DISAPPOINTED BY THE TRADITIONS AND OBLIGATIONS she had so carefully honored, ER returned to New York unwilling to be bound by convention. Within weeks she made new friends and joined political organizations—the Women’s City Club, the League of Women Voters—enrolled in a secretarial course to learn shorthand and typing, and took cooking lessons. She wanted especially to remove the mystery from everyday things that had made her feel dependent, inadequate, out of control. ER liked to type, when she had to; her shorthand would forevermore be useful. She felt pride the day she actually prepared a full five-course dinner. Even though she never did it again, she was glad she knew how to do it. Little victories, but they built her confidence.
She stepped outside the magic circle of charity boards, ladies’ luncheons and society teas presided over by Cousin Susie and her mother-in-law. “The war had made that seem an impossible mode of living.” And so, during the 1920s, Eleanor Roosevelt joined the ranks of those she believed determined to continue the progressive struggle: ER became a social feminist (part of that network committed to women’s emancipation and social reform), a political activist, a New Woman.
ER had been in New York City only a few days when Narcissa Cox Vanderlip, then chair of the New York State League of Women Voters, invited her to become an active member of the League’s board. A Republican, Narcissa Vanderlip was, like the other members of the League, committed to progressive, bipartisan, and feminist activity. Most of its active members had been radical suffragists, and were internationalists dedicated to the League of Nations. And most of them were, like ER, members of America’s privileged and affluent leadership class.
ER knew and admired Narcissa Cox Vanderlip—in fact, the two women had much in common. Vanderlip was the mother of six children; she managed several households and a considerable estate, Beechwood, along the Hudson River, in Scarborough, twenty-eight miles north of New York City. During the war, she and Eleanor had both devoted many hours of each day to the war effort, and ER had been impressed by her profound love for learning and her practical political style: her executive skills, efficiency, and dash.
ER was enthusiastic about her new work with the League, and told Esther Lape that she would like to do more. Lape, perhaps the first of ER’s new friends fully to appreciate the range of her abilities, recommended that Vanderlip consider ER for fund-raising purposes. Lape thought that she would be a “useful adjunct” and pleasant company on League trips: “Eleanor Roosevelt says that if you would care at all to have her go along with you …she would be glad to…. She said when speaking of the League in general that she ‘liked to do things’ with you. And she said it in such a nice warm way.”
Attractive and athletic, Narcissa Vanderlip had a crisp and robust manner. She rode horses and played politics with equal joy and intensity. While a student at the University of Chicago, she managed the girls’ basketball team. Like ER, as a young Junior Leaguer she volunteered to teach gymnastics at the University Settlement. Although she left college in her senior year to marry her earnest suitor Frank A. Vanderlip, she had relished its “feast of learning” and was always proud that she had read Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes, and Aristotle in the original. Over the years, she raised significant sums of money for the university, and in 1933 would return to receive her degree.
ER was impressed that Narcissa and Frank Vanderlip had done so much public work together, notably for women’s suffrage and progressive education. In 1912, they founded the Scarborough School, and during the war they toured the country together, selling bonds and promoting postwar reconstruction. Frank Vanderlip was president of the National City Bank and founder of the American International Corporation, capitalized at $50 million. Created to finance trade, investment, and ambitious transnational engineering projects in Europe and Asia, it was America’s first global development bank and construction company. A liberal Republican, Vanderlip’s financial status did not protect him from the Red Scare. He was attacked as a Bolshevik—after all, international financiers believed in “foreign” trade. Indeed, Edward L. Doheny (later mired in the Teapot Dome scandal) announced on 1 February 1919 that “Vanderlip is a Bolshevist, so is Charles R. Crane…. Henry Ford is another and so are most of those one hundred historians Wilson took abroad with him.”
