Six pregnancies between 1906 and 1916 left Eleanor little time to gain confidence or acquire control over her life. Even the nurses she hired for her children intimidated her and made her feel inadequate. She tried to improve her French and German but found such study unrewarding, and when she ventured down to the Lower East Side to teach in a settlement house, her mother-in-law advised her to stop because of her fear that Eleanor might bring home diseases.
If Eleanor had shared her husband’s interest in politics, she might have found a way to break out of her mold earlier but on that subject she lacked both knowledge and curiosity. The intricacies of government remained a mystery to her, and she later admitted that at the time of her marriage she could not have explained the difference between state and national legislatures.6 At the 1912 Democratic convention in Baltimore, she found the confusion and noise so objectionable that she left early and joined her children at the family’s summer retreat on Campobello. When Franklin’s jubilant telegram arrived later to announce Woodrow Wilson’s nomination, she failed to comprehend the reason for his excitement. Her husband’s support of woman’s suffrage about the same time shocked Eleanor, and she realized that she had never given the matter serious thought, although it had been the central objective of the feminist movement for more than half a century.7
About 1917, the shy and insecure Eleanor Roosevelt began a metamorphosis so enormous in its consequences that historians have debated its causes. By then in her thirties, she had already managed a partial escape from her domineering mother-in-law when Franklin’s appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy took them to Washington in 1913. Sara Roosevelt still came down to rearrange the furniture, but as soon as she left, Eleanor could put it back. And put it back she did. More important, Eleanor had the examples of other Washington wives who were breaking away from old traditions and accomplishing something on their own.
In part, they were drawn out by the exigencies of war, just as women in the 1860s had been impelled by the Civil War to make speeches, collect money, and put their energies into national organizations to aid in victory and to ease suffering. In Washington, as in other American cities, the entry of the country into World War I created shortages of male workers so that women ran streetcars, delivered mail, and took other jobs that under peacetime conditions they would not have gotten. Eleanor Roosevelt joined with wives of other government officials to open canteens for servicemen stationed in the capital and to visit wounded and sick men. This was the kind of activism and involvement that she had so admired in Mademoiselle Souvestre, and Eleanor could hardly conceal her enthusiasm: “I loved it,” she wrote later, “I simply ate it up.”8 Her cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, singled out the war years as the time when Eleanor went “public.”9
About the same time that Eleanor found reasons outside her home to draw her out, she found others inside to push her in the same direction. She had opened by mistake a letter to Franklin and found irrefutable evidence that he was having an affair with Eleanor’s former social secretary, Lucy Mercer. He refused Eleanor’s offer to divorce him, and the marriage continued until his death. But the union became a formal one, the distance between the two partners rather formally defined and rigidly observed. She frequently referred to him in the manner of a trusted employee discussing a superior, waiting for “my regular time to see him.”10 When he announced he would run for governor, she learned of his decision by radio, along with other New York voters.11
In writing about her life, Eleanor acknowledged that she began to change some of her attitudes before 1920, but she avoided marital problems in detailing the reasons. Her Grandmother Hall had died in 1918, Eleanor explained, causing her to wonder whether that woman’s life and those of her children might not have been happier had she developed her own interests rather than attempting to live vicariously through others. Grandmother Hall had shown artistic talent in her youth but had died without developing her ability to paint, and Eleanor resolved not to miss such opportunities for herself.12
Most of the credit for Eleanor’s increased self-confidence went, by her own account, not to negative examples but to positive ones. The League of Women Voters exposed her to the excitement of political participation, and the Women’s Trade Union League reawakened her old interest in helping others. She owed a large debt, she often said, to settlement house leaders such as Mary Simkhovitch and to League workers such as Elizabeth Read and Esther Lape.13 By helping her understand politics and social movements, they built her confidence in herself. Eleanor failed to note what her friends saw so clearly—that the public activities gave new meaning to her life and close friendships that substituted for the lack of warmth in her marriage. The same activities also helped fill the emptiness Eleanor had found in the performance of upper-class social forms. The “leaving of cards” had ceased among Washington wives during World War I, and when the war ended, the ritual was not resumed. The women turned instead to political and benevolent organizations. Eleanor took typing lessons, a definite change from the language classes she had chosen earlier.
To one tutor Eleanor Roosevelt gave particular credit. Louis Howe, the wizened newspaperman who took her husband as his protegé, recognized during Franklin’s 1920 run for vice president that Eleanor had the potential to campaign and speak out on issues, but not until Franklin’s bout with polio in 1921 and subsequent paralysis did the necessity of developing her skills become clear. If Franklin meant to pursue politics, he needed an exceptionally active and supportive spouse. Louis Howe urged Eleanor to take speaking lessons to increase her self-confidence and lower her high pitch. When she balked at facing crowds, he cajoled her into trying until eventually she could speak comfortably and effectively to large groups.
Eleanor’s energy and confidence grew rapidly in the 1920s, inspired by the support of other women, cheered on by Howe, and persuaded by the necessity of her husband’s career. The exuberance of her colleagues who felt they could accomplish whatever they set out to do also affected her. She formed two business partnerships with other women: one to operate a school in New York City and the other to manufacture furniture at Hyde Park. As though bursting with long-stored energy, she became involved in New York State politics and served on the Platform Committee at the 1926 state Democratic convention.14 In 1928, the New York Post referred to Eleanor’s new prominence when it ran a headline, “Roosevelt’s Wife is His Colonel House.” Buoyed by her new success, Eleanor began publishing magazine articles, some of them advising other wives how to run their households and care for their children. The shy bride who had retreated from managing her own family had matured into a confident teacher of others.
In August 1930, Good Housekeeping singled out the prolific wife of New York’s governor as the “ideal modern wife.” In an interview with the author, M. K. Wisehart, Eleanor outlined what she thought being a wife meant. It still combined the three roles, as it always had, but she explained that the relative importance of each had shifted. While women had formerly put most emphasis on motherhood, they now stressed being full partners to their husbands. “Everything else depends upon the success of wife and husband in their personal relation,” Eleanor was quoted as saying. “Partnership. Companionship. It is a major requirement for modern marriage.”15 But this was not a partnership weighted on one side—Eleanor urged wives to develop interests of their own so they would not smother their children with excessive attention or depend too heavily on their husbands’ careers for their own sense of achievement.
Her own definition of marriage evidently guided Eleanor in the White House, which she had entered reluctantly. “I never wanted to be a President’s wife and I don’t want it now,” she told her good friend Lorena Hickok in 1932. “You don’t believe that. Very likely no one would except some woman who has had the job.”16 But now that she had the job, Eleanor showed that she meant to use it—on the side of causes she believed in—rather than let it use her.
