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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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There was a surprising amount of freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt talks about how the happiest moments of her days were when she would take a book out of the library, which wasn’t censored.
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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 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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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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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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I think Eleanor Roosevelt’s so popular at Allenswood because it’s the first time she is, number one, free. But it’s the first time somebody really recognizes her own leadership abilities and her own scholarly abilities.
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And Eleanor Roosevelt’s really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.
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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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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.
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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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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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By 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt was so angry at FDR’s policies, she writes a book called This Troubled World. And it is actually a point-by-point rebuttal of her husband’s foreign policy. We need collective security. We need a World Court.
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You know, unloved, judged harshly, never up to par. And she was her father’s favorite, and her mother’s unfavorite. So her father was the man that she went to for comfort in her imaginings.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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