Travels with Eleanor #6: "No one can make you..." - by Nan Brooks

Ugly? or Beautiful?

As I toured my one-woman show as Eleanor Roosevelt, I was struck by what people remembered about her. Many told me about how ugly they thought she was until they met her and realized she was beautiful. I must have heard that hundreds of times. Then, as now, the way the press portrayed her was consumed as truth until the reality presented itself in person. There was more to Eleanor Roosevelt than most people knew.

Often folks would quote her, remembering twenty years after her death one sentence: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”  These days, I see her photo pop up on social media with one quote or another, but this is the one sentence people remembered and repeated. It once meant everything to me and kept me alive through jarring change in my life.

I can still see that huge 1970's kitchen, the orange and brown and avocado striped wallpaper, the bronze appliances, the dark brown wooden table and chairs. On the refrigerator was a scrap of paper, wrinkled and worn around the edges. I had clipped it from a magazine and taped it to the side of  the fridge at eye level. When I answered the phone on the wall, there was that little piece of paper.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” The long curly phone cord meant I could reach every part of that huge kitchen, cooking, cleaning, feeding my little boys while I talked with my mom or friends.

My personal crisis was that my husband had told me he probably had never loved me and wanted a divorce and our therapist was ineffective at best. I felt my world crumbling beneath me. I would not have been surprised to find myself suddenly sitting on the basement floor with the house falling around me. I had no idea what my future would be, no idea how I would care for my two sons. And worst of all,  I was falling in love with a woman. I did all sorts of contorted thinking to not feel what I felt for her, but it wasn’t working. I smoked a lot of cigarettes, sat up long nights, cried and cried and cried.

There in the kitchen I would talk on the phone with the woman I was struggling not to love and I would talk with another friend (I’ll call her Kate here) and confess it all. Then Kate, believing her conversation to be held in confidence, talked with our minister and told him my Big Dark Secret.

I was very active in the church, teaching Sunday school and summer programs, costuming the annual madrigal dinner, making pots of soup for community meals, volunteering when and wherever needed. After Kate told the minister she was worried about me and that she thought I was suicidal because I might be a lesbian, I immediately became instant persona non grata. The minister told me not to come back to the church lest I contaminate the children with my possible homosexuality. I didn’t know that Kate had talked with him and so believed he had somehow seen the truth in my behavior. I had revealed my terrible self without knowing it. I was devastated.

Somehow or other I had absorbed the idea that the church speaks for God. I find it astounding to think that I bought such a load of hogwash. The theology that I thought was the foundation of my life was gone, as were my marriage and my understanding of who I was. Only my motherhood and a few steadfast friends sustained me. The rejection by the church led me to the belief that God could no longer love me, that I did not deserve to live.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” 

I repeated it like the mantra it was, promised myself that I would never never never leave my beloved sons without their mother, without me. I clung to them and I clung to Eleanor Roosevelt, and for many days I could last only fifteen minutes at a time.

The love of that woman I was terrified of loving, the strength of the feminist movement and women friends, and my sons saw me through what I now see as a transformation. Just ten years later, I would be out and proud, producing feminist and lesbian-feminist theater. I would be reading all I could find about Eleanor and then touring Dear Mrs. Roosevelt.

One of the questions I'm often asked about Eleanor Roosevelt is whether she was a lesbian. There are two answers; one short and one more complicated. The short one is, we will never know her heart of hearts. The long answer involves her friendships with dynamic women who, as she said, were responsible for her education in many ways.  They were the women who helped Eleanor find herself when her world crumbled.

                                 

          Esther Lape and Elizabeth Reed                                   with Marion Dickerman

Eleanor is second from left, Lorena Hickok is on the right

Next time: The long answer.

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