Eleanor Roosevelt's Place in History

Recent books on Eleanor Roosevelt and her relationships with two women emphasize her extensive influence on U.S. politics and society. Activist, poet, legal scholar, and spiritual leader Pauli Murray, for instance, called ER the "mother" of second-wave feminism. Thus, the deeper we delve into ER's ideals, actions, successes, and failures, the more nuanced is our understanding of the trajectory of liberalism in the twentieth century. Admirably opting for accessibility in their respective studies of ER and Lorena ("Hick") Hickok, and ER and Anna Pauline ("Pauli") Murray, Susan Quinn and Patricia Bell-Scott use biography to explore not only the lives of ER, Hick, and Murray, but also the larger contexts in which they lived. As such, Quinn and Bell-Scott move women to the center of political history, communicating to a broad audience the mark these individual women left on the New Deal, feminism, and civil rights in the tumultuous years from the 1930s to the early 1980s. Moreover, by examining ER through the prism of her relationships, the authors underscore the dialectical nature of ER's political education as well as the boundaries that women navigated as they sought to craft policies to support class, racial, and gender justice.

Taking as a given the importance of these women in shaping history, the authors have penned well-written and engaging books that should fit comfortably on the shelves of chain bookstores and reading lists of college syllabi. At the same time, their narratives tend to advance a great-person version of history that assumes the power of individuals to shape history. Accordingly, the dust jacket of Bell-Scott's book asserts that the Murray-ER friendship "helped to alter the course of race and racism in America"; Quinn's subtitle proclaims Hick's relationship with ER as "The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady." The danger in such claims is that readers absorb a story about heroic people that stresses individual agency, leaving them with little sense of the broad forces, systems, and groups that move history.

Fortunately, educators will find much in both books that will help students grasp the intersection of social movements with the lives of activist women. Most clearly, Bell-Scott's "portrait of a friendship" offers reflections on the long civil rights movement, as it illuminates Murray's unwavering commitment to racial justice and ER's growing cognizance of the depth and perniciousness of racial inequality. From an early age, Murray possessed a sophisticated grasp of systemic racism and fought against it. Her first letter to the White House, written to Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 (with a copy also sent to ER), presented a cogent analysis of race, class, and politics. In it, she explained how low wages and racism prevented her access to the training she needed to reach her full potential as an instructor on the WPA's Workers Education Project. Excluded from the University of North Carolina due to her race, she reviewed the myriad obstacles African Americans faced as they sought an equal footing with white citizens. Weaving her own family history into the letter, she highlighted her family's lengthy and patriotic American roots and called on FDR to stand up to white Southern Democrats. In her 1938 voice, we hear contemporary scholarly analyses on race and the New Deal, such as those expounded by Ira Katznelson in Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2014).

As her correspondence and then friendship with ER grew, Murray pushed ER to be a stronger advocate on behalf of civil rights. They drew closer during the ordeal to save sharecropper Odell Waller from execution after he killed a white landlord in self-defense. In this story...