'Damned if you do, damned if you don't'
Is there anyone out there with the strength of an Eleanor Roosevelt willing to risk criticism of their opinions?
By Ellen Snortland 08/25/2005
Eleanor Roosevelt was my mother’s heroine. Rather than give me lectures, Mom handed me ER quotes, like:
“Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it, one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world,” and “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent;” and, perhaps my favorite, “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
Whew. No wonder Hillary Rodham Clinton talked about “communing” with Eleanor. In a culture that does not revere older women, she provided a badly needed model of what was possible for women, at any age.
I had the pleasure of visiting the Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate in the Hudson River Valley in mid-August. I’d seen the estate before but I had never visited Val-Kill, the cottage a few miles from the main house that Eleanor Roosevelt felt was her only home. ER never felt at home in the mansion because it was her mother-in-law’s house. She’d always felt like a visitor, even though she had raised five children there.
Her “homelessness” began early. Her mother died when Eleanor was 8, and her beloved father passed away from acute alcoholism when she was only 10. She was raised by a rather cold grandmother. Her aunts and cousins never let her forget that she was an ugly duckling. I think one of the most inspiring aspects of ER is that she could have made herself invisible if she’d allowed others’ opinion of her looks to keep her in her place. Thankfully, ER felt her “place” was in the world.
So the visit to Val-Kill — which is Dutch for “Valley River”— was extremely poignant for me. After an extremely annoying hunt for the road to Val-Kill because of the lack of adequate signage, we pulled up to a set of modest buildings surrounded by woods, next to a pond and a stream. Run by the National Park Service, the cottage was rejected as a national historic site when it was first brought up to the Congress. It was unprecedented to have a first lady important enough to warrant her own site. By the second time that a bill was introduced to preserve Val-Kill, one of ER’s sons had remodeled the cottage for tenants and had sold off most of the furnishings. Fortunately, the bill passed, and we now have a place to pay tribute to “The First Lady of the World.”
After a lot of effort, many of Val-Kill’s contents have been restored to their home. It’s a cozy, extremely humble place. The dining table was set with pottery: Franciscan apple pattern. The glasses were dime-store ware. ER entertained many a dignitary there — including a pre-presidential John F. Kennedy, who arrived at Val-Kill, hat in hand, for her blessing on his campaign — and they were all treated like equals.
ER never took to cooking. One luxury she did give herself was a professional cook. She had trouble keeping them. She’d go off to town saying she’d have six people over for lunch and by the time she’d come home, the number grew to 20. Between cooks, the only thing she knew how to make was scrambled eggs and toast for an entree. She made one dessert. She’d make pancakes, stack them, smear butter and brown sugar between the cakes and pile them as high as a regular cake. She’d then pour maple syrup over the stack and cut them into slices, layer-cake like. FDR certainly never married her for her looks or her culinary abilities.
It’s clear he married her for her heart, energy and intellect. According to the National Park Service Web site, www.nps.gov/elro, “She wrote twenty-seven books, more than 8,000 columns, and over 555 articles. She received an average of 175,000 letters a year while she served as first lady. While no official estimates of her post-White House correspondence exist, research done by our staff suggests that she received an average of 50,000 letters and generated an average of 21,000 letters annually from 1945-1962.” Whew.
I don’t know who young women look up to today. Who is quoted these days? Is it passé to have a heroine? My personal idol, Gloria Steinem, is my generation’s Eleanor Roosevelt in many ways. Steinem attained stature under her own steam, not in the reflection of a famous man, traditionally the way women have become well-known. (She saw my show when I was performing in New York and I’m still floating!) Steinem continues to lead a life that in many ways is right out of the ER playbook. Eleanor said, in her great wisdom, “Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” Do you have the courage to risk criticism?
It’s an important question in any generation.
Contact Ellen Snortland at www.snortland.com.
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