Gail Collins Quote

Eleanor was a member of one of America’s great families, niece to Teddy Roosevelt and a distant cousin of her future husband. But she was not raised to be anyone significant. In fact, it’s surprising she survived her upbringing at all—one cousin called it the grimmest childhood I had ever known. Her father was an alcoholic who kept abandoning the family. One of her two brothers died when she was five years old, and her mother, who she remembered as kindly and indifferent, died when she was eight. Her father, who Eleanor worshiped despite his endless betrayals, died two years later. The orphan was sent to live with her grandmother, a stern woman with two alcoholic adult sons whose advances caused a teenage Eleanor to put three locks on her door. When she met Franklin, he was a student at Harvard and was known in the family as the not particularly impressive only son of a domineering widow. Eleanor got pregnant right after her wedding and spent the next ten years having six children and wriggling under her mother-in-law’s thumb. (I was your real mother; Eleanor merely bore you, Sara Roosevelt told her grandchildren.)