发表于 2005-12-19 22:25:00
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT A Life of Discovery. By Russell Freedman. Illustrated. 198 pp. New York: Clarion Books. $17.95. (Ages 10 and up) A WOMAN UNAFRAID The Achievements of Frances Perkins. By Penny Colman. Illustrated. 129 pp. New York: Atheneum. $14.95. (Ages 10 to 14)
TWO finely rendered lives of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) and Frances Perkins (1880-1965), midwives of the modern social welfare state, appear not a moment too soon for young readers who are watching as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Donna Shalala present national health-care reform on Capitol Hill, the talk-show circuit and around the nation.
The role of women in the New Deal has long been slighted, but these two biographies draw on recent scholarly reassessments. Sixty years ago, Roosevelt, the first independent First Lady, and Perkins, the Secretary of Labor and the first woman ever appointed to a Presidential Cabinet, both testified before Congress. They both took part in political strategy sessions. They both traveled the country and were celebrated as gifted public speakers who could explain complicated policy issues in concrete, human terms. They both worked on legislation. In addition, Roosevelt wrote a daily newspaper column, and both she and Perkins published successful books.
Yet neither woman sought the spotlight or ever "cavorted" -- as Perkins liked to say -- before the press. And both cautiously allowed others of the Roosevelt brain trust to take credit for the genesis of historic programs in public employment, relief and Social Security for which they were in large measure responsible -- programs that fundamentally changed the way we define government in this country.
Happily, the charade is finally over, for them and, we hope, for their counterparts in the Clinton Administration. But these books remind young and old readers alike just how hard it has been for the voices of women to be heard in public life, let alone to be granted authority.
The poignant and by now well-known story of Eleanor Roosevelt's triumph over personal tragedy to become the most influential American woman of this century is recounted in "Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery," by Russell Freedman, the author of many books for children, including "Lincoln: A Photobiography," which won the 1988 Newbery Medal, and "Franklin Delano Roosevelt." In measured tones he shows how her early work in the progressive settlement houses and voluntary associations of New York City inspired an abiding confidence in the potential of government to do good. We observe her practical political education as her husband's agent in the Democratic Party following his bout with polio in 1921. We learn of her achievements as First Lady on behalf of the country's most needy and underrepresented citizens -- especially black Americans. We follow her through World War II as she won the hearts of American soldiers, then into the postwar period after her husband's death in 1945, when, as a delegate to the United Nations, she became a force in her own right for international peace and human rights.
The personal drama of Eleanor Roosevelt's life also unfolds with unflinching clarity in the text and in the exquisite photographs that accompany it. We are introduced to the troubled and insecure child who emerged from the tragedy of her father's alcoholism and her parents' early deaths. We meet the young wife and mother of five who, with great discipline and determination, overcame the sorrow of her husband's infidelity and in subsequent years forged deep and abiding friendships with a small circle of men and women, each of whom, in a manner Mr. Freedman does not speculate about, fulfilled the need for intimacy her marriage no longer satisfied.
Penny Colman, who has written about Dorothea Dix and Fannie Lou Hamer, is equally thorough, fair and candid in her treatment of Frances Perkins. A native of Massachusetts, Perkins graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1902 and became a professional social worker in the New York charity world in which Eleanor Roosevelt volunteered. So dogged were her investigations of the garment industry, and so persistent her lobbying for wage and hour reform, that she was first recruited by Gov. Al Smith, and later by Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, to work within New York State government, rather than against it. This prepared her to be President Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, a job which then encompassed health and welfare as well as labor. Perkins's tenure witnessed the greatest period of organization in American labor history. She unequivocally supported the right to organize and bargain collectively, and used her considerable influence with the President to prevent him from restraining strikes by longshoremen and automobile workers. Yet she always had more confidence in the Federal Government than in organized labor as an instrument of social justice, and she devoted most of her efforts to protecting workers through maximum-hour and minimum-wage regulations.
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