A fifteen-year-old Eleanor at the time she was sent to Allenswood
After a long ocean voyage, “lost and lonely” fifteen-year-old Eleanor was dropped off at Allenswood Academy by an aunt. In her suitcase was a packet of her father’s letters tied with ribbon. But Eleanor didn’t have much time to feel sorry for herself. She had entered a dizzying new environment, and she quickly realized she needed to step up.
The headmistress at the girls’ school was handsome, silver-haired Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre. She was the kind of woman whose “eyes looked through you,” Eleanor later reflected, “and she always knew more than she was told.” An avant-garde educator who taught her lessons with intensity and enthusiasm and prized curiosity in her students, she was also a feminist who wanted her students to know that they could have happy, fulfilling lives, with or without marriage.
The women’s movement—the push for women to have equal rights to men, including the right to vote—had been around for more than fifty years by the time Eleanor arrived at Allenswood in 1899. Most people in Eleanor’s world were more comfortable with the status quo. Women, at least upper-class women, were raised to be helpmates to their husbands and mothers to their children. Even among the well-educated, few had careers.
Mlle. Souvestre had a different idea. She thought women and girls should be able to think for themselves, find ways to make a difference in the world, and she wanted to instill in them “courageous judgment, and . . . a deep sense of public duty.” It was from Mlle. Souvestre, Eleanor later noted, that she learned one of her life’s guiding principles: that the “underdog should always be championed.”
Almost immediately upon her arrival at Allenswood, Eleanor became Mlle. Souvestre’s favorite. One of the rules of the school was that French was the primary language to be spoken. Eleanor’s first nanny had been French, and so as a toddler she’d learned the language before learning English. This fluency gained Eleanor a coveted spot at Mlle. Souvestre’s dinner table, where she spoke with her teacher in the woman’s native tongue. She was also invited to her teacher’s study with other select students to discuss—also in French—literature and poetry.
Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre was one of the greatest influences on the life of Eleanor.
Teacher and student, over the next three years, became exceptionally close. They traveled across Europe together, and Mlle. Souvestre, who was in her early seventies, left it to Eleanor to handle all the arrangements. Those responsibilities gave her a new sense of confidence. Eleanor was also thrilled by her teacher’s spontaneity; Mlle. Souvestre readily threw away plans if something more interesting presented itself. After years of doing what she was told, the idea that decisions could be made according to what one found appealing was wonderfully liberating. “Never again,” she later wrote, “would I be the rigid little person I had been theretofore.”
There was one more thing that Eleanor learned from Mlle. Souvestre. It might seem minor, but it went a long way to boost the girl’s confidence: She taught Eleanor how to dress fashionably. For years Eleanor had been embarrassed about her clothes. She had grown very tall very early, yet her grandmother insisted that her skirts remain short, like a child’s, although the dresses of other girls swept the floor. When she was finally allowed to dress more age appropriately, her clothes were usually made over from her aunts’ hand-me-downs.
Mlle. Souvestere frankly told Eleanor she didn’t think much of her clothes. While they were in Paris, she insisted that her student have a dress made just for her. At first, Eleanor was doubtful. She had been taught to be frugal, but Mlle. Souvestre wanted her to have a dress she’d be proud to wear. A flattering, dark-red evening gown was made. Decades later, Eleanor still remembered the joy she felt wearing that dress, and thought fondly of it as the article of clothing that had given her “more satisfaction than . . . any dress I have ever had since.”
Allenswood Academy was a school with thirty-five students, girls between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. The school was located near Wimbledon common, outside of London. Eleanor can be seen in the back row, fifth from the left.
Often a teacher’s pet is not popular with other students. Happily, this wasn’t the case for Eleanor. Her fellow students admired her and valued her friendship. Having friends who enjoyed her company and looked up to her was something new for Eleanor, and she relished it. During her three years at Allenswood, Eleanor forged a new, more confident version of herself. Gone were the nervous headaches that had plagued her in New York. She no longer bit her fingernails to the quick. She would have loved nothing more than to stay at school for another year. Nevertheless, in 1902, Eleanor had to return home for a reason that she was dreading. It was time for the eighteen-year-old to make her debut in New York society.
The social season started in November, and young women in the best families were expected to “come out” into society at fancy balls and exclusive dinners and luncheons. Eleanor’s mother, Anna, had been the belle of her social season, and Eleanor was sure her debut would be unfavorably compared with her mother’s success, which it was. It was also upsetting to know that the whole point of the season was to focus young women on finding suitable husbands.
Eleanor understood what Mlle. Souvestre meant when she had written to her student upon her return, “Protect yourself, my dear child . . . from . . . society’s demands. There are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought-after women at a ball.” Eleanor knew, however, she didn’t have any choice in the matter.
The first dress ball she attended was “utter agony.” But as the party-filled weeks went on, Eleanor began to feel more comfortable. Her sympathetic manner and intelligent conversation gave her some popularity, even if it was generally with the older crowd rather than her contemporaries. And although she still considered herself homely, she had a willowy figure and luminous blue eyes in her favor.
