FFirst Lady Melania Trump has been conspicuously absent from the campaign trail during her husband’s 2024 presidential bid. However, in a recent interview promoting her upcoming memoir, MelanieTrump made a bombshell revelation on one of the most divisive issues of this election: abortion. “Why should anyone but the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body?” asked the former First Lady.

Not since the 1970s has the wife of the Republican presidential nominee taken such a clear pro-abortion rights stance during a campaign. This is in stark contrast to Trump’s silence on the issue throughout her tenure as first lady. It also sets her apart from a long line of GOP First Ladies who have disagreed with their husbands on abortion, hoping not to jeopardize the party’s support from the religious right.

Why has the otherwise silent Trump decided to speak out on the issue now? The state of the GOP may have prompted her to do so. We’ve known this since the 1970s, the last time a Republican first lady—Betty Ford—spoke openly in support of women’s rights. Both then and now, the Republican party was undergoing an ideological reconfiguration, one that widened the gender gap. That opened up space for the First Lady to talk about abortion without fear of hurting her husband’s chances in November. Trump’s comments therefore tell us as much about the state of the GOP as they do about abortion.

By the 1970s, the battle for the soul of the Republican Party was decades old. Conservatives spent years building a movement to oppose the dominant brand of moderate Republicanism, most associated with President Dwight Eisenhower and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Throughout the 1960s, rising conservatives, notably Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, challenged the party’s orthodoxy.

With the collapse of the Nixon administration after Watergate and the decision of new President Gerald Ford to pardon his predecessor, the Republican Party found itself in crisis. Ford had to contend with Republican leaders in the South and West pushing the party to the right as he tried to navigate a way out of the national spiritual nadir. Women in the party were also engaged in a bitter struggle, with conservative activists such as Phylis Schlafly rising to the fore and demanding that the party drop its historic support for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), legal abortion and other feminist goals—and instead became the party of traditional conservative family values. The new First Lady, Betty Ford, found herself on the very opposite side of this debate.

Read more: Melania Trump shares her views on abortion in a new interview — and Donald’s reaction

As the GOP went through this fundamental identity crisis, abortion emerged as a central issue dividing the party.

In this context, in August 1975, sat Betty Ford 60 minutes correspondent Morley Safer. He noted that abortion was “kind of a taboo subject for the president’s wife.” However, Safer wanted to know what Ford thought about the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision roe v. Wadewhich ruled that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to have an abortion under certain circumstances. Ford rejected the idea that First Ladies should not address the difficult issue, noting instead that she felt “very strongly that it was the best thing in the world when the Supreme Court voted to legalize abortion.”

Knowing that the response would enrage the rising GOP right, the Ford Administration sought to distinguish the First Lady’s views from those of the President and the Republican Party, noting that this was her own personal opinion. President Ford admitted to reporters after the interview aired that he anticipated losing millions of votes as a result of his wife’s comments, but largely tried to remain neutral. The First Lady’s comments provoked a swift backlash, with Mormon elder Gordon B. Hinckley, for example, condemning the interview in a The CBS show as part of a “wider deterioration of morality throughout the world”.

The First Lady, however, was not interested in giving up land. She had a very different vision for the GOP. She wanted to see the ERA ratified and abortion rights protected. Ms. Ford was not alone in this. She had the support of a cohort of Republican feminists, including RNC co-chair Mary Dent Crisp.

However, the tectonic plates of the party were already shifting. Betty Ford’s brand of bipartisan feminism was already becoming increasingly outdated. Republican feminists felt power slipping away as Ronald Reagan mounted a challenge for the Republican nomination in 1976. By 1980, when Reagan had secured control of the GOP, Crisp he was kicked out of her position and ended up running John Anderson’s Independent Presidential Campaign.

Betty Ford continued to push for women’s equality even after her husband lost in 1976, but her brand of moderate Republicanism declined as the 1970s progressed. Reagan’s ascendancy solidified the GOP’s shift to the right. Abortion remained primarily a political issue—not just a women’s issue—as the Reagan Revolution reshaped the American political landscape.

In 1980, for the first time in 40 years, the GOP dropped support for the ERA from its platform. The battle to ratify the amendment failed, even after Congress extended the deadline to 1982. As moderates left the party, Reagan courted the newly organized Christian right, and First Lady Nancy Reagan followed suit .

The new First Lady personally opposed abortion but quietly supported women’s right to choose for themselves. However, Mrs. Reagan refused to make this statement in public, knowing that such a position would anger her husband’s evangelical supporters. In 1984, when a Los Angeles Times Asked by the reporter about exceptions to allow abortion in cases of rape, Nancy Reagan replied, “I don’t know.” That response forced her staff to clarify that the First Lady “was under no obligation to explain her position further because she is not an elected official or a person seeking office.” It wasn’t until 1994—years after her husband had left the White House—that she made her personal views on the matter known.

Read more: Roe v. Wade Lawyer ‘stunned’ Americans still fight for abortion

Reagan’s successor, Barbara Bush, also hid her pro-abortion stance during her husband’s presidency. When pressed on the issue during her 1992 re-election campaign, she shied away, saying instead that abortion was a personal choice and that the issue should not be in the party platform “either for or against”. Her statement shocked activists on both sides of the issue. Pro-abortion activists denounced it as a deliberate ploy to keep liberal voters from leaving the GOP, while conservatives tried to downplay Mrs. Bush’s position, fearing it would cost her husband votes on the right.

Bush’s daughter-in-law, Laura Bush, went on the record saying she doesn’t think so roe decision should be reversed in an interview the day before her own husband’s inauguration in 2001, but largely refrained from discussing the abortion because “I’m not running.” All three women’s husbands maintained strong anti-abortion positions and promoted anti-abortion policies.

The silence of the three Republican First Ladies resulted from the GOP’s alliance with the Christian Right, which left them minimal room to support abortion access as strongly as Betty Ford had. In addition, with roe protecting these rights, it might have been easier to justify not speaking as loudly.

Similarly, Melania Trump has said nothing about abortion rights during her husband’s presidency. But in 2022, the Supreme Court reshaped the debate over women’s reproductive health, overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—a direct result of the appointments made by Trump’s husband. The decision eliminated the constitutional right to have an abortion and hurt the GOP in the 2022 midterm elections. Donald Trump even worked to change his position on the issue claiming he would veto it a national ban on abortion.

This change in the GOP climate created a space for Melania Trump’s voice to be heard on abortion. Just as the party went through a period of demographic reconfiguration in the 1970s, the current GOP is at a crucial moment in its transformation from the Republican Party that existed from the 1980s to 2020 – a party of traditional conservatism and values morals – at the GOP. to Donald Trump the individual.

Melania speaking out may be an attempt to influence undecided voters who are not social conservatives but remain unconvinced by the Democratic system and open to a potential ideologically loosely defined Trumpism. It is also a bid to try to capture the women’s vote at a time when, after Dobbsthe gender gap is wider than ever. Her position on abortion reminds voters that not only is reproductive rights on the ballot in November, but so is the future of the Republican Party itself.

Elizabeth Rees is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her PhD research, completed at the University of Oxford, investigates the development of the staff of the East Wing and the First Lady’s Office in the mid-20th century.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME’s editors.