Mary Ann Glendon discusses Eleanor Roosevelt's religious faith and its influence on her work, particularly as chair of the UN's Human Rights Commission. Roosevelt was raised in a strict Protestant household but developed a more personal faith. She saw Christianity as an important source of morality and believed democracy requires a "spiritual, moral awakening." As commission chair, Roosevelt's leadership helped create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights despite many challenges. Historians have often overlooked the role of Roosevelt's faith, which strongly motivated her commitment to social justice and human rights.

1. an rs. ooseve t
Harvard scholar MARY ANN GLENDONfi nds in Eleanor
Roosevelt a surprising voice of modesty andfa ith.
n her 1958 autobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt described an

2. occasion in the early days of the
U.N. Human Rights Commission when she
invited threekey players to her Washington Square
apartment for tea. The guests that afternoon were the
commission's two leading intellectuals, Charles
Malik of Lebanon and China's Peng-chun
Chang, along with John Humphrey, the Canadian
director of the U.N.'s Human Rights Division.
"Aswe settled down over the teacups,"the former First Lady
recalled, "one of them made a remark with philosophical
implications, and a heated discussion ensued."
By Roosevelt's account, Dr. Chang was "a pluralist and held
forth in charming fashion on the proposition that there is more
than one kind of ultimate reality." Malik responded to the
remark by an extended refer- ence to the philosophy of Thomas
Aquinas. The con- versation became, as Roosevelt recalled,"so
lofty" that she couldn't even follow along.
"So I simply filled the teacups again," Roosevelt wrote, "and sat
back to be entertained by the talk of these learned gentlemen."
None of the guests on that occasion would have taken this
archly modest account at face value. They were already
familiarwith her style of chairmanship,in which she did,
indeed,"sit back"and let everyone have his or her say-all the
while studying how to steer the discussion toward her desired
outcome.
MARY ANN GLENDON,a member of the FlRSf THINGS
editori- aland advisory board, is the Learned Hand Professor of
Law at Harvard University.
Inthis way Eleanor Roosevelt herself contributed to the odd
tendency of some political historians to underestimate her
importance. She had been raised in an ethos where women were
schooled to be self-effac- ing.Later, shrewd political actor that

3. she was, she was not above feigning naivete when it suited
herpurposes. Perhaps this is why, in the early 1990s, when I
began researching Eleanor Roosevelt's role as chair of the
U.N.'s first Human Rights Commission, I found that key aspects
of Roosevelt's life and work had been ignored or underrated by
historians and biographers. Although Roosevelt herself regarded
her work on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as
her single greatest public achievement, diplomatic histori- ans
and writers on foreign policy had given short shrift to her role.
Even her biographers had not treated her
U.N.work in any detail. Infact, most biographies left off with
her departurefrom the White House after the death of her
husband in the spring of 1945.
It also struck me as curious that most contributors to the
voluminous Roosevelt literature had overlooked the connection
between Eleanor Roosevelt's achieve- ments and the high-
minded Protestant Christianity that was so much a part of her
public and private per- sona. One notable exception was Jean
Bethke Elsh- tain's 1986 essay on "Eleanor Roosevelt as
Activist and Thinker," in which Elshtain pondered why that
dimension of Roosevelt's life had been so frequently ignored -
and why feminist thinkers had shown little interest in the ideas
of a woman who undeniably had wielded great political
influence.
The truth is that few American women have been
so admired at home and abroad as Eleanor Roosevelt,
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and few have left behind such a distinguished record of public
service.Her political activities,her zeal for social reform, her
empathy for the disadvantaged, her family relationships and
friendships have been detailed in scores of books and articles
and dramatized on stage and on fi lm.At her death in 1962, the
New York Times described her as "more involved in the minds
and hearts and aspirations of people than any other First Lady in
history" and as "one of the most esteemed women in the world."
It is in that strange dichotomy-between the pub- lic, confident
heroine and the shy, retiring observer- that Roosevelt reveals
herself at her most mysterious, and most powerful.
oosevelt regularly hosted small social gather- ings for
colleagues, believing that personal connections could
help to reduce professional tensions.Shehad brought Chang and
Malik together in the hope, as she put it,
"that our work might be
advanced by an informal atmosphere."
What she did not mention in her autobiography, but what the
U.N. record shows, is that bickering between Chang and Malik,
who had emerged as intel- lectual leaders on the commission,
was threatening to become a problem.In such cases it was not
her style to take people to the woodshed;instead,sheinvited them
to tea.Although the arguments between the two never
completely ceased, Roosevelt did succeed in getting them to
work together effectively on the all-important drafting

