The New Deal: His and Hers

Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Two, 1933-1938
by Blanche Wiesen Cook
Viking, 1999, 696 pp., $34.95

In divorce court, lawyers and judges often hear amazingly different stories about a marriage that has long disintegrated. In history, as well, there are also his and her renditions of the past. For Americans who loved FDR as well as those who loathed him, it was his alphabet agencies, his support of labor, his public works, and his cheerful optimism that came to define the era that we call the New Deal. But there was also another New Deal, one that Eleanor Roosevelt championed, an agenda yoked to the vast number of women social reformers and peace activists with whom she had worked since the early years of the twentieth century. In this second volume of her biography of the most extraordinary First Lady in American history, Blanche Wiesen Cook writes about that other New Deal, the one that ER fought for, ...