krystlbrrws
brighteyes
comp_101_eleanor_roosevelt_volume_1.htmlIn this year of political surprises, none has been more stunning than the emergence of numerous women candidates for high political office. Eleanor Roosevelt, a "woman with power who enjoyed power" and, according to Blanche Cook, the "foremost political woman of the twentieth century," would have relished this triumph. In Cook's splendid biography, Roosevelt emerges as a bold and innovative feminist politician who was convinced that women's public activities would determine America's political future. Roosevelt herself set the template for the modern female politician - cook refers to her as a political "boss" - working unabashedly to advance women within party structures and for a variety of women's causes.
Yet while Roosevelt did much to foster the emergence of political women and women's issues, she failed to acknowledge, either to herself or to the general public, her liking for the game of politics and her own unsurpassed success in it. Indeed, Roosevelt fostered the myth of her own naivete and denied the power and influence she wielded. Cook's biography challenges the interpretation Roosevelt put on her own life - that of helplessness and inadequacy - which almost all previous.accounts have followed. The achievement in this volume, which concludes at the start of the White House years, is to deconstruct the myths of both the public and private E.R. (as Cook always calls her), which have been framed by the media, historians and Eleanor herself. In their stead, Cook unveils a carefully nuanced, thoroughly researched and fully imagined portrait of an engaged and adventuresome activist, a woman who was politically ambitious and who in private life was nothing short of "outrageous." "Without her essential vision, the forcefulness of her political activism, and the details of her intimate life, Eleanor Roosevelt has been lost in an historical lie," Cook tells us. The real Eleanor who emerges from this interpretation was a feminist (a word she used to describe herself) not only in public but in private. Against the weight of tradition and of convention, the social world into which she was born and the very public life that she and F.D.R. lived, she insisted on the right to her identity, to create herself according to her own needs and desires. Her life became, in Cook's words, "a purposeful journey," following goals that she alone determined at every stage of her life. No better definition of a privately realized "feminist" life process can be wrought.
There is another reason why Eleanor Roosevelt emerges from this biography as a feminist. Cook allows us to see Roosevelt as not only a woman of power but as one who expressed and embodied desire, a woman who was "independently passionate, as well as independently political. It is not news that Eleanor's relationship with Franklin soured after little more than a decade of marriage, or that his affair with Lucy Mercer caused her great pain. But it is news that alongside the life Eleanor carefully manufactured with Franklin over the next decades - a life of respect and tolerance, of public mutuality but private autonomy - she had intimate friendships with several lesbian couples and possibly two extramarital sexual relationships: with Earl Miller, the state trooper who served as a bodyguard, and with Lorena (Hick) Hickok, the A.P. reporter who covered her as First Lady. Although these liaisons have long been rumored, especially following the opening of Hick's private papers, Cook is the first to examine the evidence with painstaking care and to locate the centrality of these friendships to Roosevelt's mature adulthood.
Given the deliberate attempts to cover up evidence of these relationships, Cook's accomplishment is significant. She is angry about the historical denial of Roosevelt's friendships and bemoans the fragmentary nature of the information she must rely on to reconstruct them. Yet despite her outrage, she doesn't stray beyond the bounds of authenticity in using available data to document Roosevelt's intimate associations - most interestingly, in the case of Earl Miller, such photographic evidence as E.R. and Miller on vacation, with hands casually across one or the other's knee. Whereas Joseph Lash in his biography likened Miller's liaison with his "Lady," as Miller called E.R., to his own relationship with her - that is, as mother and son - Cook finds a fully eroticized, romantic friendship. She demonstrates great sensitivity to the difficulty of gaining full knowledge of her subject's erotic behavior. ("Did lust remain on the outskirts of love?" she asks, without a definitive answer other than to acknowledge the variety of ways that two intimate adult friends express their physical feelings.) Yet she asserts the vital importance of such questions in forming a rounded picture of Roosevelt, especially because she has been canonized in the public imagination as a Victorian angel of the house. In the end, Cook sets forth her interpretation of E.R.'s intimacy with Miller almost gingerly, relying on her empathy with E.R. to fill in the evidentiary gaps.
The primacy of passion in Roosevelt's life - personal as well as political - thus becomes a central feature of this biography. Cook is unambiguous about Lorena Hickok's friendship with E.R., also erased from the historical record, as was Hick herself from photos that showed her with Roosevelt. According to Cook, the long letters that E.R. wrote to Hickok reveal their powerful attraction: "Sigmund Freud notwithstanding," Cook writes, "a cigar may not always be a cigar, but the |northeast corner of your mouth against my lips' [as Hick wrote to E.R.] is always the northeast corner."
Cook's discussion of the Roosevelt/Hickok relationship is embedded in a fuller treatment of the female friendships that, beginning in the 1920s, transformed E.R.'s life. In the first fifteen years of her marriage, Eleanor had been lonely, depressed and unhappy, tyrannized not only by her domineering mother-in-law but even by her own household staff. In her memoirs she wrote that she had no friends at all, and spoke of herself as "Griselda," the folk character whom Cook identifies as a "monster of passivity." Although F.D.R.'s entry into politics provided a brief liberation, as E.R., too, became politically active, the revelation of F.D.R.'s affair with Lucy Mercer threw her into a profound depression accompanied by physical deterioration that Cook identifies, from a contemporary perspective, as anorexia.
