Eleanor Roosevelt - Sex~Kitten.net

Eleanor Roosevelt always reminded me of my grandmother. Their voices drove me nuts. Grandma even looked a little like Eleanor Roosevelt. And,

like Grandma, she would never be considered a pin-up. But that’s where the similarities ended. My grandmother was one of those women for whom Eleanor Roosevelt worked throughout her life.

Though she was born into the socially elite Roosevelt family, young Eleanor’s life was anything but secure. At age 8 her father was confined to a mental asylum and her mother died of diphtheria. By age 10 she was an orphan, her father having died of alcoholism. Born into the opulence of Victorian America, Eleanor grew up lonely in an ivory tower childhood. Deprived of her mother early she was often deprived of the company of a father she dearly loved. One story is told that on a rare walk with her father and his dogs her father decided to stop for a short time at his club. Eleanor and the dogs waited for him…for six hours. It was the club’s doorman who finally walked the child and dogs home.

Early in her life Eleanor and the other Roosevelt children learned the lessons of helping those less fortunate than they. Eleanor and her father served Christmas dinner for the newsboys of New York City and she traveled with her aunts and uncles into the poorest neighborhoods of New York to trim trees and sing carols. Even interacting with her family, she was always shy and retiring.

It was not until she left for Allenswood School in England that Eleanor Roosevelt began to blossom into the independent, intelligent woman she was. With the help of a sympathetic headmistress she began to develop confidence in herself and express her abilities. The effect of the headmistress was confirmed in that the mementoes of her life that she carried with her throughout her life were all her father’s letters and a photograph of the headmistress.

Uncle “Teddy” Roosevelt became another of the major shapers of Eleanor’s early life. It was this uncle, who just also became President, who taught her that she “owed something back to those less fortunate.”

At age 18 the young Miss Roosevelt made the society debut that was expected of young women of her class at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. Only a year later she became engaged to her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even becoming engaged did not mean she stopped being involved in an active life. She taught for the Junior League calisthenics and dancing to immigrants. She joined the Consumers’ League and investigated the working conditions in the garment districts.

Even marriage to the future President did not bring happiness to the young bride. There were seven pregnancies and six children who survived childhood. Rumors are rampant that in her early years of marriage she was dominated and cowed by her mother-in-law, even to the point of being forced to maintain a residence separate from her husband’s in Hyde Park (the Roosevelt family compound). In the middle of her childbearing years she discovered her husband’s affair with the woman he had hired as her personal secretary.

Throughout her life as wife of a rising political star, Eleanor Roosevelt maintained her own identity. She was always involved in women’s concerns. She was a member of the League of Women Voters before the 19th Amendment (granting women the right to vote) was passed in 1920. She, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook purchased a school in New York for poor immigrants. She taught Government and History classes as her husband was campaigning for the job of Governor of New York.

As wife of the President, Eleanor Roosevelt was not reticent in making her thoughts about women in the workplace:

As First Lady she once said, "The wives, of course, have certain official obligations, but they are certainly not responsible for their husband's policies. And they do not have to feel that sense of obligation at every point to uphold the ideas of the man of the family."

It is amazing that her words are as applicable almost 65 years after that interview with Good Housekeeping as they were then.

Throughout FDR’s presidential years, Eleanor was politically and socially active. She coordinated meetings between FDR and the NAACP to discuss anti-lynching legislation. She defied segregation laws when she sat between whites and blacks at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham. In 1939 she was the one who arranged for Marian Anderson to sing on Easter Sunday at the Lincoln Memorial.

During WWII Eleanor Roosevelt influenced the Army Nurse Corps to open membership to black women. She became one of the NAACP board of directors. Even after FDR’s death in 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt remained politically active in the cause

of human rights. She was the head of the United Nations Human Rights Commission and lectured at the Sorbonne on the “Struggles for the Rights of Man.” She even threatened to resign from the UN if Truman didn’t recognize the newly formed nation of Israel.

Despite threats from the Ku Klux Klan she spoke in Tennessee at a civil rights workshop. And it was during the Kennedy years Eleanor Roosevelt was appointed chair of the President’s Commission of the Status of Women.

Thanks to her efforts on behalf of women, children, immigrants, the poor, civil rights, and through memberships in such subversive organizations in the NAACP, ACLU, National Consumers League, League of Women Voters and the UN the FBI launched a formal investigation of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her outspokenness about segregation and lynching and her assertions for free speech combined to render her in the minds of conservatives such as Hoover as a threat to the status quo in American society. It comprises one of the single largest files in the J. Edgar Hoover collection (3,000 pages). It contains charges against her for suspected Communist activities, threats to her life on the grounds of her disloyalty to the country, close monitoring of her activities and writings, and a record of possible insurrectionary groups that she may have influenced.

Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962 at the age of seventy-eight of tuberculosis. I, like many of my generation, felt the loss of one of the great women of the world. She was politically and socially active in causes that would not come to fruition until the decades of the 60’s and 70’s. In many ways she led the way for the feminists of the later part of the 20th century. For me, Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the greatest women in history.