Eleanor had a lifelong frenemy (though no one knew that word then) in her cousin Alice, the eldest daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who was then president of the United States. As a child, Eleanor had been in awe of her confident cousin. Alice, pretty, brash, and outspoken, considered Eleanor a bit of a bore—but also a rival for her father’s affections. Theodore Roosevelt cared deeply for his niece.
Eleanor and her cousin Alice, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, were total opposites: Eleanor, responsible, serious, and shy; Alice, brazen and chatty.
Alice also thought Eleanor’s descriptions of herself were made to gain sympathy. “She was always making herself out to be an ugly duckling,” Alice later observed about Eleanor during her cousin’s debut year, “but she was really rather attractive.” She added, “It’s true that her chin went in a bit, which wouldn’t have been so noticeable if only her hateful grandmother had fixed her [protruding] teeth.”
It wasn’t all parties and teas for Eleanor after her return to New York. She took on the responsibility of overseeing the boarding-school education of her bright eleven-year-old brother, Hall, whom she had showered with letters while she was abroad, and she took charge of the family’s New York City town house, where she lived while her aunts and uncles flitted in and out.
Then Grandmother Hall decided the town house was too expensive to maintain, so she closed it up and moved to Tivoli. Elliott Roosevelt had run through most of his money before he died, so Eleanor only had a small inheritance to live on. Once more, she was at the mercy of relatives to take her in. Now it was her cousin and godmother, Mrs. Susie Parish, who gave her a place to live. The feeling that she never had a home of her own was something Eleanor struggled with well into adulthood.
Anxious to find a way to make her life more meaningful, Eleanor joined the Junior League. This was a newly formed organization of young socialites, like herself, who wanted to work on the many problems that faced the millions of immigrants who were flooding New York City. Jewish, Irish, Italian, they came to the United States fleeing danger and poverty or in search of a better life. They did find opportunity and freedom, but there was also uncertainty; crowded, unsanitary living conditions; and for those who found work—and that included children—endless hours of toil for low wages.
Eleanor wanted very much to help. But unlike many of the Junior League members who were content to hold fund-raising events, Eleanor was determined to be personally involved. She had never forgotten how, as a child, she had gone with an uncle to bring Christmas presents to children living in the worst part of the city, Hell’s Kitchen. She had tagged along with her young aunts when they volunteered at a mission in another poor part of town, the Bowery. The Thanksgiving visit to the Newsboys’ Lodge remained an outstanding memory of her father and a reminder that he often told her to grow up to be a woman he could be proud of. During the winter of 1903, Eleanor began volunteering at the settlement house on Rivington Street in New York’s Lower East Side.
Settlement houses were like community centers where neighborhood residents could go to takes classes to learn English and get help in practical pursuits like finding jobs and honing household skills. Young children were offered day care, and teaching little ones was where Eleanor found her niche, conducting classes in exercise and dance. Eleanor admitted that at first she didn’t know what she was doing, but that didn’t stop her from trying.
The Rivington Street Settlement House was located on New York City’s Lower East Side, a part of town overflowing with immigrants who needed help adjusting to their new lives.
She also got to see firsthand, as one of her biographers put it, “misery and exploitation on a scale she had not dreamed possible.” The people who came to the settlement house lived crammed together in tiny, dingy apartments called tenements. The bathroom facilities for these tenement dwellers were outdoors and shared by all the residents.
Sometimes Eleanor was frightened to be out on the dirty, dark streets of the Lower East Side, but she got great joy from the children she taught. When a father of one of her students gave Eleanor a small present because the child enjoyed her classes so much, Eleanor felt a “glow of pride.”
But teaching wasn’t the only way that Eleanor was involved with the immigrant community. While she was working at the Rivington Street Settlement House, a study was made of the working conditions of poor immigrant women and girls who earned money sewing garments in factories. The shocking report showed that working fourteen hours a day, six days a week for a wage of six dollars was not uncommon. Eleanor joined the National Consumers League, a group that wanted to change things, including by putting limits on child labor and pushing enforcement of the law allowing only a sixty-hour workweek.
Eleanor took on the job of inspecting these unsafe factories, called sweatshops, where women and girls labored over their sewing machines. “I was appalled . . .” she wrote in her autobiography. “I saw little children of four or five sitting at tables until they dropped with fatigue.”
Something was stirring in Eleanor Roosevelt. The ideals of Mlle. Souvestre and Elliott’s hopes for her were becoming realized in her work with the women and children of the immigrant community. Being useful, she found, was immensely satisfying.
But other feelings were stirring as well. Perhaps to her surprise, she had caught the fancy of a handsome young man, a distant cousin, and he wanted to marry her. She was only nineteen and he just a few years older, but that didn’t matter, nor did the objections of his mother.
Eleanor was in love, and she could think of nothing more wonderful than becoming Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