5. committee.
By the time she assumed the chair of the Human
Rights Commission in 1947, Roosevelt had perfected her own,
very effective mode of leadership.In sodoing, as Elshtain
insightfully pointed out, she had subtly transformed the social
definition of a lady.
"For Roosevelt," Elshtain wrote,"being a lady and being tough
was no contradiction in terms-none at all-and her explicit fusing
of the two turned older understandings inside out." Roosevelt's
close friend
and biographer Joseph Lash reported that shewas par- ticularly
fond of a passage from a poem by Stephen Vmcent Benet in
which he described the mistress of a plantation as a woman who
was able
To take the burden and have the power And seem like the well-
protected flower.
Her ability to simultaneously exploit and expand the social
advantages of her station served her well.But it was not likely
to endear her to the hard-line feminists of the 1970s and 1980s.
Roosevelt's tendency to downplay her accomplish- ments seems
also to have misled several writers on human rights who
portrayed her as merely having
chaired the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission while
Chang,Malik, Humphrey,Rene Cassin, and othersdid the heavy
lifting.After studying all the commission's transcripts, I
concluded that to underestimate Eleanor Roosevelt's role is to
miss the main drama of the process that, against enormous odds,
led to the approval of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights on December 10, 1948,without a single dissent- m• g
vote.
The commission she chaired was composed of
eighteen strong-willed personalities with all sorts of competing
and conflicting loyalties-not to mention such personality
conflicts as those between Chang and Malik. All the members
except Roosevelt and Hansa Mehta of India were men, at a time

6. when most men were unaccustomed to femaleleadership.The
linguistic and cultural differences among eighteen persons from
eighteen nations added to the problem.And as if those
challenges were not enough, Roosevelt, as an Ameri- can, found
herself opposed at every juncture by four hard-nosed, hostile,
and often rude Soviet-bloc repre- sentatives. The Palestine
crisis was erupting, conflict was breaking out in China and
Korea, the Cold War was deepening, and the Berlin blockade
was threaten- ing to plunge the world again into a hot war.
In other words, Roosevelt's assignment -to get a multicultural
group to preparea human-rights declara- tion and to get it
approved by the General Assembly- appeared a near-impossible
task.
I see Eleanor Roosevelt's role in the framing of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights as like that of George Washington
at the Constitutional Convention. He, too, "only" presided; but
historians agree that withou t the force of his personality and
the great respect of his colleagues, there would have been no
Constitution.
he transcripts of the Human Rights Commis- sion shed an
interesting light on Eleanor Roo- sevelt's view of the scope and
limits of the role of
government in addressing the social and economic problems that
were of deep concern to her. The most heated debates concerned
how the declaration's social and economic rights were to be
implemented. Roo- sevelt and other representatives of liberal
democracies wanted not to dampen private initiative or to give
too much power to the state. As chair of the drafting com-
mittee, she favored leaving each nation broad room for choice
and experimentation with a range of means for implementing
the new rights -governmental programs and policies, market
dynamics, voluntary private initia- tives, and so on. Implacably
opposed were the Soviet- bloc delegates, who insisted that the
state must be the sole guarantor of rights to health care,
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other social services.The Soviet-bloc delegates' failure toobtain
language tothat effect was one of themain rea- sons why they
abstained from the final vote.
ecent biographers have tended to omit discus- sion of Eleanor
Roosevelt's religious beliefs. It is hard to believe that this
results from mere
oversight.That aspect of her personality was taken for granted
in memoirs by contemporaries such as Joseph Lash and William
Turner Levy, who knew her well. Roosevelt herself referred
frequently to the importance of Christianity in her daily life. A
prolific writer of books, articles, newspaper columns, and
letters, she often discussed her beliefs,her prayers, and
herjourney from a strict religious upbringing to a more personal
faith.
Born in 1884, Roosevelt was raised in households
that vigorously fostered habits of piety. The Rev. William
Turner Levy, an Episcopal priest, recounted that she once told
him that her grandmother's insis- tence on the literal truth of
every word in the Bible had "discouraged me from asking any
questions, and that was a very unhealthy situation." But she also
rejected the dogmatic atheism of her beloved boarding-school

