Politics is not an isolated, individualist adventure. Women really need to emerge as a power to be the countervailing power to the men.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOKEleanor Roosevelt’s very helpful to a lot of children who cannot speak French, who do not write well. And Marie Souvestre is fierce. She tears up students’ papers that are not, you know, perfect.
More Blanche Wiesen Cook Quotes
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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.
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One, she’s really talented, an organizational woman. She knows how to do things. She begins to compare her life to her grandmother’s life. And it’s very clear to her that being a devoted wife and a devoted mother is not enough.
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There’s very little private time with the children in the early years. Actually, there’s much more private time with the children in the 20s.
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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.
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We need something like the League of Nations. We need to work together to fight fascism. We need embargoes against aggressor nations, and we need to name aggressor nations. All of which is a direct contradiction of FDR’s policies.
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Also, she spoke perfect French. She grew up speaking French. She’s now at a french-speaking school where, you know, girls are coming from all over the world. Not everybody speaks French.
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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.
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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’s very helpful to a lot of children who cannot speak French, who do not write well. And Marie Souvestre is fierce. She tears up students’ papers that are not, you know, perfect.
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I have both the personal and the political. And their relationship is about ardor. It’s about fun. And it’s also about politics.
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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.
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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.
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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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I mean, in the campaign of ’24 and in ’28 and ’32, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt insists that women have equal floor space. And this is a great victory over time. Then she wants women represented in equal numbers as men. And she wants the women to name the delegates. And the men want to name the delegates.
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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.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK