A Beautiful Role Model

Remembering One of Our Loveliest First Ladies with Admiration and Gratitude for a Life Well Spent

Pat Ryan Nixon (1912-1993)

... Few, if any First Ladies ever worked as hard and as consistently as Pat Ryan did before her marriage to Richard Nixon in 1940. She was only a year old when her parents relocated to the farming community of Artesia, California (about 12 miles southwest of Los Angeles) and purchased a ten-and-a-half-acre truck farm where they grew produce sold from the back of the Ryan family truck in larger nearby towns and cities. 

She joined the rest of her family at an early age in planting and harvesting peppers, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, tomatoes, corn, and barley. When her mother became ill with cancer (1924-1925), Pat Ryan assumed the chores of cooking, cleaning and laundering for her brothers and father, as well as for the seasonal farm workers in addition to her farming responsibilities. 

When her father began to fail because of terminal tuberculosis (1929-1930), she continued with the household chores, farm chores. and  also took a job at the farmers and dairymen Artesia First National Bank to meet his medical bills, rising early to clean the floors as a janitor, then returning after high school to work as a bookkeeper. 

... Despite considerable hardship and adversity, Pat Ryan managed to graduate cum laude from the University of Southern California, and was the first First Lady to earn a graduate degree ...
 
In 1932, Pat Ryan drove an elderly couple across the country, a return bus ticket to California being her recompense. At Seton Hospital for the Tubercular run by the Catholic Sisters of Charity, Pat Ryan worked in a capacity of jobs, including x-ray technician, pharmacy manager, typist, laboratory assistant, and lived with the nuns at the hospital (1932-1934).
 
Admitted to USC on a research scholarship that covered her $240 tuition and living expenses, Pat Ryan worked for a psychology professor, helping to grade student papers and doing research for a book he was writing on orientation. Requiring more income, she also worked as assistant in the office of the university's vice president, a cafeteria waitress, a librarian, preparing graduate survey questionnaires, testing beauty products in salons, as a movie extra, and as assistant buyer at Bullock's Wilshire Department Store. She worked an average of 40 hours a week, beyond her classes. (1934-1937)
 
Hired as a teacher at Whittier Union High School, she taught commercial classes in typing, bookkeeping, business principles, stenography, and adult night classes in typing. She served as faculty advisor to the Pep Committee, which organized social outings for students, helped organize student rallies, attended all high school sports events and every PTA meeting, and served as director for school plays earning an annual salary of $1,800.00. Pat continued her job as a teacher for a full year after she married (1937-1941). ...

... Pat Nixon became the first incumbent First Lady to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment. She was the first to disclose publicly her pro-choice view on abortion in reaction to questions on the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. Before she even began unrelentingly to lobby her husband to name a woman to the Supreme Court, she called for such an appointment publicly. She even became the first First Lady to appear publicly in pants and model them for a national magazine, reflecting the radical change in women's attire that critics derided as masculine. Still, Pat Nixon valued her identity as a middle-class homemaker, supportive wife and devoted mother and was often depicted as the quintessential traditionalist in contrast to the emerging image of the modern liberated woman ...

http://www.firstladies.org/biographies/firstladies.aspx?biography=38