Q: Talk about her as a mother.
A: The younger children really benefit from her new freedom because they're part of it. She takes them on trips. They do things that are much more fun and much more free with her friends, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook. She's never done these free things before.
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. Like traditional upper class families, there are nannies and servants, and the children, you know, come in to say good-night before they go to bed. There's very little private time with the children in the early years. Actually, there's much more private time with the children in the twenties.
And in the same way, FDR's not much of a father. Although the children in all their memoirs really talk about what a fun-loving guy Dad was, and how brooding and unhappy Mom was. The children sort of blame it all on the mother. Well, this is kind of standard and typical, and aggrieved Eleanor Roosevelt that she was not a happier mother. She wanted to be a happier mother. And I must say, she was a happier grandmother. But she was an unhappy young matron, and a very flawed mother. They were very flawed parents.
One should also say, she was a very devoted mother. One of the reasons she worked to the very end of her life was, she's constantly bailing her children out.
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