Blanche Wiesen Cook Quotes

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• And even when success comes, as I am sure it will, bear in mind that there are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought after women at a ball.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Joy, Mind, Bears

  Blanche Wiesen Cook (1992). “Eleanor Roosevelt: 1884-1933”

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Support, Environment, Sexuality

  4 Copy quote

• I think FDR was very dashing and charming and debonair, and probably reminded her of her father. A great bon-vivant. He loved to party. 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.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Beautiful, Fun, Father

  Source: www.pbs.org

  11 Copy quote

• 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?

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Husband, Book, Firsts

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• I think Eleanor Roosevelt always had a most incredible comfort writing letters. I mean, she was in the habit of writing letters. And that's where she allowed her fantasies to flourish. That's where she allowed her emotions to really evolve. And that's where she allowed herself to express herself really fully, and sometimes whimsically, very often romantically. And it really starts with her letters to her father, who is lifelong her primary love.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Father, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• I think that Hick was in love with Eleanor, and Eleanor was in love with Hick. I think it's very important to look at the letters that are in my book, because unlike some of the recent published letters, I have both the personal and the political. And their relationship is about ardor. It's about fun. And it's also about politics.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Fun, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• Politics is not an isolated, individualist adventure. Women really need to emerge as a power to be the countervailing power to the men. And Eleanor Roosevelt's really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Adventure, Men, Effort

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• One of the things for me, as a biographer, that is so significant is for Eleanor Roosevelt - the child who never had a home of her own, who lives in her grandmother's home and then goes to school and then gets married and lives in her mother-in-law's homes, and then in public housing (like the White House and the State House) - housing becomes for Eleanor Roosevelt the most important issue.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Mother, Children, Home

  Source: www.pbs.org

  6 Copy quote

• And her [Eleanor Roosevelt] Grandmother Hall provided her really with a quite wonderful education, and a freedom that, within the framework of Tivoli (which is a framework of discipline and order) is also a very encouraging and loving one.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Grandmother, Order, Discipline

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• A lot of people say that Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't a good mother. And there are two pieces to that story. One is, when they were very young, she was not a good mother. She was an unhappy mother. She was an unhappy wife. She had never known what it was to be a good mother. She didn't have a good mother of her own. And so there's a kind of parenting that doesn't happen.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Mother, Two, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• And Grandmother Hall really imagines that she can raise Eleanor and her two brothers differently than these children were raised. And if she is very strict and everything is very regimented and ordered and disciplined, that they will become the perfect children who her own children did not become.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Brother, Children, Grandmother

  Source: www.pbs.org

  6 Copy quote

• 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, 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.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Writing, Grandmother, Dark

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• Well, when Eleanor Roosevelt's mother dies, she goes to live with her Grandmother Hall. And her Grandmother Hall is in mourning. She's in widow's weeds. She's in her 50s, but appears very old. And she's exhausted from raising rather out-of-control children. Her favorite daughter, Anna, has died (Eleanor's mother), and she has living at home two other sons, Vallie and Eddie. And they are incredible sportsmen, incredible drinkers, out-of-control alcoholics.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Daughter, Mother, Weed

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• It's interesting to me that really one of the first things she [Eleanor Roosevelt]did as First Lady was to collect her father's letters and publish a book called The Letters of My Father, essentially, hunting big game, 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. 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.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Father, Book, Hunting

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• 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. I mean, he was absolutely unreliable. He was absolutely involved with various people. He had outside families, outside children, outside wives. He made his wife's life miserable. And she [Eleanor Roosevelt]ignored all of his faults and retained this sense of him as the perfect father.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Children, Father, Mean

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• She writes that one of the moments that she felt most useful was when her mother had a headache, and she would stroke her head and rub her forehead. And I think Eleanor Roosevelt's entire life was dedicated to two things: (one) making it better for all people, people in trouble and in need, like her family.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Mother, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• 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. 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.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Thinking, Two, White

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• 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. The amazing thing, I think, historically, is that he says, "Go do it. If you can make this happen, I'll follow you."

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Hurt, Husband, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• 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. She meets Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, and becomes very involved in the women's movement, and then in the peace movement. And ironically, the years of her greatest despair become also the years of her great liberation.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  New York, Years, Despair

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• And if you look at pictures of Eleanor between 1918 and 1921, she becomes anorexic. She really loses a tremendous amount of weight. That's when her teeth really go bad. It's a terrible, terrible time for her. And she has five children, ranging in age from three to 10. It's an emotionally terrible ordeal.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Children, Age, Teeth

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

• Well, in Washington, this is a very hard time for Eleanor and Franklin. This is when Lucy Mercer first appears. And Lucy Mercer is Eleanor Roosevelt's own secretary. Very beautiful young woman, not unlike Eleanor Roosevelt: tall, blonde, thick haired. And FDR is having an affair with her, which Eleanor Roosevelt finds out when FDR returns from Europe in 1918 with the famous flu of 1918.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Beautiful, Hard Times, Europe

  Source: www.pbs.org

  11 Copy quote

• And of course, FDR was very charming. At 6'2", he was tall enough to be her beau, and they made a beautiful couple. And she could encourage him. His mother also encouraged him. So this notion of a woman with ideas of her own and a spirit of her own and a style of her own was very congenial to Franklin. And he loved her. And their romance was a very dear and true and deep romance.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Beautiful, Mother, Couple

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• It's right around this time that her Grandmother Hall dies. And Eleanor Roosevelt is responsible for making all the funeral arrangements. And there are a couple of things that she really understands, as she contemplates her grandmother's life and makes the funeral arrangements. 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.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Mother, Couple, Wife

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• I mean, if you pause over what it means at the age of 76 that Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, the happiest single day of her life was the day she made the first team at field hockey. Field hockey is a team sport. Field hockey is a knockabout - I mean, picture Allenswood, the swamps of north London. It's a messy sport. So she really enjoyed playing this rough-and-tumble sport in the mud of Allenswood, a team sport. And she was very competitive. And she loved being competitive, and she loved to win. And that, I think, was all of the things that Allenswood enabled.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Sports, Team, Mean

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• And she [Eleanor Roosevelt]loves being a star. And she loves being a teacher and a leader and a mentor and a big friend. Also, she's tall. She's one of the tallest girls in the school. And she's an athlete. And she writes many years later, at the end of her life, 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. I

  Blanche Wiesen Cook

  Girl, Teacher, Stars

  Source: www.pbs.org

  5 Copy quote

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