Barbara Bush

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 won't 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.