How do you become the person you are? What factors shape the way you see yourself and the world around you? In 1951, Eleanor explored these questions in an essay called “The Seven People Who Shaped My Life,” which was published in a popular mainstream magazine, Look. In it, she listed the people who affected her most and discussed their contributions to her growth as a person:
What you are in life results in great part from the influence exerted on you over the years by just a few people.
There have been seven people in my life whose influence on me did much to change my inner development as a person.
The first were my mother and father. . . .
My mother always remained somewhat awe inspiring. She was the most dignified and beautiful person. But she had such high standards of morals that it encouraged me to wrongdoing; I felt it was utterly impossible for me ever to live up to her!
My father, on the other hand, was always a very close and warm personality. I think I knew that his standards were nowhere nearly as difficult to achieve, and that he would look upon my shortcomings with a much more forgiving eye. He provided me with some badly needed reassurance, for in my earliest days I knew that I could never hope to achieve my mother’s beauty, and I fell short in so many ways of what was expected of me. I needed my father’s warmth and devotion more perhaps than the average child, who would have taken love for granted and not worried about it.
My mother died when I was six. After my father’s death when I was eight years old, I did not have that sense of adequacy and of being cherished which he gave me until I met Mlle. Marie Souvestre when I was 15.
The headmistress of the school I went to in England, she exerted perhaps the greatest influence on my girlhood. . . . She liked Americans and attributed to them qualities of character and intelligence, which shortly began to give me back some of the confidence that I had not felt since my father’s death.
I had lived in a family with some very beautiful aunts and two attractive uncles who looked upon me as a child to whom they were always kind, but about whom there was certainly nothing to admire. I was conscious of their pity because my looks fell so far below the family standards, and I had no special gifts of any kind to redeem my looks.
Mlle. Souvestre, on the other hand, laid a great deal of stress on intellectual achievements, and there I felt I could hold my own. She took me traveling with her. . . . For three years, I basked in her generous presence, and I think those three years did much to form my character and give me the confidence to go through some of the trials that awaited me when I returned to the United States. . . . As I look back, I realize that Mlle. Souvestre was rather an extraordinary character. She often fought seemingly lost causes, but they were often won in the long run. . . . I think I came to feel that the underdog was always the one to be championed! . . .
The next important and stimulating person in my life was Mrs. W. Forbes (Hall) Morgan, the young aunt with whom I lived when I first came home from Europe. . . . It happened that my family was distinctly a part of what was then called society, not by virtue of having money, but because it had held a place in what might be called the Four Hundred for several generations. . . .134
I admired her inordinately, but I knew that I must not be a nuisance. After a none too happy childhood, I was lonely, friendless, shy, and awkward, and not a society success. For a [member of the] Hall [family], that was not easy to understand, but it hardened me in much the way that steel is tempered. The fires through which I passed were none too gentle, but I gained from them nevertheless and each new ordeal was a step forward in the lessons of living.
The personalities of my husband and my mother-in-law, I am sure, exerted the greatest influence in my development.
My mother-in-law was a lady of great character. She always knew what was right and what was wrong. She was kind and generous and loyal to the family through thick and thin. But it was hard to differ with her. She never gave up an idea she had, whether it was for herself or for you. And her methods of achieving her own ends at times seemed a bit ruthless if you were not in accord. She dominated me for years.
But I finally developed within myself the power to resist. Perhaps it was my husband’s teaching me that there was great strength in passive resistance. Perhaps it was that, having two such personalities as my husband and his mother, I had to develop willy-nilly into an individual myself. . . .
Both wanted to dominate their spheres of life, though they were enough alike to love each other dearly. My husband was just as determined as his mother, but hated to hurt people, and never did so unless they really angered him. She won even with him sometimes, but usually he simply ignored any differences in their point of view.
His illness finally made me stand on my own feet in regard to my husband’s life, my own life and my children’s training. The alternative would have been to become a completely colorless echo of my husband and mother-in-law and be torn between them. I might have stayed a weak character forever, if I had not found that out.
In some ways, my husband was a remarkable teacher . . . [he] opened the windows of the world for me. As I think it over, he was perhaps the greatest teacher of the many who contributed to my education.
The last person, probably, to have influenced me much as an individual was Louis Howe, my husband’s adviser. He pushed me, not for my own sake but for my husband’s, into taking an interest in public affairs.
This was a field I had carefully shunned, feeling that one member of the family with a knowledge of politics was all that one family could stand. But, little by little, I found myself beginning to understand why certain things were done, and how they came about. Before I realized it, I was at least interested in the fields of domestic and of foreign affairs.135