As we remember and honor the legacy of our 39th president, Jimmy Carter, it is important also to remember and honor the legacy of his political and lifetime partner, Rosalynn Carter.

In 1988 I traveled to Plains, Georgia, to interview Rosalynn Carter for an article for Woman’s Day magazine about the role of First Lady in American politics and politics. Then, as now, the role was undefined—and culturally bound. “Nobody ever tells you about the role you’re supposed to play,” she told me. “It’s what you make of it.”

Mrs. Carter—who was married to Jimmy Carter for more than 77 years before her death at age 96 in 2023–—became one of the most politically active first ladies since Eleanor Roosevelt.  Seated alone in a modest office in Plains in 1988, Mrs. Carter said that when she came home to the White House for the first time, she was surprised to find her family’s clothes unpacked and hanging in the closets. There was no first lady’s instruction manual sitting on the table.

Mrs. Carter—who married Jimmy Carter when she was 18 and he was 21–was her husbands’ secret weapon in his unexpected rise from rural Georgia to the Georgia governor’s mansion to the U.S. presidency in 1976.  Jimmy Carter called her his political partner. “Rosalynn and I were the ones who discussed every facet of the campaign,” Carter said.  “She can do everything as well as I can,” said the president, who called her “a full partner or better.”

In our interview, Mrs. Carter said it was only natural to continue that relationship once they reached the White House.   Soft-spoken but fiercely  political, more so, aides said, than the president himself at times, Mrs. Carter sat in on cabinet meetings, held a weekly working lunch with president Carter and felt herself to be such a part of the presidency that White House reporters at the time told me she occasionally lapsed into calling the Carter presidency “we.” It was a view of the presidency that offended Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist and opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. “The presidency is not a co-chairmanship,” Schlafly told me more than 35 years ago.  “We have the right to assume that the first lady will support her husband’s positions. When people ask me when we’re going to have a woman president, I say, ‘We already had one: Her name is Rosalynn Carter.’”

Mrs. Carter did not identify herself as a feminist; but, as the New York Times noted when she died, she lobbied for the Equal Rights Amendment and pushed for women to serve throughout the government. That day in 1988, at pains to define her role as first lady, Mrs. Carter said, “I always considered Jimmy to be elected, but everybody knew I came with him. If you’re there in the White House, I don’t see how you could sit on the sidelines and not voice an opinion.”

Indeed, Rosalynn Carter told me, surprisingly that day, that she had suggested the Camp David meeting that led to the historic peace treaty signed there by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menahem Begin in 1979. “Jimmy and I were walking around the grounds at Camp David one day,” she recalled. “It’s so peaceful there.  We were talking about the Middle East, and Jimmy was frustrated.  I said, ‘Why don’t you bring President Sadat here? If we got him here in this beautiful, quiet place, we could do something.”

After Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, the Carters, then in their mid-50s, founded the Carter Center in Atlanta, and built a remarkable “post-presidency” of humanitarian, health and human-rights work that continued until Jimmy Carter’s death at 100.

From her years as the first lady of Georgia to the White House and at the Carter Center, Rosalynn Carter made the treatment of mental illness an important cause. She testified before Congress in 1979 on behalf of the Mental Health Systems Act, which established support for community mental health centers; and she championed legislation, finally passed in 2008, for mental illness to be covered like physical illness in health insurance.

“Jimmy never came to me and said, ‘What should I do about that?’”Rosalynn Carter said in our interview. “But if I felt strongly about something, he’d listen to me.”