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Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt has been attributed to some of the most inspiring and uplifting quotes for women, and she remains a role model even to modern women. However, her home life was often hard and problematic, forcing her to suffer a great many trials through the course of her very successful life.

Roosevelt’s  mother was openly disappointed at her “plainness” and worried she would never find a husband. Her mother even nicknamed her “Granny” because she was such a serious and quiet young child. Refusing to let her cold and withholding mother shape her self-worth, Eleanor once wrote, despite considering herself an “ugly ducking” for a while, “no matter how plain a woman may be if truth and loyalty are stamped upon her face, all will be attracted to her.”

Of course, we know she did marry, and it just happened to be her fifth cousin, future president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Her mother in law was a controlling wretch, and she lived in a house connected by sliding doors to the young couple. Eleanor’s mother in law treated her children like they were her own, giving Eleanor no agency in the matters of her own home or family. Despite bearing six children, she did not care for sex with her husband at all, and found it a chore.

This micro-management from her mother in law, coupled with her husband’s infidelity, emboldened Eleanor to take up activism. She created the American Youth Congress and National youth and later became invaluable in the early moments of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1940s.

She may have come to be known as the embodiment of domestic grace and poise, but she was a fighter that had the grit to take on anything.