8. teacher and mentor, Mlle.Marie Souvestre. Reminisc- ing about
Mlle.Souvestre, Roosevelt told Levy: "She simply refused-and I
suppose it was pride-to acknowledge that she was following
standards she hadn't invented. She was following love, as we
allmust, and that is to follow God."
Although Roosevelt abandoned the severe religios-
ity of her grandmother, she kept her habits of regular prayer and
church attendance. She also retained from her upbringing a stem
sense of duty. The conviction that much is expected of those to
whom much is given-together with empathy born of the
loneliness and loss she had experienced in childhood-helped to
fuel her passionate commitment to those she regarded as
disadvantaged.
The Christian sensibilities of the mature Eleanor Roosevelt are
onprominent display in The M oral Basis of Democracy, a short
book she published in 1940.The opening sentence explains the
purpose of the book in the rather preachy style to which its
author was some- times prone: "At a time when the whole world
is in a turmoil and thousands of people are homeless and
hungry, it behooves all of us to reconsider our political and
religious beliefs in an effort to clarify in our minds the
standards by which we live." The Tocquevillean premise of her
book is that democracy depends on moral foundations and that
religion is the main source of morality."We donot begin to
approach a solution of our problems," she wrote, "until we
acknowledge the fact that they are spiritual."
Even more than other forms of government, she maintained,
democracy requires "a spiritual, moral awakening."She did not
consider that such an awaken- ing need "necessarily come
through any one religious belief, or through people who
regularly go to church," but she did take for granted that
theprincipal wellspring of morality in the United States was the
Christian reli- gion. "The citizens of a Democracy," she wrote,
"must model themselves on the best and most unselfish life we
have known in history. They may not all believe in Christ's

9. divinity, though many will; but His life is important simply
because it becomes a shining beacon of what success means."
"We may belong to any reli- gion or to none," shewent on, "but
we must acknowl- edge that the life of Christ was based on
principles which are necessary to the development of a
Democra-
u.c state."
eploring the pervasiveness of poverty and the scandal of racial
discrimination in America, Roosevelt framed her political
message inreli-
gious terms:"It is quite obviousthat we donot practice a Christ-
like way of living in our relationship to sub- merged people,
and here again we see that a kind of religion which gives us a
sense of obligation about living with a deeper interest in the
welfare of our neigh- bors isan essential to the success of
Democracy."It dis- tressed her that many Americans "who call
themselves Catholic,Protestant, or Jew,behave as though
religion were something shut up in one compartment of their
lives. It seems to have no effect on their actions or their growth
or on their relationship to their surroundings and activities." If
Americans would only "develop the fundamental beliefs and
desireswhich make us consid- erate of the weak and truly
anxious to see a Christ-like spirit on earth," she exhorted, "we
will have educated ourselves for Democracy."
Joseph Lash, who was Jewish, recalled that Roo- sevelt used to
carry in her purseaninspirational message by Henry Van
Dyke,enjoining one to "think seldom of your enemies, often of
your friends, and every day of Christ."He noted that she had
circled the phrase about Christ. "As completely as she could she
wanted to live according to Christ's teachings,"Lash wrote.
But the biographer also noted that he was "struck
by her hostility" to the Catholic Church. "Somewhere deep in
her subconscious," Lash speculated, "was an anti-Catholicism
which was a part of her Protestant heritage. Inher great-
grandmother Ludlow's Sunday- school exercise books, there
were lessons on the dan- gers of popery. Enlightened

10. Protestantism had long since outgrown such primitive prejudice-
she had ardently supported Al Smith in the 1920s -but her fear
of the Church as a temporal institution
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was reawakened from time to time by its political operations."
When Roosevelt was publicly accused of anti-
Catholicism during a celebrated tiff with Cardinal Spellman
over government aid to parochial-school students,her main
defense was that she had supported Catholic candidates for
public office. But that did not pass muster with Lash, who
believed that "her distrust of the church as a temporal
institution was one of the reasons for her strenuous opposition
later to John F. Kennedy's bid for the presidential nomination."
ranklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had divergent ideas about
religion, as they did about many matters.The president was not
a regular church-
goer, nor does the historical record disclose much
about his convictions. "He had a strong religious feel- ing and
his religion was a very personal one," Eleanor wrote in This I

