I didn’t set out to do this when I began writing, but I have ended up writing about women who became famous because of the men they married—such as the Roosevelt women. Too often they have been dismissed with a single adjective: “witty Alice,” “little Mittie,” “bossy Bamie,” “poor Eleanor.” Today I hope to show they deserve more.

Sara Delano Roosevelt, the mother of Franklin Roosevelt, is perhaps more infamously known as the mother-in-law of Eleanor Roosevelt. When people think of Sara Delano Roosevelt, they often have the image of her bossing Eleanor around, building a house next door to Franklin and Eleanor’s and being very intrusive, belittling Eleanor to Franklin and Eleanor’s children. In my book, The Roosevelt Women, I tried to look beyond that stereotype and see if there was more to Sara. I interviewed her great-granddaughter, for instance, who said, “That’s not the image I have of her at all. She was a woman of her time and of her class, but she was really a very wonderful grandmother to us.” This description caused me to look again at Sara’s letters, and I concluded she led a very interesting life. She grew up in China; she went to school in Europe; and she became interested in settlement houses long before Eleanor knew they existed. So, we need to rethink our view of Sara Delano Roosevelt. It’s difficult to do because the image of her as a bossy, shallow woman is so firmly set in people’s minds.

Mittie Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s mother, is another woman who deserves more than one adjective. Here we might consider how some of us look at the same letters and come to different conclusions. Kathleen Dalton, for instance, examined the same letters I did, and she saw Mittie as rather weak while I saw her as a much stronger and independent person, especially in her youth.

Born Martha Bulloch, TR’s mother was often called “Little Mittie,” probably because she was less than five feet tall, and the typical perception of her is that she was a fragile person and a fanatic about hygiene. She always wore white, and she took two tubs to bathe: one to wash, one to rinse. Yet I often note that she wasn’t clean enough because she died of typhoid, which is the “dirty water disease.”

Let’s look at another side of Mittie. Her family, on both her mother’s and her father’s side, was involved in politics. I always say that the Roosevelts made money in New York, but they really didn’t amount to much politically until TR’s father married Mittie Bulloch from Georgia.

Mittie’s mother, Martha Stewart Elliott Bulloch, grew up in Georgia where she was expected to marry the neighbor boy, James Bulloch. Instead, she married a much older man, a United States senator named John Elliott. Then her former boyfriend, Bulloch, married the senator’s daughter. Martha had children with the senator. Bulloch had children with the senator’s daughter. Then both the senator and his daughter died, and James Bulloch and Martha got back together and had several children of their own, including Mittie.

Not only had Mittie’s mother been married to a United States senator and gotten to know her way around Washington, D.C.; her second husband, Mittie’s father, James Bulloch counted among his ancestors many who had been active in Georgia government and in the nation’s history. For example, Archibald Bulloch was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress, and the first Governor of the state of Georgia.

Mittie grew up in an impressive plantation house in Roswell, Georgia, and the answer to how she met TR’s father, son of a wealthy New York merchant, lies in the large extended family of Elliotts and Bullochs that resulted from the marriage of Mittie’s parents. Some of the family moved to Philadelphia, and TR’s father met them during a visit there. He found them fascinating and later visited more Elliotts and Bullochs in Georgia, where he met 14-year-old Mittie, whom he found extremely charming. But she was only 14, so he left on a long European trip. When he came back, he visited Georgia again and soon decided to marry Mittie.

The wedding took place in the Bulloch plantation house in Roswell, Georgia, in December, 1853, when Mittie was only eighteen. Thee, as Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., was called, brought his young bride to live in New York City, where they resided with his parents just south of Union Square. This must have been an extremely difficult time for her, because the Roosevelts were strongly anti-slavery and Mittie came from a slave-owning family.

Within a year, the in-laws did for Thee and Mittie what they did for all their sons. They built them a brownstone house a few blocks away. Within the next ten years, Mittie gave birth to four children in that house.

It was a very difficult time for a southern woman to be in New York, and I think that’s where we get the picture of her as fragile or weak. Many historians expressed this view of her. For example, Doris Faber, who wrote about president’s mothers, said that Mittie was slightly neurotic. Edmund Morris, author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, called her “languid” and “lazy.” Kathleen Dalton gave a more nuanced picture, but she also used the word “frail.”

When I looked at Mittie’s letters, I saw something else. For example, when Mittie was writing to Thee during their courtship, her handwriting was quite large. It only becomes smaller later when she turns into a scared Southerner living in New York City during the Civil War. Earlier, she had been very definite in her letters, showing a mind of her own. When Thee was arranging to come to Georgia for their wedding, she instructed him: “You’ll come on this day and not a day sooner.”

