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 COOKShe 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.
More Blanche Wiesen Cook Quotes
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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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And Eleanor Roosevelt’s really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.
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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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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.
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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.
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One of the things for me, as a biographer, that is so significant is for Eleanor Roosevelt.
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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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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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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.
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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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Politics is not an isolated, individualist adventure. Women really need to emerge as a power to be the countervailing power to the men.
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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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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.
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So she [Eleanor Roosevelt] is an amazing First Lady. What other First Lady in U.S. history has ever written a book to criticize her husband’s policies?
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The amazing thing, I think, historically, is that he says, “Go do it. If you can make this happen, I’ll follow you.”
BLANCHE WIESEN COOK