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There was a surprising amount of freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt talks about how the happiest moments of her days were when she would take a book out of the library, which wasn’t censored.

Blanche Wiesen Cook

A lot of people say that Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t a good mother. And there are two pieces to that story. One is, when they were very young, she was not a good mother. She was an unhappy mother.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Everywhere Mother People Two
Eleanor Roosevelt doesn’t ever do anything that is going to hurt her husband. She tries things out on him. She gets permission to do things.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Hurt Husband Thinking
You know, unloved, judged harshly, never up to par. And she was her father’s favorite, and her mother’s unfavorite. So her father was the man that she went to for comfort in her imaginings.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Imagination Judged Know Mother Unfavorable Unloved
She meets Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, and becomes very involved in the women’s movement, and then in the peace movement. And ironically, the years of her greatest despair become also the years of her great liberation.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Despair Met Movement Peace Women Years
She was going to redeem her father’s honor. And publishing his letters, reconnecting with her childhood really fortified her to go on into the difficult White House years.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Childhood House Reconnecting Years
I mean, if you pause over what it means at the age of 76 that Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, the happiest single day of her life was the day she made the first team at field hockey. Field hockey is a team sport. Field hockey is a knockabout.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Mean Sports Team
And in her [Eleanor Roosevelt] letters, she writes the most, you know, fanciful letters: when we are together, and when we are reunited, and you know,
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Brother Mother Writing
They’re partners in a big house where there are two separate courts, and they both know they have two separate courts. But these are courts that are allied in purpose, united in vision.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Count Partner Separate United Vision
And that’s where she allowed herself to express herself really fully, and sometimes whimsically, very often romantically. And it really starts with her letters to her father, who is lifelong her primary love.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Letter Lifelong Long Romantically Sometimes
And there’s something about, you know, when your mother dies, this sense of abandonment. I think Eleanor Roosevelt had a lifelong fear of abandonment and sense of abandonment after her parents’ death.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Abandonment Fear Lifelong Mother Think
The very first entry in her FBI file begins in 1924, when Eleanor Roosevelt supports American’s entrance into the World Court. And the World Court comes up again and again – ’33, ’35.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Again Comes Count Country Entrance People
She was an unhappy wife. She had never known what it was to be a good mother. She didn’t have a good mother of her own. And so there’s a kind of parenting that doesn’t happen.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Happen Kind Known Mother Unhappy
She only writes about her father’s agony. But her whole life is dedicated to making it better for people in the kind of need and pain and anguish that her mother was in.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Better Making Mother Need
And Eleanor Roosevelt’s really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Dynamic Effort Really Superhead
Like traditional upper class families, there are nannies and servants, and the children, you know, come in to say good-night before they go to bed.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Children Good Night Years
Eleanor Roosevelt loved to write. She was a wonderful child writer. I mean, she wrote beautiful essays and stories as a child. And Marie Souvestre really appreciated Eleanor Roosevelt’s talents and encouraged her talents.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Beautiful Children Girl

There was a surprising amount of freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt talks about how the happiest moments of her days were when she would take a book out of the library, which wasn’t censored.

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There was a surprising amount of freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt talks about how the happiest moments of her days were when she would take a book out of the library, which wasn’t censored.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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