All through the 1930s, Eleanor’s letters reveal uncertaint
y as to how to combine her own private concerns with the demands of her public role as wife of the president. When Hickok attempted to distinguish between Eleanor, the “person” whom she preferred, and Eleanor, the separate public “personage,” Eleanor wrote back: “I think the personage is an accident and I only like the part of life in which I am a person.”17 It was a dichotomy not easily dismissed, however, and Joseph Lash reported that it became an “old discussion” among her friends as to whether she gained prominence as a “result of being the President’s wife” or because of her personal skill in using the “opportunities afforded her as First Lady.”18 Lash’s own conclusion was that the person and personage eventually merged into one,19 but that Eleanor insisted on dividing them: “I drove up [to northern New York State] in the capacity of ER,” she wrote in 1933, “and only on arriving became FDR’s wife.”20
Many decisions called for working out the competing claims of the two roles. Eleanor arranged for a leave of absence from her teaching, but she stubbornly continued her other professional activities, including lecturing and writing. When the question of doing radio broadcasts came up, Eleanor wavered, first refusing and then reversing herself. To counter criticism that the president’s wife had no right to a profitable career of her own, she donated much of her income to organizations such as the Women’s Trade Union League and the Red Cross. After seven years as First Lady she explained to reporters that she had earned a “great deal,” but that she had “not one cent more of principal or of investment” than in 1932. “I have the feeling that every penny I have made should be in circulation.”21
The earning of money, not the spending of it, appealed to Eleanor because it was money that resulted from her own efforts. She liked the feeling of having funds apart from the trust income she had inherited from her family and the allotment she got from her husband. Her paycheck was hers “to do a lot of things [with], just things that give me fun.”22 Often that meant gifts for her family and friends but rarely an extravagance for herself. Clothes held no interest at all and a friend observed that Eleanor frequently wore dresses in the $10 range.23
Having felt the satisfaction of making her own money, Eleanor was particularly sensitive to attempts to curtail other women’s opportunities to earn. During the Great Depression, when as many as one in four workers could not find jobs, public sentiment held that wives of employed men should renounce jobs of their own and stay home. In fact, a 1936 Gallup Poll concluded that 82 percent of Americans held that view,24 which rested, in part, on the mistaken assumption that women worked for “pin money” to buy luxuries. In many families, wives’ earnings made the difference between real hardship and comfort, but the evidence was not often forthcoming since it reflected on men’s earning abilities. Even in cases where a second income was not essential to a family’s budget, the woman’s job might play an important part in her sense of worth, as it had for Eleanor.
The president’s wife acted on more than one level to combat prejudice against married women working. She encouraged Ettie Rheiner Garner, who had worked as her husband’s secretary for many years and did not want to stop when he became vice president in 1933, to continue.25 On a public level, the First Lady teamed up with Molly Dewson, then prominent in the Women’s Division of the Democratic National party, to denounce the Economy Act of 1933, which permitted firing women in civil service if their husbands also had government employment.26 Her news conferences, which she had begun immediately upon becoming First Lady,27 served as forums for Eleanor to speak out on wives’ right to work if they wanted to (although she carefully noted that each woman should make up her own mind about whether to work outside the home or not). When individual states sought to enact laws that would have permitted firing working wives, Eleanor used her conferences with women reporters to fight back: “It is of great moment to us [women] not to let this happen.”28
Multiple biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt make clear that her concerns extended beyond women’s rights and well-being, but she broke precedent in putting the power of First Ladyship to work on the side of women—both married and single. When the Civilian Conservation Corps offered jobless young men the chance to get out of cities and earn money, Eleanor worked with the Labor secretary, Frances Perkins, to gain equivalent opportunities for young women. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration responded by setting up camps for women,29 and although the number enrolled totaled only about eight thousand, compared to two and a half million men in the CCC, this victory marked another small strike against the double standard.30
In her attempt to influence New Deal legislation, Eleanor worked through every channel she could find. Before moving into the White House, she had helped her friend Molly Dewson obtain leadership of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, a post from which Dewson could effect the appointment of other women to party jobs in the various states and in federal agencies. One of Dewson’s early victories was the naming of Frances Perkins as secretary of labor in 1933, the first woman to serve in a president’s cabinet. Dewson also orchestrated a remarkable increase in women campaign workers, from 73,000 in 1936 to 109,000 by 1940.31 It was this kind of pyramiding that made Eleanor Roosevelt such an effective proponent—she carefully laid the groundwork for change and made way for women at the lower echelons in government and politics so that they could prepare for the bigger jobs. Her efforts achieved remarkable results. In slightly more than twelve years, the number of women holding jobs requiring Senate confirmation doubled, and countless lesser jobs were filled through her influence. Lois Banner, the historian, credits Eleanor with helping achieve the appointment of four thousand women to post office jobs.32
Always sensitive to charges that she held inordinate power, Eleanor frequently issued disclaimers. “I never tried to influence [Franklin] on anything he ever did,” she announced at one press conference, “and I certainly have never known him to try to influence me.”33 When the New York Times credited the president’s wife with achieving the appointment of a particular woman to attend an international conference, Eleanor wrote to Secretary of the Interior Ickes, who had made the selection, that she had been merely passing along the president’s thoughts when she informed Ickes of the woman’s qualifications. “There is such a concerted effort being made,” Eleanor wrote, “to make it appear that I dictate to FDR that I don’t want people who should know the truth to have any misunderstanding about it. I wouldn’t dream of doing more than passing along requests or suggestions that come to me.”34 When one man publicly credited Eleanor with obtaining a job for him in Washington, she reprimanded him, pointing out that he had put her “in a very embarrassing position by having made it appear that I had used my influence.”35
At the very same time she was issuing these disclaimers, Eleanor Roosevelt made other statements, sometimes very privately, that indicate she was not unaware of her influence. When Jerre Mangione, a young author who worked as national coordinating editor for the Federal Writers’ Project in the late 1930s, visited the White House, Eleanor told him that she had argued with the president late into the night on a particular matter and then had been surprised when the next day he presented her opinion as his own to the British ambassador. “I was so astonished,” Eleanor told Jerre Mangione, “that I almost dropped the teapot.”36
Eleanor peppered her letters to friends with references to her attempts to influence both legislation and appointments, and she discussed powerful Washington figures as colleagues rather than superiors. After meeting with Postmaster General James Farley and his aides to “start them off on patronage for women,”37 she judged both Harry Hopkins and Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes “good to work with;”38 and when Hopkins came through with improvements in school lunches, she upgraded her estimate of him to “swell.”39 She admitted that she used the occasion of a dinner for senators to “throw bombshells about federal controls and setting minimum standards,”40 and when she invited the Rexford Tugwells and Harry Hopkins to the White House, she confesse
d that she hoped “we’ll have a real talk of some ideas I think we should work on.”41
Her own children offered rather different descriptions of Eleanor’s influence with Franklin. James Roosevelt, who acted as his father’s secretary, assigned her a significant role, even “if he didn’t always sympathize with her causes” and called her part of the “kitchen cabinet.”42 His sister Anna, who lived at the White House for several years, described her parents’ lives as very separate and Franklin as so intolerant of Eleanor’s primness and shrillness that he sometimes barred her from his study when he entertained his friends. Anna thought her mother often miscalculated people’s moods and tried to bring up serious matters when everyone wished to relax and be frivolous. Whenever Eleanor joined Franklin for a pre-dinner cocktail, Anna recalled, she usually planned to use the occasion to make an appeal.43
Eleanor’s persistence in trying to get what she thought was necessary or right became almost legendary, and one example, related by Joseph Lash (who was present), indicates that other members of her family did not always appreciate her efforts. According to Lash, the Roosevelt clan was gathered at Hyde Park a few days before the 1941 inauguration, and Eleanor sought some assurance from Franklin that a recent appointee to supervise housing construction would look out for the needs of the poor rather than bow to real estate interests. Franklin’s mother, who noted her son’s reluctance to discuss this particular matter right then, called for the butler and the wheelchair, and only by physically removing the president from the room was she able to cut off Eleanor’s appeal.44
Often Eleanor’s lobbying was more genial, and she herself explained how she had acted to win Franklin’s endorsement of the National Youth Administration, a program to employ young people and offer financial aid to those who could not be employed. On May 17, 1933, she met with an assistant to Harry Hopkins and reported that “they have a good youth programme ready to submit to FDR I think.”45 As she explained in her autobiography, she went to Franklin that evening just before he went to sleep and described “the whole idea” to him.46 The next day, she was optimistic about success: “I think we are going to get a youth programme started & one for artists far more far reaching than I dared hope.”47 Often Eleanor’s role involved merely providing access to the president at some social occasion. Molly Dewson explained that whenever she wanted some help from the president, “Mrs. Roosevelt gave me the opportunity to sit by [him] at dinner and the matter was settled before we finished our soup.”48
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