Word: eleanors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Eleanor have a physical relationship with "Hick"? Lash's cautious but firm conclusion is that she did not (though Hickok's sexual orientation was more clearly lesbian), and it seems likely that he is right. To cover the situation, he resurrects the archaic term "Boston marriage," meaning a close and longstanding, but not necessarily sexual, relationship between two women. The fact is-and this is the main subject of Lash's new book-that throughout her life E.R. carried on a series of intense and rather schoolgirlish friendships with a variety of women and men, none...
Indeed, the First Lady was never on familiar terms with love. Her mother, who seems not to have cared much for the child, died when Eleanor was eight, and her beloved father, Teddy Roosevelt's charming, doomed younger brother Elliott, died when she was ten, after two years during which he was exiled from his family for drunkenness and other sins. She was an awkward, serious girl, nicknamed "Granny" by her mother. She did arouse at least the admiration of her cousin Franklin, whom she married when she was 20, but her attitude toward sex, which she recommended...
...Howe, an early political aide of her husband, a man described as ugly and misshapen, an impossible choice for a lover. Yet her daughter Anna was shocked once to find her sitting at Howe's.feet as he stroked her hair. "No form of love is to be despised," Eleanor once copied into a diary, and the truth seems to be that she successfully conducted her sentimental friendships as if sex did not exist. Earl Miller, F.D.R.'s handsome bodyguard when he was Governor of New York, was another such friend; Lorena Hickok seems merely to have been...
...counterintelligence files under the Freedom of Information Act, that Army spooks had concluded that the two of them were having a sexual affair. In 1943, moreover, an FBI agent reported hearing at "a social function" that the results of the bugging had been presented to F.D.R., who squabbled with Eleanor in the presence of an Army counterintelligence officer and then ordered "that anybody who knew anything about this case should be . .. sent to the South Pacific for action against the Japs until they were killed...
...foreword, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. condemns this report. The notion that his parents "might have engaged in marital recriminations in front of staff and aides is totally inconsistent with their semi-Victorian upbringing and their personal reticences." The letters exchanged between Eleanor and Lash, he says, accurately reflect the innocent nature of their unusual friendship. Here, the reader is the jury. The old Roosevelt haters who recall her muzzy newspaper columns and his years of autocratic rule will believe the worst. But those who see in E.R. a complex, endlessly charitable woman can only answer with more charity...