ER admired the concerned and politically astute women who dedicated themselves to making their hard-won right to vote meaningful. In 1920 and 1921, the League’s platform set the reform agenda far into the future: national health insurance, unemployment insurance, state and federally funded old-age pensions, expanded appropriations for the Women’s Bureau and the Children’s Bureau, an end to child labor, maximum-hour and minimum-wage legislation, the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infant Protection Act, pure-milk-and-food legislation, federal aid to education, civil-service reform, full citizenship for women (whether or not married to U.S. nationals), the participation of women at every level of national life, the promotion of international peace and membership in the League of Nations.
A. Mitchell Palmer and his successors throughout the 1920s—most notably New York’s Lusk Committee—condemned the League of Women Voters, and all its works, as Bolshevism, and feared that Leaguers intended to weaken America by destroying the family. But for ER the League filled the vacuum that had existed in her life since she took off her Red Cross uniform. In January 1921, she attended the annual convention of New York’s League at Albany, one of very few Democratic women present (127 of the 157 women were Republican). It was an extraordinary session. Vanderlip had invited Governor Nathan Miller to speak to the newly enfranchised women of his state. He agreed—in order to attack them: “There is no proper place for a League of Women Voters. …Any organization which seeks to exert political power is a menace to our free institutions and to representative government.” He condemned all their efforts outside the two-party system, and particularly assaulted their legislative program.
Miller’s attack resulted in a vastly increased membership for the League, in part due to Carrie Chapman Catt’s spontaneous reply, which received front-page headlines across the country. There remained, she stated, a minority of political men who were bitter against suffragists “because we are women.” “I do not recall one time in history when a great reform was brought about by a political party,” Catt said. “The League of Women Voters aspires to be a part of the big majorities which administer our government, and at the same time it wishes to be one of the minorities which agitate and educate and shape ideas today which the majority will adopt tomorrow.”
Carrie Chapman Catt inspired Eleanor Roosevelt. In April 1921, ER attended the National League’s convention in Cleveland, where she was particularly stirred by Carrie Chapman Catt’s speech to the delegates on 11 April. As Catt strode to the podium, she tore up her prepared remarks. That day she had read Harding’s first address to Congress, in which he declared that “This Republic will have no part” in a League of Nations. Catt was outraged: “The people in this room tonight could put an end to war. Everyone wants it and everyone does nothing…. I am for a League of Nations…. Let us consecrate ourselves to put war out of the world…. Men were born by instinct to slay. It seems to me God is giving a call to the women of the world to come forward, to stay the hand of men, to say: ‘No, you shall no longer kill your fellow men!’”
That night Catt stirred the convention to a women’s crusade for peace. For Eleanor Roosevelt it was an exhilarating meeting. The women she met in Cleveland, including many former suffrage militants, were different from the affluent and privileged circle around Vanderlip. ER was moving far beyond her familiar orbit. As she wrote to her husband:
I’ve had a very interesting day and heard some really good women speakers.
Mrs. Catt is clear, cold reason; Mrs. Larue Brown is amusing, apt, graceful; [Minnie Fisher Cunningham] from Texas is emotional and idealistic, but she made nearly everyone cry! I listened to Child Welfare all the morning and Direct Primaries all the afternoon, lunched with Margaret Norrie, drove out at five …and called on Mrs. [Newton D.] Baker, dined and heard some speeches on Child Welfare and attended a NY delegates’ meeting and am about to go to bed, quite weary!
But she felt a need to reassure her husband: “Much, much love dear and I prefer doing my politics with you.”
ER would continue to do some part of her politics with her husband, but after 1921 she was centrally engaged in every aspect of the women’s political movement. Throughout the 1920s, with Vanderlip, Esther Lape, and Elizabeth Read, she dedicated herself to the struggle for America’s participation in the World Court, created to substitute international law for international violence. Within weeks of their meeting in 1920, Vanderlip had persuaded ER to direct the League of Women Voters’ national-legislation committee. At first ER protested that she was not sufficiently informed. But Narcissa Vanderlip assured her that she would have all the assistance she needed from “an able woman lawyer” named Elizabeth Read.
A scholar and an attorney, Elizabeth Read was an honors graduate of Smith College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She was affluent and self-assured, and her personality was flavored by a warm and quick wit. She became one of ER’s closest friends as well as her personal attorney and financial adviser. Each week, Read went through the Congressional Record and marked the bills of potential interest to the League. She and ER would then meet to discuss possible activities, after which ER prepared a monthly report with her final recommendations. A quick study, ER soon found her activities multiplied. She rapidly developed her own political vision and style, but she always credited her early work with Elizabeth Read as essential to every new step she took in activist politics during the 1920s.
The first time she went to Elizabeth Read’s office, ER “felt humble and inadequate.” But “I liked her at once and she gave me a sense of confidence.” Those weekly meetings were the beginning of a friendship with Read and her life-partner, Esther Lape, “which was to be lasting and warm.” Their “standards of work and their interests played a great part in what might be called the ‘intensive education of Eleanor Roosevelt.’”
A graduate of Wellesley, Esther Lape had taught English at Swarthmore, the University of Arizona, and Barnard. But she achieved prominence as a journalist, researcher, and publicist. ER noted that “Esther had a brilliant mind and a driving force, a kind of nervous power,” which she much admired. In their company, Eleanor Roosevelt became a “New Woman,” a prominent member of that diverse and diffuse group that heralded modernity. Although she lived uptown, in the house that Sara built, which she hated, ER spent several evenings each week downtown, with the women who became in 1921 her most intimate friends. They were among the first generation of college-educated women, independent and hardworking, who kept the flame of feminism alive.
Like many radical women, Lape and Read lived in Greenwich Village, which for decades had been a haven for creativity and independent politics. Although after the war many artists and radicals had gone into exile to escape what they considered years of torpor, materialism, and mediocrity, those who stayed continued to find Greenwich Village an appealing and harmonious environment. During the 1920s, rumors abounded that Greenwich Village was dead, that after the war it had become a “bogus and lewd bore,” a philistine swamp filled with lesbian harems and other licentious things. Whatever the myth, the area’s residents included a community of fighting political women who chose their battles and their neighborhood with great care.
STEREOTYPES AND FANTASIES OF THE 1920S HAVE TENDED to concentrate on flappers and speakeasies, to emphasize new styles—short hair, short skirts, and very red lipstick—and to consider smoking, drinking, and lust the essence of it all.
In reality, the “New Women” were not flappers at all. To begin with, they were too old. ER called her teen-aged daughter a “flapper.” But nobody would have called ER or Esther Lape a flapper. Nor were their political opponents associated with the National Woman’s Party— Crystal Eastman, Doris Stevens, Alice Paul, or Agnes Brown Leach—flappers. Surely the president of the Woman’s Party, Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, who had become a separatist personally as well as politically (self-supporting women, she now maintained, needed to have nothing to do with men—neither in political parties nor in marriage), was no flapper. But they were all “New Women,” as were their older colleagues in progressive reform, such as “social feminists” Jane Addams and Lillian Wald.
The ongoing stereotype of the 1920s is that postsuffrage activist women who sought emancipation and independence were politically uninvolved but sexually aggressive. The New Women, however, concentrated on political power and economic change. Some organized for social reform, and sought protective labor legislation for women and children, unions for all workers, equal pay for equal work. Others organized for constitutional equality, and paid scant attention to labor legislation. The New Women disagreed about priorities and strategy. And they disagreed among themselves: Among the equal-rights feminists of the Woman’s Party, Crystal Eastman was a socialist; Alice Paul and Alva Belmont were not. Among the social feminists, ER was a Democrat; Narcissa Vanderlip a Republican. They all organized vigorously for political change and enjoyed emancipated private lives. Their sexual freedom included the freedom not to have “premarital” or freewheeling heterosexual sex, as well as to have it.
The New Women of the 1920s considered themselves part of a movement that was both international and inevitable. In 1919, a Russian feminist and economist, the first Soviet minister of social welfare, Alexandra Kollontai, introduced the concept of the New Woman to the new revolutionary government. The New Woman was economically independent, and sexually liberated. She “asserted her personality,” and “protested the universal servitude of women to the state, the family, and society.” She believed in equality of the sexes even in the sphere of physical and emotional experience. The New Woman was free, sometimes lonely, but always self-defined. She was different: “The feminine virtues on which she has been raised for centuries: passivity, devotion, submissiveness, gentleness, proved to be fully superfluous, futile and harmful,” wrote Kollontai. “Harsh reality demands other characteristics from independent women: activity, resistance, determination, toughness, that is to say, characteristics which hitherto were viewed as the hallmark and privilege of men…. The woman of the past had been raised by her lord and master to adopt a negligent attitude toward herself, to accept a petty, wretched existence as a natural fate….” But today the wife no longer stood beneath the shadow of her husband. Before us stood “the personality, the woman as human being.”
Within two years, Kollontai’s writings were condemned in Russia as bourgeois Western feminism, and after 1921 she spent most of her political life in exile. Although she was one of the very few of the first revolutionaries not killed after Lenin’s death, she was silenced and her feminist works were virtually erased.
In the United States, New Women with similar views were condemned as Bolshevist. They too were exiled, dishonored, or bitterly attacked. Wherever they were, the New Women of the 1920s continued to organize, and to write. Their ideas were in ferment all over the world. They would be embattled for the rest of the twentieth century. In the meantime, they created communities of work and friendship that enhanced their lives, empowered their work, and fueled their understanding.
Like most people ER and her new friends defied simplistic categories. Nevertheless, a variety of stereotypes were applied to the politically engaged New Women of the 1920s. They were, to begin with, branded “spinsters”—a word with new meaning in the vocabulary of the 1920s, which rapidly became the decade of Freudian misunderstanding. “Old maids” were dismissed as dreary, unfulfilled harpies who sublimated their longings in good works. “Spinsterhood” became the worst imaginable fate for young girls.
Not only were “old maids” ridiculed and reviled, however; they were diagnosed as deviants, as were all women who sought to extend their lives beyond the traditional roles of wife and mother. Under the spell of Krafft-Ebing and Freud, psychiatric handbooks began to feature the scariest deviant of all: the “Mannish Lesbian.” Portrayed as a woman in tie and high collar, she was known especially to have inappropriate and selfish ambitions—for a university education and a career. Whether or not she had sex with other women mattered less to her diagnosticians than her independence and the range of her interests and concerns. In that respect the misogynists were correct. The “New Women” did indeed live “deviant” lives. They were different. Having broken free of tradition, they sought to live fully according to the dictates and rhythms of their own nature. By doing so, women like those in ER’s new circle of friends began the long and ongoing process of expanding the boundaries of “normalcy.”
Esther Everett Lape and Elizabeth Fisher Read lived together in a house that Esther owned at 20 East 11th Street, a quiet tree-lined street just off Fifth Avenue. Nearby lived the women with whom ER was to build Val-Kill and share many years of her life, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook. They lived at 171 West 12th Street, in a cooperative building filled with social feminists—virtually all of whom were to become ER’s friends. Just across the hall lived Polly Porter and Molly Dewson, who would become the driving force of the women’s committee of the Democratic Party. But during the first years of her emancipation, ER spent most of her time with Lape and Read.
Cultured, learned, and ambitious, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read created an atmosphere that reminded ER of Marie Souvestre and her circle. They celebrated excellence in food and champagne, art and conversation. They were passionate about music and theatre. Cut flowers in great profusion decorated their homes in the city and in the country. Their candlelit dinners were formal, splendidly served, and spiced by controversy. After dinner Lape, Roosevelt, and Read read poetry aloud, French poetry in particular, for hours on end. The evenings were incomplete if they did not include discussions of new and imaginative political strategies, and the contents of the following week’s editorials in the weekly newsletter Lape and Read published: City, State and Nation. That journal was addressed to women and men, politicians and voters. Lape and Read enlisted ER and their closest friends to support and write for it, and many dinners were working editorial-committee meetings with ER, Vanderlip, and Helen Rogers Reid, married to Ogden Reid, subsequently publisher of the New York Herald Tribune. Not since Allenswood had ER spent such stimulating, exciting, and purposeful hours—hours that engaged her talents, advanced her vision.
In the early 1920s, ER spent as much time as possible with Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read. During the White House years, Lape suggested she rent a floor on 11th Street. It became ER’s sanctuary, a hiding house from the press and the rituals of First-Ladyhood.
Like most of the New Women of the 1920s who lived in Greenwich Village, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read were committed to personal and emotional freedom. Dedicated to public affairs, they were also devoted to each other. They sought to maintain a balanced and artful life, and lived in a world of elegance and daring. It was a world that they created; there were no blueprints or tradition. They answered to nobody, and to no established order.
Style mattered to Lape and Read. Their costumes were dashing, and they dressed for each other. Their clothes were custom-made of the finest imported fabrics. Over the years, they persuaded ER to use their favorite designer, and frequently gave her gifts of unique and dazzling fabrics. Elizabeth Read was more casual and preferred dark, basic colors, comfortably tailored suits with string ties, and sensible walking shoes. In the country, she wore working corduroys and knickerbockers, with high-laced hunting boots. Short and agile, she was proud of her athletic and powerful body. She uprooted trees and personally built the stables that housed Esther’s horses. Esther Lape was more extravagant—eccentric, even. Her clothes were exquisite, and they lasted forever. Patterned silks, velvets, satins, a variety of brocades: She wore during the 1970s what she had designed during the 1920s and 1930s. She preferred white in the country and black in the city—except on Christmas, when she wore red velvet. In the country, she wore riding jodhpurs, and she never rode side-saddle. Slacks were for working in her well-considered gardens and for taking country drives. No pants ever hung in her New York City closet.
Ceremony was as important as fashion to Lape and Read. Their cats, for example, were always called Ariel and Pan. Above the door of their 147-acre Connecticut estate, Saltmeadow, Elizabeth Read carved in wood Plato’s invocation to the god Pan, ruler of woods and fields: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods that haunt this place / give me beauty of the inward soul….”
In a philosophic mood during particularly annoying negotiations in behalf of a compromise between the League of Women Voters and the National Woman’s Party, Elizabeth Read wrote Narcissa Vanderlip a letter in which she examined her feelings about balance in life. She said that they had spoken only
about whether it was better to resign—[and] we did not get down to the real issue: Whether a cause, or one’s human relationships, is the more important. EL and I were speaking of it that night. I know that for myself the human relationships are; not that selfish absorption in them can be satisfactory, for life cannot be big and sweet that way; but on the other hand causes won’t make life endurable either. You could work fifty years for a cause, and find your life too dreary and barren to be endured. If a person is lucky enough to meet a human being that is worth devotion, that—in the absence of a crisis, or an all-compelling call—is the important thing—always remembering that selfish devotion defeats its purpose, that limiting life to the devotion eventually kills it. In other words, it is a matter of a balance that changes every day….
Esther Lape shared Read’s commitment to a balanced life of work and love, in unity with nature. The spirit of their lives, Esther Lape wrote in her history of Saltmeadow, which she gave to ER, was to be found “in the inscription ‘toujours gai’” painted in large green letters on the double-sized “doormat of the big house.” When she was over ninety years old, she asked a friend to repaint that inscription, because she hated to see it fade.
Lape and Read believed that life could be crafted, made into a work of art. Their friends were central to the world of “beauty and the gaiety of life” that they created in New York and at Saltmeadow, where ER would spend some days in each season every year. It was in fact at Saltmeadow that ER spent the last vacation weekend of her life.
ER believed that “Providence was particularly wise and farseeing when it threw these two women together, for their gifts complement each other in a most extraordinary way. From their association has come much good work which has been of real service in a good many causes.”
Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read became the core of her female support network. Similar networks of shared work and friendship sustained many political women who struggled for change and equality in a world they were not supposed to inhabit, a world that continually erected barriers to their presence and all their contributions.
LAPE AND READ CARED ABOUT ER’S WELL-BEING, AND HER spirits. They encouraged and promoted her work and reintroduced her to a way of life she had not considered since she left Allenswood. As a student, she had always believed that she would return to England to teach. But for twenty years, that independent female world of work and community had been very remote. It seemed ages away. Within weeks, the charm and intensity of their lives restored to ER a range of possibilities she had forgotten she ever knew.
ER hated to be alone. When she discovered how much she really enjoyed people, she realized just how lonely she had been. To the end of her life, her daily calendar might have seemed to anyone less robust like a political and emotional carnival. ER’s appetite for life was vast, unlimited. After 1920, she set out, consciously and with gusto, to pursue her own independent destiny. Nevertheless, she made compromises with form and tradition. She avoided scandal, broke no fundamental ties with her husband or her mother-in-law, and, where her children were concerned, allowed convention to rule.
ER was never able to prevail against the stern opposition of her mother-in-law and the passivity of her husband when it came to her children. Although she disapproved, and spoke vigorously against the tradition, all her boys went to Groton when they were twelve. And when her daughter was eighteen, she came out. Like her mother and her mother before her, the third Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was a debutante in society. She hated it and protested, but her grandmother insisted, and ER agreed: “Yes, you must.” Anna never got over her outrage: “My mother made me …go to Newport for what they call ‘Tennis Week.’” She was made to stay with Cousin Susie Parish, whom ER’s brother, Hall, by then called a Ku Klux Klanner and whom ER herself had come to consider perfectly dreadful. But ER did not stand up for her daughter: “She didn’t help me a bit.”
She made me go there, and I completely abhorred this stuff…. But Mother made me do this. It was Granny who took me to get the clothes….
Now, Father, you couldn’t draw into this. He’d just say, ‘That’s up to Granny and Mother. You settle all this with them….’ He wouldn’t give me the time of day.”
Anna wished “Newport would blow up and bust,” but in 1924 she went, and endured the time-honored and primary rite of passage still enjoyed by so many of the women of her class. ER, always uncomfortable in Newport, did not join her daughter. Like many women of her generation, and later generations, ER’s own removal from her family’s culture, from rituals she found suffocating, did not extend to her daughter. Badgered by her mother-in-law and her godmother, with all the ghosts of her foremothers and all the pain of memory haunting her decision, ER was not free to share her liberation with her daughter: Anna must go through the form and then decide, later, for herself.
During the week, Anna’s objections subsided: “This is a strange place! Even more formal than I imagined.” “How those dances scare me.” After several days, she felt less “belligerent to Society’s claim.” “Newport seems to me a good education for a girl for one week when she comes out….”
Even regarding the issue of a college education for women, ER’s views for herself were not translated into action for her daughter. ER had always wanted to go to college. That she did not attend Vassar or Barnard, as so many of her contemporaries did, was one of the biggest disappointments of her life. But her daughter recalled: “College for me was never even discussed that I remember.” She recalled vaguely that her parents had perhaps talked of her learning “to do something,” and encouraged her to go to Cornell’s School of Agriculture, at least for a year (which she did). But she remembered vividly that her grandmother was entirely against it, and she “was most outspoken.” “Girls who went to college were very apt to be ‘old maids’ and become ‘bookworms’ …a dire threat to any girl’s chance of attracting a husband!”
ER’s commitment to the idea of advanced education for women was no match for the fear of spinsterhood. There were household battles over the subject—between Anna and ER, between ER and her mother-in-law. ER and FDR finally persuaded Anna to attend Cornell on a trial basis. But she was so angry with her mother, she refused to talk to her during the entire drive up to college. Moreover, Anna evidently hated the school, did virtually no work, spent most of her time at parties, and left to get married within a year.
From 1920 to the end of her life, ER lived in two worlds: the world she made for herself, and the social world into which she was born. ER never abandoned that familial world. But she did redefine her place in it. She had the courage to speak and to act, to bear witness, to disrupt and change it profoundly.