black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Her mother died at the age of 29, essentially turning her face to the wall and deciding to die. And so we can only imagine the agony she felt. And Eleanor Roosevelt really wanted to make her mother happier, and – and to make her live, you know, make her want to live.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Mother Thinking Wall
She writes that the happiest day, the happiest single day of her life was the day that she made the first team at field hockey. And I have to say, as a biographer, that’s the most important fact.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Biographer Fact Happiest Hockey Important Team
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.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Childhood Look More Responded Something Think
I have both the personal and the political. And their relationship is about ardor. It’s about fun. And it’s also about politics.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Personal Politics Relationships
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.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Entered House Really Redemption White
I think FDR was very dashing and charming and debonair, and probably reminded her of her father. A great bon-vivant. He loved to party.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Beautiful Father Fun Party Reminded
One of the things for me, as a biographer, that is so significant is for Eleanor Roosevelt.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Children Home Mother
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.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Devoted Grandmother Life Own Painter
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
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
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.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Thinking Two White
Well, the reality of her father was that he was a very diseased alcoholic, who died at the age of 34. And one always has to pause to wonder how much you have to drink to die at 34. And he was a really tragic father.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Children Father Mean
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.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Father Mean Writing
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
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
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
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
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

Country Despair Years
So in 1924, Eleanor Roosevelt really gets a sense of what the limits of the battle and the contours of the battle are going to be. The men are contemptuous of the women, and the women really need to organize.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Contemptuous Men Support Writing
And Eleanor Roosevelt’s really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Dynamic Effort Really Superhead
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
In 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.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Dark Grandmother Writing
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 COOK

Adventure Coutevailing Effort Men
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
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.
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

Brother Grief Pain
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 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Blanche Wiesen Cook Quotes