When Mittie was a young wife in New York, people commented on what a good household manager she was. It is true that her mother and sister came to live with her for a few years, but Mittie managed well after they left. The Roosevelts moved back and forth between their summer home outside the city and their house in Manhattan, so Mittie had to uproot her entire household, including servants, kids, and belongings, twice a year. She also managed a busy social schedule, and people noted that she did this extremely well.

When Theodore was quite young, Thee and Mittie took the children on an extended trip to Europe. At one point, Thee had to return to New York to oversee the building of a new house for the family. Mittie had enrolled the three younger children to study German in Dresden, and during the course of their studies, there was a cholera outbreak in the city. Now, if she was a fragile, incompetent person, I think she would have just wrung her hands, not knowing what to do, since there was no quick way to confer with her husband and get his advice. Instead, she took her kids out of Dresden and wrote to her husband in New York, “I didn’t want to disrupt their studies, they were doing so well. But I feared cholera more.”

Mittie is often described as spending too much money, but we ought to remember that she was married to one of the richest men in New York. She could spend about any amount she wanted. But even with that in mind, her letters show that she tried to be economical. She wrote things like, “If you don’t think we can afford that carpet, I’ll buy something else,” or “If you don’t want these friends to visit at our expense, I’ll put them off.”

Mittie wrote wonderful and entertaining letters home, with detailed descriptions. For example, the carpet on the ship going over to Europe was “so full of organic matter, you could make anchovy paste just by squeezing it.” The steward who served the soup was so “knotty” that you could balance a plate on different parts of his body.

I think we miss a lot by portraying Mittie with one adjective. She was much more fun than that. Her granddaughter said, “The Roosevelt men were good, they were strong, and they were solid. But the Bulloch women really knew how to have fun, and they passed that on to the next generation.”

When you hear stories about TR at the White House, wrestling or acting like a child, that comes from Mittie’s side. One of his friends said about TR during his presidency, “You must remember, he is about 6 years old.” Mittie is also sometimes described as being stuck at 18 years of age, and it is this girlishness that gives the wrong picture, because she was actually a much more complicated person than that.

Mittie had two daughters. Her first was Anna, named after Mittie’s sister, but the child was nicknamed Bamie, from the Italian word bambina, which means little girl. I find this ironic because Bamie was never a little girl. Everyone said that she skipped childhood completely. Most people said this was because she had a very early childhood illness – some said it was polio – that left her crippled and with a slightly curved spine. The treatment for this condition in the 1850s was to put the child in a brace, a brace so cumbersome and heavy that Bamie had to be carried from room to room. Therefore, she always interacted with adults and rarely spent time with children her own age.

Bamie had tremendous energy, though, and her second nickname was Bye, as in “bye-bye,” because she was always on the go. The younger generation – Alice’s generation – always called her Auntie Bye. Theodore from Harvard wrote, “O energy, thy name is Bye.” Nobody could think faster than Bye. Everyone who knew the Roosevelts thought that she was the sharpest and brightest of the children. Her cousin, Nicholas Roosevelt, said, “If she had been a man in 17thcentury Europe, it would be easy to imagine her as a successful and highly capable minister of state, or perhaps a cardinal, unquenchable in zeal and effective in guile.”

In every family, there is one person who is central and keeps things going, and Bamie was that person in the Roosevelt family. When TR’s first wife died in 1884, he entrusted the care of his baby daughter Alice to Bamie. She immediately sold the family house on 57th Street and bought herself a brownstone on Madison Avenue. This is where she took little Alice to live. During this time, TR was ranching in Dakota Territory, and when he did come home to New York, he stayed at her Madison Avenue house.

Bamie wanted to come out to the ranch in the Dakotas, but TR kept putting her off. So she took other trips during the summers when Alice went to live with her mother’s Lee relatives in Boston. One year, Bamie took a long railroad trip with James and Sara Delano Roosevelt. When she came back, she saw a newspaper report that TR was going to marry Edith Carow, a childhood friend. Bamie was certain it must be wrong, knowing TR as she did and being in constant correspondence with him, but TR had to admit that it was true. Bamie pulled herself together and went to London for the wedding.

It wasn’t until three years later in 1889 that Bamie finally got the chance to come out to Dakota Territory and see the ranch, and she loved it. She came with her younger sister Corinne, who was already married at this time. As they came across the countryside on the train, they said they knew why TR had fallen in love with this beautiful part of the world. Bamie had grown up with a large number of servants – maids, butlers, and such – but here in the Dakota Territory she was staying in a two-story cabin, sleeping on the ground floor with a couple of young single men who were just camping out. The two married couples, TR and Edith and Corinne and her husband, got the upstairs rooms.