11. Remember."I think he actually felt he could ask God for
guidanceand receive it....He never talked abouthisreligion or
hisbeliefs and never seemed to have any intellectual difficulties
about what he believed." His beliefs, as she rather
condescendingly concluded, were those "of a child grown to
manhood under certain simple influences."
After FDR's death, according to her son Elliott, Eleanor would
"put on her old blue bathrobe, and by
the bed with its uncompromising hard mattress, she knelt to say
her prayers." When the Rev. Levy asked her, in the 1950s,
whether she still read the Bible, she told him, "I try to read it
daily, at bedtime, even if it's only a page or two.The trouble is
that I'm usually so tired -I'm ashamed to say it, but I sometimes
fall asleep in the middle of my prayers!" Levy said she seemed
relieved when he told her that the same thing often happened to
him.
In 1951 Eleanor Roosevelt attended a meeting in Brusselsat
which thinkersand religiousleaders from all over the world
gathered to discuss how an individual's spirituality could affect
his or her actions in public life. Afterward, she reflected on the
conference inher news- paper column, My Day. She began with
a remark that sounds like an implicit judgment on her late
husband's happy-go-lucky spirituality.She confessed her fear
that when one asks for guidance from God,one might sub-
consciously confuse "a feeling of guidance" with one's own
desires. She then discussed her own convictions:
It seems to me that there is the chance that we were given our
intelligence and our gifts as a part of God's plan, and it might
well be that each and every one of us should develop our
faculties to the best of our ability,that we should seek
information from others.Infact, we should explore all avenues
that would help us to meet our own problems.
This is not saying that we would feel able to decide without
God's help.But the deep religious feeling of many people will
not, of necessity, mean that on each action that they take they

12. feel direct guidancefrom God. Rather, it may mean that what
they have learned and the effort they have made to live, if they
are Christians, according to Christ's teachings,will have so
molded their characters that unconsciously they will do the
Lord's will.
Regarding religiousdifferences,Roosevelt went on: "I think I
believe that the Lord looks upon His chil- dren with compassion
and allows them to approach Him in many ways. ...But I do not
think that anyone can feel there is only one way, since what
may meet someone's needs may not of necessity meet another's
needs.And one must even beware of too much certain- ty that
the answers to life's problemscan only befound in one way and
that all must agree to search for light in the same way and
cannot find it in any other way." It seems Eleanor Roosevelt's
mature faith encompassed a loving God, a Christ who has shown
the most perfect way to live, and a sense of theresponsibility of
each and every human being to search for, and cooperate with,
God'swill.
n view of the importance that Eleanor Roosevelt attributed to
religion throughout her life,how can one explain that few
contributors to the Roosevelt
literature have connected her religious beliefs to her
well-known empathy? Roosevelt was famously com- mitted to
helping the hungry, the homeless, the job- less, the
dispossessed, and the victims of war, disease, and injustice.
How did that relate to her faith? Jean Elshtain put her finger on
the right answer in 1986: "Eleanor Roosevelt's deeply devout
and intensely felt religious convictions, her determination to
bear wit- ness and to serve as Christ did, and her unabashed
openness about all of this, is more of a scandal to us than to her
contemporaries."
To ignore that dimension of Roosevelt's persona is
to separate her public positions from what she herself maintain
ed were their deepest springs. An analogous phenomenon is the

13. increasing tendency by many who did not know the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr.to refer to him as Dr.King-and to omit
discussion of the reli- gious convictions that motivated him in
his nonviolent quest for racial justice.Likewise,no portrait of
Eleanor Roosevelt will be complete that does not include her
career as a gifted diplomat, her understanding of the importance
of the institutions of civil society, and the religious convictions
that gave life to her impassioned commitment to social
activism. @l
Title:
Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933
Author(s):
Joyce Antler
Source:

14. The Nation.
255.2 (July 13, 1992): p58.
Document Type:
Book review
Copyright :
COPYRIGHT 1992 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-
contact