Not until she met her first feminist friends, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, a lesbian couple active in the women's movement, and herself became a feminist activist, working for the League of Women Voters, the Women's Trade Union League, the Women's City Club, the Women's Division of the New York State Democratic Committee, the Women's Joint Legislative Conference and for a host of progressive reforms to benefit women and children, did Eleanor shake off her depression. Within an amazingly short period of time, she became the leading figure in a network of female political activists that spanned New York State. E.R. rented an apartment in Lape and Read's Greenwich Village home, which remained a sanctuary for her throughout the 1920s and into her White House years. Just as important to her were Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, another lesbian couple active in feminist and Democratic politics, with whom she developed an equally intense, supportive relationship. Encouraged by F.D.R., Eleanor built Val-Kill, called "The Honeymoon Cottage" by F.D.R., on his property in Hyde Park, where Eleanor and her friends spent much of their time. All linens at the cottage were embroidered with their joint initials, E.M.N., which also became the emblem of their nearby furniture factory, a showcase for women's industrial skills. One of E.R.'s happiest ventures, her teaching at Todhunter, a private girls' school she owned jointly with Dickerman, its principal, also derived from this friendship.
In detailing the importance of these networks of friendship to Roosevelt's developing public persona and to her personal autonomy, Cook demonstrates how closely in E.R.'s life the political was aligned to the personal. Another linkage between public and private goals lay in Eleanor Roosevelt's clear recognition that her own struggle for independence was connected to the wider struggle of all women for economic and political power. These connections, which Cook threads throughout the narrative, make this a more fully integrated biographical study than is common even from feminist scholars.
The full power of biography lies, I believe, in the biographer's ability to narrate and explain the subject's conflicts and choices against the backdrop of her own time and place and her specific emotional realities. In this, Cook succeeds admirably, producing a richly textured drama of an individual life in interaction with complex social, political and psychological forces. The reader is carried along the peaks and gullies of Roosevelt's life by Cook's clear prose, balanced interpretations and vivid vignettes; my favorite is of Roosevelt contemplating the statue of a hooded female figure known as Grief, which she visited frequently in Rock Creek Cemetery in the District of Columbia. Built by Henry Adams as a memorial to his wife, Clover, who committed suicide when she learned of Adams's affair with another woman, this representation of female pain soothed Eleanor's psyche at the time of her greatest trauma (when she learned of the Mercer affair) and enabled her to imagine the possibility of female endurance beyond tragedy. Years later she would take Hick to visit the statue, explaining its symbolic meaning in her development. The prominence that Cook gives to E.R.'s pilgrimages to the statue, mentioned only briefly by other biographers, shows how deftly she has penetrated the mass of biographical detail about Roosevelt to reach her subject's emotional core.
Of course, the story of Eleanor Roosevelt is inherently dramatic, and not only because of her accomplishment in structuring an unconventional, independent feminist life style and program, together with an equally unconventional though mutually supportive partnership with Franklin. For E.R. was the daughter of one of America's most colorful fin de siecle aristocratic families, a family that in spite of its achievements - including the succession of her uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, to the presidency - was ravaged by "alcoholism, adultery, child molestation, rape, abandonment." Cook appropriates one-quarter of the narrative to tell the story of Eleanor's childhood in this privileged but problematic family, an account that helps the reader understand her lifelong dread of scandal and her determination not to share the unhappy fate of her mother and grandmother.
Overall, Eleanor Roosevelt is presented as a "woman in struggle, dedicated to modernity," a woman whose insistence on shaping her own destiny has become a "bellwether for our belief system." Yet Eleanor was not always saintly. Cook describes in elaborate detail the leisured, selfish style of Roosevelt's early married years and her unreflective adoption, during this period, of the prejudices of her stratum, including a casual anti-Semitism that once led E.R. to comment, after a celebration for Bernard Baruch, that "the Jew party was appalling." Cook also notes the gap between E.R.'s progressive ideas on schooling and the fact that her own school, Todhunter, drew its students from a narrow elite. And she notes that the circle of female friends that nourished Roosevelt was eventually broken by personal jealousies. Even feminism was no haven for cooperative idealism.
Cook might have elaborated more fully how the world of privilege in which E.R. was born exerted a continuing pull on her sensibilities. If, as she suggests, E.R. lived perpetually in two worlds - the one she made and the social world of her class - we need to know precisely when and how these worlds collided and how tensions between them were overcome. I look forward to Volume Two, which Cook promises will chronicle E.R.'s emergence as a leader in the battle for human rights and international peace, in the expectation that the reader will learn more about her continuing transformation as she met the challenges of her changing times and fought the devils of her past.
Joyce Antler teaches American studies at Brandeis University and is co-editor of The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women (forthcoming from Illinois).
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition) Antler, Joyce. "Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933." The Nation 13 July 1992: 58+. Academic OneFile. Web. 10 Apr. 2014. Document URL http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA12514207&v=2.1&u=lewi36276=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=b02203f8940cd16e68fe394efd9c5d80Gale Document Number: GALE|A12514207
