Bush Barbara

American First Lady, the wife of politician George Bush, whom she married on 6 January 1945 after meeting him at a Christmas party in 1942. They had six kids, but lost one daughter to leukemia on 11 October 1953. She and her husband had a total of 14 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. Barbara Bush was raised in a five-bedroom brick house in Rye, New York, almost at the border of the golf club. They did not have a fortune but they did have a large social inheritance. Her mother was the daughter of an Ohio Supreme Court justice, and her father, a member of a once wealthy Pennsylvania iron clan, was a distant relative to President Franklin Pierce. Barbara was the third of four kids, something of a social leader and arbitrator as a youngster. If she said, "We wont speak to Posy today," no-one spoke to Posy, giving the girl a miserable time. Pauline Pierce was a beautiful woman, but rather humorless and austere, critical of her daughter Barbara. For her junior year in high school, Barbara followed her sister to Ashley Hall, a genteel ladies prep school in Charleston, SC, the kind where a chaperone accompanied the girls to dances at the Citadel. Her early pudginess had dropped off and she was a slim and pretty teenager with pale skin and large, dark eyes. Barbara was closer to her father than her mother, and from them both learned the lessons of gender politics, a model of how mom rules the roost but dad wins the popularity contests. The goal of a woman of that day was to gain importance through her marriage, the end all of status, stability and sensibility. Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, while home from school on Christmas break, Barbara met her destiny. It was a dance at the Club where Barbara and George, just 16 and 17, locked into each other with a striking seriousness, a mixture of teenage crush and wartime gravity. It was three years before they married, but that conclusion was never in doubt. They were in the same class and well suited. George was a catch, string-bean handsome, a big man on the Andover campus, from a good family and a glamorous figure with his enlistment. She was wild about him and invested her whole life in him. They married in grand style while he was home on leave in 1945. By the time they reached their late 40s, there was a marked disparity in their looks. He was spare and still youthful looking, graying but tall and striking and she was lined and bowed, snow-topped and with a middle-age spread. She tried diets and dyes for a while before deciding to go along with nature. It was George who was the initiator, starting his own company, raising money back East, always instigating a great adventure, and it was Barbara who lived a life of hard work. In the first six years of their marriage they moved at least 11 times. Over 14 years she bore six kids, George, Robin, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. For long periods, Barbara raised the kids while George traveled. To the kids, he played good cop and she, bad cop. She had the duty roster. She was 28 years old when she made the decision to attempt a surgery to relieve the suffering of their three-year-old; George could not be reached. He reached the hospital shortly before their baby Robin died of leukemia. In defining herself as a wife and mother, Barbara Bush spoke for millions of women of her generation. In taking a subordinate role and holding the family together, she was observing the sexual politics of her generation. She did i Read less