15. Full Text:
In this year of political surprises, none has been more stunning
than the emergence of numerous women candidates for high
political office.
Eleanor Roosevelt, a "woman with power who enjoyed power"
and,
according to Blanche Cook, the "foremost political woman of
the
twentieth century," would have relished this triumph. In Cook's
splendid biography, Roosevelt emerges as a bold and innovative
feminist
politician who was convinced that women's public activities
would
determine America's political future. Roosevelt herself set the
template
for the modern female politician - cook refers to her as a
political
"boss" - working unabashedly to advance women within party
structures and for a variety of women's causes.
Yet while Roosevelt did much to foster the emergence of
political
women and women's issues, she failed to acknowledge, either to
herself
or to the general public, her liking for the game of politics and
her own
unsurpassed success in it. Indeed, Roosevelt fostered the myth
of her own
naivete and denied the power and influence she wielded. Cook's
biography

16. challenges the interpretation Roosevelt put on her own life -
that of
helplessness and inadequacy - which almost all
previous.accounts have
followed. The achievement in this volume, which concludes at
the start of the
White House years, is to deconstruct the myths of both the
public and private
E.R. (as Cook always calls her), which have been framed by the
media,
historians and Eleanor herself. In their stead, Cook unveils a
carefully
nuanced, thoroughly researched and fully imagined portrait of
an engaged and
adventuresome activist, a woman who was politically ambitious
and who in
private life was nothing short of "outrageous." "Without her
essential vision, the forcefulness of her political activism, and
the details
of her intimate life, Eleanor Roosevelt has been lost in an
historical
lie," Cook tells us. The real Eleanor who emerges from this
interpretation was a feminist (a word she used to describe
herself) not only
in public but in private. Against the weight of tradition and of
convention,
the social world into which she was born and the very public
life that she
and F.D.R. lived, she insisted on the right to her identity, to
create
herself according to her own needs and desires. Her life
became, in
Cook's words, "a purposeful journey," following goals that she
alone determined at every stage of her life. No better definition
of a
privately realized "feminist" life process can be wrought.

17. There is another reason why Eleanor Roosevelt emerges from
this
biography as a feminist. Cook allows us to see Roosevelt as not
only a woman
of power but as one who expressed and embodied desire, a
woman who was
"independently passionate, as well as independently political. It
is not
news that Eleanor's relationship with Franklin soured after little
more
than a decade of marriage, or that his affair with Lucy Mercer
caused her
great pain. But it is news that alongside the life Eleanor
carefully
manufactured with Franklin over the next decades - a life of
respect and
tolerance, of public mutuality but private autonomy - she had
intimate
friendships with several lesbian couples and possibly two
extramarital sexual
relationships: with Earl Miller, the state trooper who served as a
bodyguard,
and with Lorena (Hick) Hickok, the A.P. reporter who covered
her as First
Lady. Although these liaisons have long been rumored,
especially following
the opening of Hick's private papers, Cook is the first to
examine the
evidence with painstaking care and to locate the centrality of
these
friendships to Roosevelt's mature adulthood.
Given the deliberate attempts to cover up evidence of these
relationships, Cook's accomplishment is significant. She is
angry about

18. the historical denial of Roosevelt's friendships and bemoans the
fragmentary nature of the information she must rely on to
reconstruct them.
Yet despite her outrage, she doesn't stray beyond the bounds of
authenticity in using available data to document Roosevelt's
intimate
associations - most interestingly, in the case of Earl Miller,
such
photographic evidence as E.R. and Miller on vacation, with
hands casually
across one or the other's knee. Whereas Joseph Lash in his
biography
likened Miller's liaison with his "Lady," as Miller called
E.R., to his own relationship with her - that is, as mother and
son - Cook
finds a fully eroticized, romantic friendship. She demonstrates
great
sensitivity to the difficulty of gaining full knowledge of her
subject's
erotic behavior. ("Did lust remain on the outskirts of love?" she
asks, without a definitive answer other than to acknowledge the
variety of
ways that two intimate adult friends express their physical
feelings.) Yet
she asserts the vital importance of such questions in forming a
rounded
picture of Roosevelt, especially because she has been canonized
in the public
imagination as a Victorian angel of the house. In the end, Cook
sets forth
her interpretation of E.R.'s intimacy with Miller almost
gingerly,
relying on her empathy with E.R. to fill in the evidentiary gaps.
The primacy of passion in Roosevelt's life - personal as well
as political - thus becomes a central feature of this biography.

19. Cook is
unambiguous about Lorena Hickok's friendship with E.R., also
erased from
the historical record, as was Hick herself from photos that
showed her with
Roosevelt. According to Cook, the long letters that E.R. wrote
to Hickok
reveal their powerful attraction: "Sigmund Freud
notwithstanding,"
Cook writes, "a cigar may not always be a cigar, but the
|northeast
corner of your mouth against my lips' [as Hick wrote to E.R.] is
always
the northeast corner."
Cook's discussion of the Roosevelt/Hickok relationship is
embedded in a fuller treatment of the female friendships that,
beginning in
the 1920s, transformed E.R.'s life. In the first fifteen years of
her
marriage, Eleanor had been lonely, depressed and unhappy,
tyrannized not only
by her domineering mother-in-law but even by her own
household staff. In her
memoirs she wrote that she had no friends at all, and spoke of
herself as
"Griselda," the folk character whom Cook identifies as a
"monster of passivity." Although F.D.R.'s entry into politics
provided a brief liberation, as E.R., too, became politically
active, the
revelation of F.D.R.'s affair with Lucy Mercer threw her into a
profound
depression accompanied by physical deterioration that Cook
identifies, from a
contemporary perspective, as anorexia.

20. Not until she met her first feminist friends, Esther Lape and
Elizabeth Read, a lesbian couple active in the women's
movement, and
herself became a feminist activist, working for the League of
Women Voters,
the Women's Trade Union League, the Women's City Club, the
Women's Division of the New York State Democratic
Committee, the
Women's Joint Legislative Conference and for a host of
progressive
reforms to benefit women and children, did Eleanor shake off
her depression.
Within an amazingly short period of time, she became the
leading figure in a
network of female political activists that spanned New York
State. E.R.
rented an apartment in Lape and Read's Greenwich Village
home, which
remained a sanctuary for her throughout the 1920s and into her
White House
years. Just as important to her were Nancy Cook and Marion
Dickerman, another
lesbian couple active in feminist and Democratic politics, with
whom she
developed an equally intense, supportive relationship.
Encouraged by F.D.R.,
Eleanor built Val-Kill, called "The Honeymoon Cottage" by
F.D.R.,
on his property in Hyde Park, where Eleanor and her friends
spent much of
their time. All linens at the cottage were embroidered with their
joint
initials, E.M.N., which also became the emblem of their nearby
furniture
factory, a showcase for women's industrial skills. One of E.R.'s
happiest ventures, her teaching at Todhunter, a private girls'

21. school
she owned jointly with Dickerman, its principal, also derived
from this
friendship.
In detailing the importance of these networks of friendship to
Roosevelt's developing public persona and to her personal
autonomy, Cook
demonstrates how closely in E.R.'s life the political was aligned
to the
personal. Another linkage between public and private goals lay
in Eleanor
Roosevelt's clear recognition that her own struggle for
independence was
connected to the wider struggle of all women for economic and
political
power. These connections, which Cook threads throughout the
narrative, make
this a more fully integrated biographical study than is common
even from
feminist scholars.
The full power of biography lies, I believe, in the
biographer's ability to narrate and explain the subject's conflicts
and choices against the backdrop of her own time and place and
her specific
emotional realities. In this, Cook succeeds admirably, producing
a richly
textured drama of an individual life in interaction with complex
social,
political and psychological forces. The reader is carried along
the peaks and
gullies of Roosevelt's life by Cook's clear prose, balanced
interpretations and vivid vignettes; my favorite is of Roosevelt
contemplating the statue of a hooded female figure known as
Grief, which she

22. visited frequently in Rock Creek Cemetery in the District of
Columbia. Built
by Henry Adams as a memorial to his wife, Clover, who
committed suicide when
she learned of Adams's affair with another woman, this
representation of
female pain soothed Eleanor's psyche at the time of her greatest
trauma
(when she learned of the Mercer affair) and enabled her to
imagine the
possibility of female endurance beyond tragedy. Years later she
would take
Hick to visit the statue, explaining its symbolic meaning in her
development.
The prominence that Cook gives to E.R.'s pilgrimages to the
statue,
mentioned only briefly by other biographers, shows how deftly
she has
penetrated the mass of biographical detail about Roosevelt to
reach her
subject's emotional core.
Of course, the story of Eleanor Roosevelt is inherently
dramatic,
and not only because of her accomplishment in structuring an
unconventional,
independent feminist life style and program, together with an
equally
unconventional though mutually supportive partnership with
Franklin. For E.R.
was the daughter of one of America's most colorful fin de siecle
aristocratic families, a family that in spite of its achievements -
including
the succession of her uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, to the
presidency - was
ravaged by "alcoholism, adultery, child molestation, rape,

