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 COOKI think that Eleanor Roosevelt really learned about the limits of power and influence from Arthurdale. She could not make some things happen. And she particularly learned that she could not, just because she was nominally in charge.
More Blanche Wiesen Cook Quotes
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She’s very warm about her grandmother, even though, if you look at contemporary accounts, they’re accounts of horror at the Dickensian scene that Tivoli represents: bleak and drear and dark and unhappy. But Eleanor Roosevelt in her own writings is not very unhappy about Tivoli.
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Women who love women, who choose women to nurture and support and to create a living environment in which to work creatively and independently, are lesbians.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK -
I think that Eleanor Roosevelt really learned about the limits of power and influence from Arthurdale. She could not make some things happen. And she particularly learned that she could not, just because she was nominally in charge.
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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.
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In 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt goes on the air; she writes columns; she broadcast three, four times to say the US must join the World Court.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt. And it really was an act of redemption, really one of her first acts of redemption as she entered the White House.
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She really is a completely different First Lady. Eleanor Roosevelt was not going to suffer and withdraw in the White House. And I think he’s a very different President. He does not want his wife to suffer and withdraw in the White House. And they really are partners.
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And during the campaign of 1936, she writes that she and her brother would always rather be out doing things when they’re sick, rather than take to their beds.
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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.
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But it’s also the beginning of another level of liberation for her]Eleanor Roosevelt], because when she returns to New York, she gets very involved in a new level of politics.
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And I think Eleanor Roosevelt always responded to pain by doing more, by doing something, by being active. And I think she just couldn’t bear to look at her childhood grief. And she didn’t.
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Eleanor Roosevelt started off almost every early article she wrote, starting with, “My mother was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” And I think her life was a constant and continual and lifelong contrast with her mother.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK