Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush passed away this week at age 92.

She was remembered for her sharp wit, for not taking herself too seriously, for her blunt honesty, even about her kids.

I mean, listen to this. Near the end of her life,

she said to a doctor, want to know why George W., her son and the 43rd president, is the way he is?

Because she said, I smoked and drank when he was in the womb. Barbara Bush feared nobody,

especially not the ladies of Wellesley College. That's what I want to

tell you about today, a remarkable, somewhat forgotten moment in her long life. It was 1990. The Berlin Wall

had fallen seven months earlier. Wellesley, an all-female college near Boston, invited Barbara Bush to give the commencement

speech.

But the students were not happy.

Why?

Bush had gone to Smith College, another all-female school in Bastion of Feminism, but she

had dropped out at age 19 to marry a patrician young Navy pilot named George

H.W. Bush. Not quite the Wellesley way. Students signed a petition saying her life choice,

quote, contravenes what we have been taught over the last four years at Wellesley. They said her

prominence came through the achievements of her husband.

Suddenly, the typically uncontroversial Barbara Bush found herself at the center of a national

debate about the nature of feminism that would continue for decades.

Bush's husband rushed to her defense, and when the day finally came for the speech, the White House decided to send backup.

Who?

Another first lady, Razak Gorbachev, who was in Washington with her husband, Mikhail,

...