23. abandonment." Cook appropriates one-quarter of the narrative
to tell the
story of Eleanor's childhood in this privileged but problematic
family,
an account that helps the reader understand her lifelong dread of
scandal and
her determination not to share the unhappy fate of her mother
and
grandmother.
Overall, Eleanor Roosevelt is presented as a "woman in
struggle, dedicated to modernity," a woman whose insistence on
shaping
her own destiny has become a "bellwether for our belief
system."
Yet Eleanor was not always saintly. Cook describes in elaborate
detail the
leisured, selfish style of Roosevelt's early married years and her
unreflective adoption, during this period, of the prejudices of
her stratum,
including a casual anti-Semitism that once led E.R. to comment,
after a
celebration for Bernard Baruch, that "the Jew party was
appalling."
Cook also notes the gap between E.R.'s progressive ideas on
schooling
and the fact that her own school, Todhunter, drew its students
from a narrow
elite. And she notes that the circle of female friends that
nourished
Roosevelt was eventually broken by personal jealousies. Even
feminism was no
haven for cooperative idealism.
Cook might have elaborated more fully how the world of
privilege

24. in which E.R. was born exerted a continuing pull on her
sensibilities. If, as
she suggests, E.R. lived perpetually in two worlds - the one she
made and the
social world of her class - we need to know precisely when and
how these
worlds collided and how tensions between them were overcome.
I look forward
to Volume Two, which Cook promises will chronicle E.R.'s
emergence as a
leader in the battle for human rights and international peace, in
the
expectation that the reader will learn more about her continuing
transformation as she met the challenges of her changing times
and fought the
devils of her past.
Joyce Antler teaches American studies at Brandeis University
and
is co-editor of The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing
the Lives of
Modern American Women (forthcoming from Illinois).
Source Citation
(MLA 7th Edition)

25. Antler, Joyce. "Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933."
The Nation 13 July 1992: 58+. Academic OneFile. Web. 10 Apr.
2014.
Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA12514207&v=2.
1&u=lewi36276⁢=r&p=AONE&sw=w&asid=b02203f8940cd16
e68fe394efd9c5d80
Gale Document Number:
GALE|A12514207
English 101 Biographical Essays
Assignment Due 4/19/14
For this essay you will need to focus on a famous person—past
or present—and concentrate mainly on some area of the
person’s biography. For instance, you may focus on career highs
and lows, early life and influences, defining experiences, etc.
You do NOT need to focus on one event or one specific
“moment in time” that was a changing experience. However,
don’t try to do an entire “birth to death” biography.

26. You must refer to a minimum of 2 sources. If you use a web
site, it must have an author. Anything from Infotrac (Academic
Onefile) is fine. There is a specific biographical database that
may help you get ideas as well as information. Remember that
even if you do not quote the source directly, you must give
credit to it. Use parenthetical documentation within the paper,
and a works cited page at the end.
Example of parenthetical documentation (Bosheep 12)
This is author and page number.
Example of entries for Works Cited page:
Book: Bosheep, Billy Bob. One Day in the Life of an Imbecile.
New York:
Noonday, 1998.
Magazine Article: Eastwood, Bob. “Make My Day and Other
Movie Tidbits.”
Time 18 Jan. 1999:72-73.
Internet Sites:
Most general Internet sites will require the following
information:
· Author or sponsoring organization
· Title of specific section or article
· Date last updated or publication date
· Number of pages or paragraphs (if fixed numbers are given)
· Date accessed
· URL address
Article in periodical/magazine
Burness, Howard, “Economic Forecast is Positive.” National
Business Employment
Weekly Online l5 Nov. 1999. 17 Nov. 2001
http://business.com./article.ret/html.

27. Article in a Reference Database
“Douglas Fir.” Britannica Online. Vers. 98.1 1 Mar. 1998.
Encyclopedia Britannica.
21 Oct. 1999<http:.//www.eb.com:240>
Online Professional or personal site
Walker, James. Home page. 4 May 1998
http://www.princeton.edu/-jam/index.html.