Page Two of Review, A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway
Illness also meant travel. I was struck by the number of times Isabella and her family took the train to New York to see doctors. She sent her children to California for high school, but there is no mention of seeing any doctors in Los Angeles.
Except for the election of 1912 when both women supported the candidacy of ER’s uncle Teddy, neither paid much attention to politics before 1920 or, if they did, they didn’t write about it. They weren’t involved in womens' suffrage or any of the other Progressive movements of the era.
ER plunged into political work in the 1920s, initially to serve the career aspirations of her invalid husband. She and some of her New York friends organized women into the Democratic Party in upstate New York, the value of which became readily apparent when her husband ran for Governor in 1928.
John Greenway took his new bride to Arizona where he owned copper mines. He was planning to retire from business and go into politics when he died. In a sense, Isabella fulfilled his ambitions, becoming a civic activist and Arizona’s Democratic National Committeewoman. After ER’s husband was elected President he brought Arizona’s sole Member of Congress into his administration and Isabella easily won election to replace him.
During FDR’s first term, ER and Isabella could see each other frequently because they were both in D.C. There are fewer letters, but enough to know that Isabella didn’t always see eye-to-eye with FDR. Nor did she like being in Congress; she chose to not run for re-election in 1936. Back in Arizona she pursued her civic and business interests. In 1940 she supported Wendell Wilkie for President, which caused a temporary breech in her friendship with ER. Nonetheless, their relationship survived and the two women worked together again during and after World War II.
While it might sound simple to compile a book of letters, especially of two women who were public figures, an enormous amount of work went into this book. Tracking down the letters, deciphering the handwriting, identifying the people, places and events and generally making sense of private communications is no small task. One can see the dedication and the scholarship of Miller and McGinnis in the numerous explanatory paragraphs interspersed between the letters and in the extensive footnotes which are fortunately printed at the bottom of each page. There is as much authorship as editing in this book. We should be grateful to them for giving us this portrait of an enduring friendship and a peek into the private lives of two public women.
©2009 Jo Freeman for SeniorWomen.com
