Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy

Life, work, and accomplishments:

• Growing up the daughter of mayor and politician John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, Rose’s youth was filled with early lessons in politics and the importance of public service. Accompanying her father, she learned the skills that would later serve her as an ambassador’s wife and matriach of a political family
• When she was 17 and the “belle of Boston Irish society,” she met and fell in love with her future husband Joseph Kennedy. However, due to her higher status and young age, they hid their relationship from her father. Once Joe graduated from Harvard and became the youngest bank president in the nation, they revealed their courtship
• Her life changed as a wife, but she poured herself into motherhood and resolved herself to raise the most perfect children she could. She had 9 children
• During Joe’s ambassadorial years, Rose served as a classy socialite diplomatic consultant and spent much time traveling as she could within her duties as the matriarch of the family
• Rose was an active participant in the campaigns of her sons: she used her Boston connections to win support, organized tea parties and receptions to personally connect with the female vote, traveled the country making speeches, used television specials to reach many voters, and advised her sons on public speaking and presentation
• In her later years, her faith that she held strong to throughout her lifetime held strong throughout the many tragedies of the Kennedy family, and the spirit of public service rooted in her youth carried through in her many charitable activites
• Through speeches and the use of the platform of president that her son Jack held, Rose sought to bring attention and normalcy to intellectual disability in the nation during a time where it was shunned and hidden. She openly admitted her daughter Rosemary’s disability, which helped bring the issue to the public’s attention. She worked clsoely with the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, named after her late eldest son, to these ends
• Pope Pius XII awarded her the title of Papal Countess in 1939 for her  “exemplary motherhood and many charitable works,” making her the sixth to receive such a title from the United States