Rosalynn Smith Carter died on Sunday, November 19, at the age of 96 at her home in Plains, Georgia. Her marriage to 99-year-old former Democratic president Jimmy Carter lasted 77 years, the longest American presidential marriage. "Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished," said the former president in a statement released on Sunday.

Rosalynn Carter, who gained first lady status when her husband took up residence in the White House for a single term from 1977 to 1981, followed in the tradition of women who had a massive influence on their husband's presidency. She preceded Hillary Clinton and came after such figures as Edith Wilson, wife of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), who suffered a stroke, and Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945).

It was she who helped propel Jimmy Carter, Democrat and peanut planter, from his rural Georgia life to the White House, in an America traumatized by the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. But the Carter presidency failed to withstand the Iranian revolution, which led to a hostage crisis and an oil crisis. Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan, and accepted his fate, obviously more than Rosalynn Carter: "I'm bitter enough for both of us," she wrote about this experience in her memoirs First Lady from Plains. "I hate to lose."

Rosalynn Carter was born in 1927 in Plains, a small, remote village in Georgia, 220 kilometers south of Atlanta. She was delivered by Jimmy Carter's mother, a nurse, but did not meet Jimmy until he was a student at the Navy Academy in 1945. He kissed her on his way back from the cinema. "I had never let any boy kiss me on a first date, I was completely swept off my feet," she wrote in her memoirs. They never left each other's side.

They married in 1946 and the couple traveled with Jimmy Carter's work, until one day in 1953: Jimmy's father was dying and he announced to his wife that he was going to take over the family farm. "I argued. I cried. I even screamed at him," Rosalynn Carter recounted in her memoirs. They moved back to the rural South from which she had escaped. The couple, who would have four children, developed their peanut plantation, and Jimmy entered politics at the height of the battle for civil rights. He was elected Senator of Georgia in 1962, and then wanted to become Governor. He lost the 1966 Democratic primary to a segregationist, but eventually won the 1970 election.

Throughout these years, his wife advised him and chose a favorite subject, mental health: "I wanted to take mental illnesses and emotional disorders out of the closet." According to the New York Times, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter shared a deep work ethic. Their Christian faith was at the heart of their lives. Both were thrifty and could be stubborn.

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