Background and career
Ann Lois Romney (née Davies; born April 16, 1949) is an American author and philanthropist. She is married to politician and businessman Mitt Romney and was First Lady of Massachusetts during her husband's tenure as governor of that state. Davies was born in Detroit and raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she attended the private Kingswood School. After converting to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in 1966, Davies attended Brigham Young University (BYU). She married Mitt Romney in 1969 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in French in 1975. As First Lady of Massachusetts, Romney served as the governor's liaison for federal faith-based initiatives. She was involved in a number of children's charities, including Operation Kids. Later, she was an active participant in her husband's U.S. presidential campaigns in 2008 and in 2012. Romney was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1998. She has credited a mixture of mainstream and alternative treatments with giving her a lifestyle mostly without limitations, and has said that equestrianism has helped her maintain her health. Romney has received recognition in dressage as an adult amateur at the national level and has competed professionally in Grand Prix as well. In 2014, she opened the Ann Romney Center for Neurological Diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston; the Center performs intersectional research regarding multiple sclerosis and several other brain diseases.
Born Ann Lois Davies in Detroit on April 16, 1949, she was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by parents Edward Roderick Davies and Lois (Pottinger) Davies. She has two brothers. Her father, originally from Caerau near Maesteg, Wales, was a self-made businessman who in 1946 co-founded Jered Industries, a maker of heavy machinery for marine use located in Troy, Michigan. He had also held the part-time position of Mayor of Bloomfield Hills. Raised in the Welsh Congregationalists, he had become strongly opposed to all organized religion, although on her request the family very occasionally attended church, and she nominally identified as an Episcopalian. At times, she helped out at her father's plant. Ann Davies knew of Mitt Romney since elementary school. She went to the private Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills, which was the sister school to the all-boys Cranbrook School that he attended. The two were re-introduced and began dating in March 1965; they informally agreed to marriage after his senior prom in June 1965. He talked of the marriage taking place in the near future, but she insisted that he go on Mormon missionary duty on the grounds that he would regret it later if he did not. Mitt attended Stanford University for a year and then was away starting a 2+1⁄2-year missionary stint in France. During 1966, she converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, without him having made any request to her that she do so. In the conversion process she accepted the guidance of Mitt's father George Romney, the Governor of Michigan. George included her in Romney family events while Mitt was away; she appreciated his treating her as an equal and picked him to baptize her. Ann graduated from high school in 1967 and began attending Brigham Young University (BYU). She spent the second semester of her freshman year abroad, at the University of Grenoble in France, and was there during the 1968 Winter Olympics and met athletes such as skiing star Jean-Claude Killy. The Mormon missionary rules allowed her only two brief visits with Mitt and very rare telephone calls with him. Back at BYU, she involved herself in campus life, spending several days a week as a volunteer in the academic affairs office. While at BYU, she dated future business academic Kim S. Cameron. She sent Mitt a letter mentioning being courted by another student who she said reminded her of Mitt; this alarmed Mitt as missionaries often received "Dear John" letters from girlfriends while away. Mitt sent letters back imploring her to wait for him.
Immediately after Romney's return from France in December 1968, the pair reconnected and agreed to get married as soon as possible. Ann Davies and Mitt Romney were married in a civil ceremony on March 21, 1969, at her Bloomfield Hills home, with a reception afterward at the Bloomfield Hills Country Club. It was presided over by Edwin B. Jones, a banker and Romney family friend then serving as an LDS Church Regional representative of the Twelve. Among the 250–300 guests were U.S. House Minority Leader Gerald Ford and automotive executives such as Semon Knudsen and Edward Cole, and President Richard Nixon sent congratulations. The following day the couple flew to Utah for a wedding ceremony inside the Salt Lake Temple; her parents could not attend since they were non-Mormons, but were present at a subsequent wedding breakfast held for them across the street. (Both her brothers converted to Mormonism within a year of her doing so; her mother converted much later.) The couple's first son, Tagg Romney, was born in 1970 while both were undergraduates at BYU (Mitt had transferred from Stanford to BYU at Ann's request). After Mitt graduated, the couple moved to Belmont, Massachusetts, so that he could attend Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. Slowed down by parenthood, she later finished her undergraduate work by gaining a semester and half's worth of credits via taking night courses at Harvard University Extension School. Ann Romney received a Bachelor of Arts degree with a concentration in French language from BYU in 1975. A stay-at-home mother, Romney raised the family's five sons: Taggart (known as "Tagg", born in 1970), Matthew ("Matt", 1971), Joshua ("Josh", 1975), Benjamin ("Ben", 1978), and Craig (1981). She faced criticism from her parents over her decision to marry and start a large family so young. She also felt snubbed by her peers, at a time when the feminist movement was blooming and educated women were establishing careers. She later said, "My parents were questioning my choices, my peers were. But [...] I was pretty resolute, pretty confident in what I was doing." She taught early morning seminary to them and other children while her husband worked, first in business, then in politics. She wanted to go on for a master's degree, perhaps in art history, but first taking care of her children, and later her health issues, forestalled that. She was active in the local PTA and with the League of Women Voters. With a friend, she held local cooking classes for a brief period. Naturally athletic, she began playing tennis and became one of the best players around the local country clubs.
