An amusing take on Eleanor Roosevelt from Helen Andrews in the Claremont Review of Books:
The irony of Eleanor Roosevelt, feminist political icon, is that her career was a 50-year vindication of every misogynist cliché about women in politics. Her politics were sentimental rather than rational. She was impulsive and easily swayed, a busybody who meddled in every issue under the sun without bothering to master anything intellectually. She honestly believed we could end poverty and war by all being a little nicer to each other. Hillary at least has a political temperament. Eleanor, had she not married Franklin Delano Roosevelt, probably never would have gone near politics at all.
And that’s not even the meanest paragraph in Andrews’s demolition job. Try this one:
The place to start is with her face. The bovine eyes, the vanishing chin, the buck teeth, those jowls. During the fight over women’s suffrage, anti-suffragists claimed that only ugly women were interested in politics, to compensate for their inability to find happiness through normal channels. A cruel and baseless generalization, no doubt, but certainly in Eleanor they had their most glaring data point since the Quaker sisters and abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimké.
Amusing. Read the whole thing.