Whenthe history of women began to receive focused attention in the 1970’, EleanorRoosevelt was one of a handful of female Americans who were well known to bothhistorians and the general public. Despite the evidence that she had beenimportant in social-reform circles before her husband was elected President andthat she continued to advocate different causes than he did, she held a placein the public imagination largely because she was the wife of a particularlyinfluential President. Her own activities were seen as preparing the way forher husband’s election or as a complement to his programs. Even Joseph Lash’stwo volumes of sympathetic biography, Eleanor and Franklin (1971) and Eleanor:The Years Alone (1972), reflected this assumption.
Lash’sbiography revealed a complicated woman who sought through political activityboth to flee inner misery and to promote causes in which she passionately believed.However, she still appeared to be an idiosyncratic figure, somehowself-generated not amenable to any generalized explanation. She emerged from thebiography as a mother to the entire nation, or as a busybody, but hardly as asocial type, a figure comprehensible in terms of broader social developments.
Butmore recent work on the feminism of the post-suffrage years (following 1920)allows us to see Roosevelt in a different lightand to bring her life into a more richly detailed context. Lois Scharf’s EleanorRoosevelt, written in 1987, depicts a generation of privileged women, bornin the late nineteenth century and maturing in the twentieth, who made thetransition from old patterns of female association to new ones. Their views andtheir lives were full of contradictions. They maintained female social networksbut began to integrate women into mainstream politics; they demanded equal treatmentbut also argued that women’s maternal responsibilities made them both wards andrepresentatives of the public interest. Thanks to Scharf and others,Roosevelt’s activities—for example, her support both for labor laws protectingwomen and for appointments of women to high public office—have becomeintelligible in terms of this social context rather than as the idiosyncraticcareer of a famous man’s wife.
Q25.
Q 25: Which of the following studieswould proceed in awaymost similar to the way in which, according to the passage. Scharf’s bookinterprets EleanorRoosevelt’scareer?
A. An exploration of the activities of awealthy socialreformer in terms of the ideals held by the reformer
B. A history of the leaders of a politicalparty whichexplained how the conflicting aims of its individual leaders thwarted and diverted the activities of each leader
C. An account of the legislative career of aconservative senator which showed his goals to have been derived from a nationalconservative movement of which the senator was a part
D. A biography of a famous athlete which explained her high level of motivationin terms of thekind of family in which she grew up
E. A history of the individuals who led themovement to end slavery in the United States which attributed the movement’s success tothe efforts ofthose exceptional individuals
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