Supporting Activist Women: Blanche Wiesen Cook and Feminist Biography

Referred to as Eleanor Roosevelt's "ferociously feminist biographer" by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (Dowd 1999), Blanche Wiesen Cook describes herself as an activist, journalist, and historian—in that order (Cook 2009). An expansive feminist, her scholarship and activism encompass struggles for racial equality, economic justice, and world peace. Deeply influenced by the 1970s women's liberation movement, Blanche turned her full attention to women determined to change the world. From Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution, published in 1978, to her ongoing multi-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, her body of work asserts that uncovering, documenting, interpreting, and disseminating widely the details of political women's lives is itself a revolutionary act (Cook 1978; 1992; 1999).

Two of Blanche's early essays did revolutionize the growing field of women's history. Her groundbreaking 1977 essay, "Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, and Emma Goldman" first appeared in the feminist journal Chrysalis and two years later in the now-classic anthology, A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (Cott and Pleck 1979).

Through "Female Support Networks," Blanche sought to challenge the entire field of history. "In the past," she wrote, "historians tended to ignore the crucial role played by the networks of love and support that have been the very sources of strength that enabled political women to function" (Cott and Pleck 1979, 416). Scholars would never look at the lives of public, political women in quite the same way. Young feminists would learn that even radical, heroic, fearless, revolutionary women not only needed the support of other women to fulfill their social change agendas, but that these relationships could be life-sustaining. Women did not have to do it alone, nor did they have to follow a traditional model of achievement.

The distinctions Blanche made among the different political positions, feminist analyses, and class consciousness of early twentieth-century women reformers mirrored fierce 1970s debates among socialist feminists, radical feminists, and liberal feminists. Her scholarship was a timely reminder that female support networks and ideological diversity could coexist.

During my college internship at Val-Kill, not yet open to the public, I saw the "the female support network" thesis embodied. The only National Historic Site dedicated to a first lady, Val-Kill was created by Eleanor Roosevelt as her retreat, her office, and her home from 1924 until her death in 1962. With FDR's support, she lived there with her friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman. They were the next dyad of political women to influence ER after her Greenwich Village friends, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read.

At the same moment, Doris Faber published a homophobic book, The Life of Lorena Hickok: ER's Best Friend (Faber 1980), and Blanche sprung into action. In a review in Feminist Studies, she directly confronted the book as "a perfect example of vulgar stereotyping and the continual denial of lesbianism" (Cook 1980, 511).

In her own scholarship, Blanche created a balanced, nuanced portrait of all of ER's intimate relationships, including her marriage and her connections to Lorena Hickok and Earl Miller. Noting that many of ER's friends were "dismayed at how much of her heart she opened," she wrote that ER "cherished Hick, and also, Earl, because they had determinedly crashed through her protective barriers" (Cook 1999, 217).

By demonstrating the centrality and interrelationship of the public and private in the lives of major historical figures, Blanche's scholarship helped legitimate feminist biography and changed historiography forever.

It also challenged women's studies to be inclusive of lesbian history. The 1979 publication of Blanche's second transformative essay, "Women Alone Stir My Imagination: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition," in Signs, the premiere journal of feminist scholarship, reflected this recognition. In "Women Alone," Blanche highlighted the pivotal insight from Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, asserting: "Virginia Woolf's entire life is reflected in her work, and demonstrates Woolf's conviction that 'The public and private worlds are inseparably connected; and the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies...