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. She unpacks his luggage, and there is a stack of the proverbial, in red ribbon, letters. And she reads them, and her world disintegrates. Before she knows, with evidence of the affair, she suspects it, as one does. I mean, the unconscious knows everything. And it's a very hard time for them. She spends a lot of those years in Washington, alone. She realizes there's a tremendous amount of gossip about them and her bon-vivant husband. And she is really quite miserable. She offers him a divorce. He promises never to see Lucy Mercer again. His mother threatens to cut him off without a penny if he doesn't go back to his wife. 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 3 to 10. It's an emotionally terrible ordeal.
But it's also the beginning of another level of liberation for her, 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.
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. She wants a life of her own. Her grandmother could have been a painter. Her grandmother could have done so much more than she did with her life. And Eleanor Roosevelt decides she is going to do everything possible with her life. She's going to live a full life.
And out of her many moments of grief -- it's not just her husband's affair, but it's this great sense of grief over her grandmother's death, the death of her parents, all of the deaths, of her little brother. I mean, what is life about? And it's really just at that time that she meets these politically involved and very interesting women who recall the community that she left in Allenswood. And Eleanor Roosevelt had wanted to teach, and had come back and become a social worker. And so once again, she gets very involved in politics, the politics of her own life.
previous | back to Interview Transcripts | next
|