Ann Romney ran for the position of town meeting representative in Belmont in 1977. She studied local issues and engaged in door-to-door campaigning, and won the election. It was partly due to her urging that her husband entered politics and ran in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts against incumbent Democrat Ted Kennedy. The race constituted her first prolonged public exposure as she campaigned for him on a nightly basis. She was seen as superficial and too deferential to him and some columnists labelled her a "Stepford wife". Late in that campaign, she gave a long interview to The Boston Globe. Her statement in it that she and her husband had never had a serious argument during their married years came in for ridicule, and her portrayal of the couple's student years as financially impoverished, while they lived off of sales of George Romney's stock and loans, made her seem privileged and naïve and brought a harsh public reaction. Boston University political science professor later said, "She definitely hurt him in that race." Asked following her husband's loss if she would be involved in future campaigns, Ann said, "Never. You couldn't pay me to do this again." She later termed the experience "a real education".
In 1997, Ann Romney began experiencing severe numbness, fatigue, and other symptoms, and in November 1998, just before Thanksgiving, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Mitt Romney described watching her fail a series of neurological tests as the worst day of his life. He later said: "I couldn't operate without Ann. We're a partnership. We've always been a partnership so her being healthy and our being able to be together is essential." She initially experienced a period of severe difficulty with the disease, and later said: "I was very sick in 1998 when I was diagnosed. I was pretty desperate, pretty frightened and very, very sick. It was tough at the beginning, just to think, this is how I'm going to feel for the rest of my life." Since then, she credits a mixture of mainstream and alternative treatments with giving her a lifestyle mostly without limitations. She initially used corticosteroids, including intravenously, and credited them with helping stop the progression of the disease. She then dropped them and other medications due to counterproductive side effects. She has partaken of reflexology, acupuncture, and craniosacral therapy, and has said, "There is huge merit in both Eastern and Western medicine, and I've taken a little bit from both." She is a board member for the New England chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Romney is an avid equestrian, crediting her renewed involvement in it while in Park City, Utah (where the couple had built a vacation home and where they lived when he was in charge of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games), for much of her recovery after her multiple sclerosis diagnosis and for her continued ability to deal with the disease. She has said that riding "saved my life", explaining that, "I was losing most of the function of my right side. And I decided I needed to go back and do what I loved before I couldn't do it anymore." At first she could barely stay on a horse without getting tired, but gradually the muscle control required for riding proved directly beneficial, and psychologically, "Riding exhilarated me; it gave me a joy and a purpose. When I was so fatigued that I couldn't move, the excitement of going to the barn and getting my foot in the stirrup would make me crawl out of bed." As a result, she said, "My desire to ride was, and is, so strong that I kept getting healthier and healthier." She has received recognition in dressage as an adult amateur at the national level, including earning her 2006 Gold Medal and 2005 Silver Medal at the Grand Prix level from the United States Dressage Federation. She also sometimes competes in professional dressage events and has broken the 60% level at Grand Prix. Romney works with California trainer Jan Ebeling, who schools her and her horses in dressage and works with her importing new stock from Europe. The pair qualified for the Pan-Am games in 2004. By 2011, the horses she owned and kept at Ebeling's Moorpark, California, stables, which she is a partner in, were valued at more than $250,000. The Romneys helped fund Ebeling's aspirations for equestrian competition at the 2012 Summer Olympics, and Ann was present in Gladstone, New Jersey, in June 2012 when Ebeling, riding on the horse Rafalca (co-owned by him and Ann) won a spot on the U.S. dressage team. At the London games in August 2012, she watched the pair place 28th in the competition.
