Eleanor Roosevelt: Father’s Little Golden Hair
Every once in awhile one meets another who defies the social standard, faces the wind and all around steps to the beat of a different drummer. In American history, one first meets Abigail Adams and quickly recognizes her style which features this pattern. The wife of John Adams, Abigail stepped over the line of traditional women’s standards and inserted herself directly between her husband and his chief political rival, Thomas Jefferson. More than 100 years later the country, and it’s women, are introduced to Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In her J. William T. Youngs finds a reserved persona yet patiently defiant of social standards involving inequity. In his biography, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life, Youngs details the life of Eleanor Roosevelt through personal letters, companions’ writings and theoretical speculation in order to divulge the essence of one of the 20th century’s leading ladies.
Smartly organized, Youngs’ account is divided into 10 chapters chronologically outlining Eleanor’s raising in an affluent home of a socialite and alcoholic father, through her experiences in England where she attended boarding school and on into her time as wife to the future President and on her own. Youngs spends most of the book relaying the troubles of her youth despite the great advantages of being an affluent New York Roosevelt. For example, her father was an alcoholic and adulterer. “During the summer of 1891 he resumed drinking and , stayed away from home for days at a time , and began an affair with an American woman living in Paris (Youngs 42). It is here that Eleanor’s esteemed and extroverted uncle, the soon to be President Teddy Roosevelt, intervenes and urges a separation of Elliott Roosevelt from his family in order to salvage the relationships. It is from this separation that Eleanor’s parents will never reunite. Besides the separation of her parents, Eleanor had to...