On Friday, Betty Ford, former First Lady, wife of former President Gerald Ford and founder of the Betty Ford Center, died at the age of 93 from natural causes. She was a recovering alcoholic who helped found the influential rehabilitation clinic, vowing to help those in need who were in the grips of various addictions but needed extra help away from a hospital setting.

She was also a tireless supporter of various, somewhat taboo, social causes at a time when most people were still scared to talk about things like drug use, premarital sex and gender equality. Some would even go as far as to say she was more important to the country in the early '70s than her husband was. He was busy cleaning up the messes of his predecessor, Richard Nixon, and found it hard to crawl out of the shadow of Watergate.