The Three Graces of Val-Kill: Eleanor Roosevelt, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook in the Place They Made Their Own by Emily Herring (review)

Emily Herring Wilson's The Three Graces of Val-Kill is impeccably researched, well written, and beautifully illustrated; it encapsulates in literary form the highly evocative sense of place created by Eleanor Roosevelt, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook in the architectural embodiment of Val-Kill. While indeed scholarly, this book has a poetic tone that rolls along like the rivulets of Fall-Kill Creek and pulls the reader into the easygoing spirit of a weekend retreat with short chapters and comfortable prose.

Wilson's prologue puts us at FDR's childhood home and the nexus of Sara Delano Roosevelt's matriarchal power in the Hudson Valley, Springwood's breakfast table in the late summer of 1924. So, the story begins the day after FDR had suggested building the cottage at Val-Kill. For the reader, Wilson reveals the liberation this cottage represents for Eleanor Roosevelt and "the three Graces." The geographical distance between Springwood and Val-Kill is less than three miles, but they are worlds apart in their countenance and design. Both structures embody the women who lived there—Sara Delano Roosevelt's Springwood with its dark-wooded Victorian style and adherence to strict social protocols; Val-Kill's knotty pine and insouciant comfort where Eleanor, Marion, and Nancy would live more freely and remotely.

Eleanor Roosevelt is an iconic figure. What makes this book timely is the narrative arc that reexamines her personal and professional relationships with Marion Dickerman and Nan Cook as a couple, with all the highs, lows, and rifts that human relationships entail. Wilson's presentation of facts is admirable (see, e.g., 4), though I think she errs on the side of conservative interpretation of a same-sex relationship in this day and age. On the back cover, Wilson illustrates the monogram on one of Val-Kill's linen napkins, "EMN," each woman's first initial embroidered thereon. In a nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century household, the linen in a bridal trousseau would feature just such an embroidered monogram of conjoined initials of a heterosexual couple based on etiquette conventions. It would be interesting to know who had embroidered these "for company" napkins. My posthumous hope for Eleanor, Marion, and Nancy is that the structure of this relationship sustained them.

Other scholars have examined in more forthright terms Eleanor's friendships and relationships with women and men beyond the context of her marriage to FDR. These include William H. Chafe's 1984 "Biographical Sketch," in Hoff-Wilson and Lightman's Without Precedent; in a number of Blanche Wiesen Cook's books about Eleanor Roosevelt (e.g., her 2016 Eleanor Roosevelt: The War Years and After, 1939–1962, Volume 3, page 6); Susan Quinn's 2016 book Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady. Susan Ware's exploration of ER's friendship with Molly Dewson (and Polly Porter) in their Democratic National Committee work in the late 1920s and Dewson's work as a New Dealer throughout the 1930s after FDR is elected president in Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics. It seems inordinately heterosexist to judge anyone for a relationship outside the context of a skewed marriage, never mind these women reformer/activists whose decades of work contributed so much to social justice and humanity as a whole. I hope for their sake that they were sustained by their relationships—that just seems like a human right to me in 2019.

Wilson deftly discusses the reorganization of domestic life for Eleanor, Marion and Nan, "and the fact that friends sent gifts of china and silver showed how they embraced the women's choice to be a family" (66). Indeed, as the center of the Roosevelt universe shifted from Albany...