first visit to the U.S. in 1979. She frequently sat in on the daily National Security Council briefings held for the president and senior staff. In November of 1979, when she learned the details of the Cambodian refugee crisis, she flew to see the conditions for herself and successfully urged the United Nations creation of a world relief coordinator. She raised millions of dollars for the cause in the U.S. and got the president to increase U.S. quotas for refugees, permit food delivery directly into Cambodia and to accelerate Peace Corps efforts. With the November 4, 1979 taking of American hostages in Iran, the First Lady urged the President to immediately enact an oil embargo from that nation.
Rosalynn Carter sponsored the first poetry festival and the first jazz festival at the White House. She also hosted a series of classical music concerts that were broadcasted for the public as In Performance at the White House. At Christmas, Rosalynn Carter hosted a unique winter lawn festival for congressional families, complete with skating rink.
Upon leaving the White House in 1981, Rosalynn Carter remained active through The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia, a private, nonprofit institution founded by the Carters in 1982. She served as vice chair of the board of trustees until May 2005. She is a leading opponent of the death penalty and continues to advocate for mental health issues, early childhood immunization, human rights, and conflict resolution. She created and chairs The Carter Center's Mental Health Task Force, an advisory body of experts and advocates promoting positive change in the mental health field. She hosts an annual Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy, bringing together leaders of the nation's mental health organizations. In 1996, she started awarding Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism, to combat the stigma associated with mental illnesses. Mrs. Carter also chairs the International Committee of Women Leaders for Mental Health, a global coalition of first ladies, royalty, and heads of state. The group's goals are to raise awareness about mental health issues, to identify and prioritize related needs in individual countries, and to implement appropriate actions.
Rosalynn Carter served on the Policy Advisory Board of The Atlanta Project, a program of The Carter Center addressing the social ills associated with poverty and quality of life citywide, from the program's inception in 1991 until its transfer to Georgia State University in 1999. In 1988, she convened with three other former first ladies the "Women and the Constitution" conference at the Center to assess that document's impact on women.
Outside of The Carter Center, Mrs. Carter is president of the board of directors for the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregiving at Georgia Southwestern State University, which was established in her honor on the campus of her alma mater. The RCI promotes the mental health and well-being of individuals, families, and professional caregivers, builds public awareness of caregiving needs, and advances public and social policies that enhance caring communities. She and her husband are involved with Habitat for Humanity, a network of volunteers who build homes for the needy, and Project Interconnections, a public/private nonprofit partnership to provide housing for homeless people who are mentally ill.
She has also received many honors, including The Volunteer of the Decade and "Into the Light" awards from the National Mental Health Association, The Award of Merit for Support of the Equal Rights Amendment from the National Organization for Women, The Notre Dame Award for International Service, The Eleanor Roosevelt Living World Award from Peace Links, The Kiwanis World Service Medal from Kiwanis International Foundation, The Jefferson Award from the American Institute for Public Service, The Georgia Woman of the Year Award from the Georgia Commission on Women, The Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health from the Institute of Medicine, The United States Surgeon General's Medallion, and The Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor. In 2001 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Rosalynn Carter has written several books: her autobiography, First Lady from Plains (1984), Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the rest of Your Life (1987) co-authored with her husband, Helping Yourself Help Others: A Book for Caregivers (1994) and Helping Someone with Mental Illness : A Compassionate Guide for Family, Friends, and Caregivers (1998), the latter two written with Susan Golant.
Rosalynn Carter enjoys fly-fishing and bird-watching. She lives with the former president in Plains and Atlanta, Georgia. In 2006, she resumed her skills on the campaign trail on behalf of her son Jack who was then seeking the U.S. Senate seat from Nevada. Jack was unsuccessful in his challenge to incumbent Republican John Ensign.
In May of 2010, Mrs. Carter authored Within Our Reach: Ending the Mental Health Crisis and throughout the year traveled the U.S. to carry the message of her work, including an appearance as a guest on "The Daily Show." Among the many startling facts she raised in the book was how American prison systems often become the only institutional provider of help to those suffering from mental illness. She pointed out that the American suicide rate was higher than the homicide rate, and that ten out of the one hundred Americans who commit suicide daily are children.
Rosalynn Carter has also become an advocate for addressing the unmet needs of members of the U.S. Armed Forces returning from Iraq or Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. The issue is one in which Rosalynn Carter and incumbent First Lady Michelle Obama intend to jointly address. When Mrs. Carter is in Washington, she will often visit with her successor. At the age of 85, she doesn't seem to be slowing down.