BECOMING ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
New York City played big role in personal and public life of former first lady
Eleanor Roosevelt’s greatest invention was herself.
Born into a society family at the height of the Victorian age, she was expected to be polite, subservient, and silent. Initially, she was.
Until she decided to be blunt, independent and heard.
“If women could believe they were free, they could behave as if they were free,” she said. “Then they would be free.”
“Eleanor in the Village: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Search for Freedom and Identity in New York’s Greenwich Village,” by Jan Jarboe Russell, is the story of her liberation.
The book is slim and its focus specific, yet it’s still a complete portrait of a pioneering feminist and pivotal political figure.
When Eleanor was born in 1884, her family had been in New York for nearly 250 years. Her father adored her, but was an alcoholic and mentally ill. Her mother found her so ugly she could barely look at her. She called her skinny, serious daughter
“Granny.”
“I was without beauty and painfully shy,” Eleanor reflected. “Even when I danced, I never smiled.”
Eleanor was 9 when her parents died of diphtheria, and she was packed off to her grandmother’s house. By her teenage years — nearly 6 feet tall and with a perpetual slouch — she felt even more awkward and unwanted. Still, she harbored dreams.
“No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth & loyalty are stamped on her face all will be attracted to her,” she wrote in an essay for school. “And those who love her will always love her, for they will feel her loyal spirit & have confidence in her.”
Perhaps the first man to have confidence in her was her distant cousin, Franklin.
They bumped into each other on a train in 1902. Although they hadn’t seen each other in years, they talked for almost two hours. They began seeing each other frequently. “E is an Angel,” Franklin wrote in his diary. The handsome college student proposed the following year, and Eleanor happily accepted.
Franklin’s widowed mother was less pleased, and she controlled his allowance. She told them to wait a year. Dutifully, her son returned to Harvard to finish his degree. Eleanor went down to the Lower East Side, where she took a job teaching dance to immigrant girls.
She commuted from the family’s W. 37th St. brownstone by streetcar.
After the year was over, Franklin’s mother reluctantly gave her blessing. The couple was married on St. Patrick’s Day, 1905.
Eleanor’s uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, gave away the bride. “Well, Franklin,” he joked afterward, “there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family!”
Eleanor’s mother-in-law wasn’t alone in her doubts about the marriage, however. Theodore Roosevelt’s acerbic daughter, Alice, said Eleanor once “tried to sit on my head and smother me with a pillow” when she attempted to explain the facts of life. “She probably went to her wedding not knowing anything about the subject,” Alice said.
Whatever surprises the honeymoon held, there were more ahead.
The couple returned to Manhattan to discover Franklin’s mother had rented and furnished their first house. Later she would build them a new one — connected to her own. The message was clear: Eleanor may have married Franklin, but there was truly only one Mrs. Roosevelt.
And then, in 1918, Eleanor discovered another woman had taken her place in bed, too. Franklin was having an affair and refused to end it.
The couple discussed a divorce. Then
Franklin’s mother butted in again with an edict. There would be no divorce, she declared. Not unless Franklin wanted to be disinherited and abandon his dreams of an important political career.
And so the couple stayed together, under new terms.
One of their children, James, recalled the marriage as “an armed truce.” One of their biographers, Doris Kearns Goodwin, described it simply as a “new and different partnership.”
However, what it meant practically was that when it came to one crucial subject — continuing the Roosevelt progressive, political dynasty — they were united.
On everything else, they would lead separate lives.
Increasingly, Eleanor’s would center in Greenwich Village. In 1921, she befriended a lesbian couple, Elizabeth Fisher Read and Esther Everett Lape, who lived at 20 E. 11th St.
The three spent hours talking about feminism and social justice. Eventually, Eleanor rented an apartment in the couple’s building.
“Eleanor’s brand of feminism, shaped by these women, was moved by compassion, bottled-up sexuality, and the quest for her own truth,” Russell writes.
She also befriended another couple, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, who encouraged her involvement in politics. When Eleanor invited them to the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, Alice sneered at them as “female impersonators.”
“I was drifting far afield from the old influences,” Eleanor acknowledged.
Yet her devotion to her husband and his work remained steadfast.
When FDR contracted polio in 1921, it was Eleanor who nursed him, taking charge of bedpans and catheters. When his mother proclaimed it the end of his political career, Eleanor disagreed heatedly. Nothing was finished. She campaigned for him in his successful race for New York’s governorship and, later, the presidency. “My legs,” Franklin called her.
Yet meanwhile, she lived her own life. When he moved into the governor’s mansion in Albany, she mostly stayed in Manhattan. Eleanor taught at a girl’s private school, worked for the League of Women Voters and the Women’s Trade Union League. She went on marches for workers’ rights, which even got her arrested and tossed in jail.
“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you,” she wrote later, “if you realized how seldom they do.”
When Franklin went to D.C. as president, Eleanor accompanied her husband and kept working. She wrote for magazines and newspapers and toured the country, meeting coal miners and sharecroppers. She advocated for civil rights.
J. Edgar Hoover put her and her friends under surveillance. Eleanor wrote him furiously, decrying his “Gestapo methods.” But she continued to live her life without fear.
Without apologies, either. Eleanor had a serious relationship with an Associated Press reporter, Lorena “Hick” Hickok. “I want to put my arms around you,” Eleanor wrote her from the White House. “I yearn to hold you close.” She also had an affair with her driver and bodyguard, Earl Miller.
“He made her feel that she was a woman,” her son James said later.
Yet Eleanor’s devotion to her husband’s work remained absolute.
That came to an end on April 12, 1945, when FDR suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Eleanor had already picked out a Washington Square apartment for the couple’s retirement. Now she would move into it as a widow.
Alone but never lonely, Eleanor continued her work. She served at the United Nations, wrote and gave speeches, and avidly supported Adlai Stevenson for president twice.
Less enthusiastic about the cocky John F. Kennedy, she still endorsed him and chaired his Commission on the Status of Women in 1961.
Eleanor died the following year of heart failure. She was 78.
And, in the end, the daughter whose own mother had called ugly, the wife who her beloved husband had betrayed, the activist the FBI had investigated as a dangerous subversive, died honored, respected, and adored.
Because she refused to let anyone else define her first.