She writes an article which becomes an article she writes in different ways over and over and over again: Women need to organize. They need to create their own bosses. They need to have support networks and gangs so that they are a force.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOKIn one way, it is this sense of order and also love that, I think, really saved Eleanor Roosevelt’s life. And in her own writing.
More Blanche Wiesen Cook Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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I think that Hick was in love with Eleanor, and Eleanor was in love with Hick. I think it’s very important to look at the letters that are in my book, because unlike some of the recent published letters.
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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.
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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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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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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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I think Eleanor Roosevelt always had a most incredible comfort writing letters. I mean, she was in the habit of writing letters. And that’s where she allowed her fantasies to flourish. That’s where she allowed her emotions to really evolve.
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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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He loved to sing. He loved to have fun. And he wrote beautiful letters, just as her father did, which – alas and alack – Eleanor Roosevelt destroyed. But she refers to his beautiful letters. And she was charmed by him.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK