American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
 J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life, Chapter Five 

           "Eleanor and Children in Arizona, 1912", Courtesy of the Library of Congress

I looked at everything from the point of view of what I ought to do, rarely from the standpoint of what I wanted to do. ... So I took and interest in politics.  It was a wife's duty to be interested in whatever interested her husband, whether it was politics, books, or a particular dish for dinner.
-Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story

Chapter 5: A Politician's Wife

Picture
FDR 1913, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, courtesy of the Wiki Commons

Summary

Eleanor gets used to life as the wife of a successful politician.  She faces conflict with Franklin who wishes for more time together.  She grows as a person and in her political thought.  Franklin Roosevelt is elected to the legislature in New York, and is appointed as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, the same position Teddy Roosevelt held years earlier.  His ambition becomes the driving force in Eleanor's life.

Author reads from the Text

Although Eleanor was intrigued, and sometimes disturbed, as the lessons of politics were revealed to her, she could not lose herself in Franklin's career.  She began to realize that something within herself "craved to be an individual." And what did it mean to be an individual? Eleanor probably did not know.  By her own later admission she was not "a feminist in those early days."  She did not expect to be able to vote, and she was "shocked" when Franklin came out for women's suffrage.  Eleanor had simply assumed "that men were superior creatures and knew more about politics than women did."  She became a supporter of women's suffrage for the ironic reason that Franklin was for women suffrage so she "probably must be too."


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Chapter 4: Eleanor and Franklin
Eleanor Roosevelt Main Page
Chapter 6: Grief