Matriarch : Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty (9781538713624) by Page Susan

Author:Page, Susan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2019-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Almost three decades after the Wellesley speech, in 2006, Barbara Bush seethed after another college commencement, this one at the George Washington University. She and former president George Bush each delivered remarks, and each received an honorary degree. Her speech, she told her diary, had been “really funny” (“if I say so my self”) and pivoted to a serious note at the end.

“All of this to tell you that I was really hurt, well maybe mad, at least upset by my citation,” she went on. “It was 3 or 4 minutes long and never said one thing that I had done for others… Literacy, hospital boards, anything. I was a house wife and a mother, a saint who sacrificed her life for her husband and children.”

The citation mentioned Barbara Bush’s father, her husband, her children, her humor, and her famous lack of cooking skills. It made no reference to anything else she had done over the previous eighty-one years of her life. “Like Abigail Adams, you remind us of the pleasures of a long marriage and the importance of family,” university president Stephen Joel Trachtenberg had concluded. “You never let us forget that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”

“I had not realized that I was a women’s libber, but I am now,” Barbara Bush wrote afterward, venting to her diary. “Of course I love that part of my life, but I love the other side, too.”

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