Bamie loved the characters and the wildness of the west. She marveled at how accurately people could spit tobacco juice. She had never seen anything like that. By now, in her mid-thirties, she was already very crippled with arthritis, making movement difficult. However, she insisted on seeing everything. She made the 38-mile trip from town to the ranch in a rickety carriage so she could “count along the way the prairie dogs and watch for rattlesnakes.” After seeing the ranch, Bamie and the others in the group went west to Yellowstone where they camped and rode horses. This was an eye-opener for her.

A few weeks later, they all returned to New York, and Bamie had to step back into her role as caretaker in the family. This time it was her younger brother Elliott who required her attention.

Elliott, even as a teenager, had problems—headaches, inability to concentrate—that meant he was not likely to do well in college. So the family sent him to work on a Texas ranch. Later he married the beautiful Anna Hall. By the time Bamie came back from the Dakotas, Elliott and Anna and their two children (Eleanor, about 6, and her brother, about 4), were having lots of problems. Elliott had become an alcoholic, and he was making life miserable for everyone. Different cures had been tried but now the decision was made to send him to Europe for treatment there. It was Bamie who went along to make sure everything went all right. After escorting Elliott’s entire family to France, she found a treatment center for him in Austria. She enrolled him in it, and against all rules, she got herself a room in the attic and signed herself up for German lessons. This was extremely inappropriate – for a single woman to have a German tutor come see her in the attic. But she did it!

After Bamie got Elliott through the treatment program, she escorted his wife, who was expecting their third child, back to Paris, and arranged for the child to be delivered by a doctor who had insisted he would never make house calls to the outskirts of the city, where they were living. Somehow Bamie talked him into it. After the baby’s birth, Bamie and Elliott’s family returned to New York. Unfortunately, Elliott’s treatment had not done much good: his wife left him and she died soon after; then Elliott died, leaving his children orphaned. His daughter Eleanor, who almost always tops the list of America’s First Ladies, often pointed to her aunt Bamie as her inspiration and model.

So Bamie, the smart, shrewd one of the family, was also the caretaker. She kept the house on Madison Avenue for people to have a place to stay when they came to New York, but when she was needed elsewhere, she packed her bags and went. Soon after Elliott’s death she got word that cousin Rosie Roosevelt in London needed her. His wife was ill, and his two young children required supervision. Bamie expected her London stay to last only a few months, but the cousin’s wife died, and Bamie ended up staying on. Everyone said she immediately turned the cousin’s household around, managing it expertly as though she had always been there.

While in London, something extraordinary happened to Bamie. She met a naval attaché, Will Cowles from the United States, and she fell in love. He was 49 years old, she was ten years younger, and they decided they wanted to get married. You would think her family would be pleased that spinster Bamie was finally going to have a home of her own. But you should see the telegrams that went back and forth between London and New York. Will Cowles had been previously married and had gotten a divorce on what TR called “flimsy grounds.” TR warned Bamie that if she married Will Cowles she would be called a bigamist, and any children born to them would be labeled illegitimate. Perhaps TR had his eye on his political future and was worried about how any scandal would touch him.

In spite of all the warnings, Bamie went ahead and married Will. They stayed in London for a couple years, but ended up coming back to New York where she gave birth to a son. In 1899, she and Will bought a house in Washington, DC. It was there that TR, when he became president, was able to hold meetings, since it was just a short walk from the White House. Eleanor later said that she didn’t think TR ever made an important decision before talking it over with Bamie, because he valued her opinion so highly.

Of all the Roosevelt women, I found Bamie the hardest to catch because she was the most vibrant. She had terrible health her whole life: poor eyesight, deafness, circulatory problems, crippling arthritis, requiring confinement to a wheelchair for the last years of her life. However, she remained the sharpest, the wittiest, the most interesting adult. It was said that in a roomful of people, everyone gathered around her. And she remained fascinating to the end. Someone described her in her final years as like a battleship that might be going down, yet every flag was flying and the band was playing.

Bamie’s “baby sister,” Corinne, often described as the “adoring little sister,” had a daredevil streak in her. An old family slogan about how to confront obstacles was modified in Corinne’s case to, “You can go over or under, but never around.” Her children swore that one day when they were out hiking, they came upon a big barn, and instead of going around it, she crawled up on the roof and down the other side, just to prove her point. She was educated almost entirely at home, as her sister was, but she had enormous faith in her ability to confer with anybody, and she became friends with some of the most important writers (Edith Wharton) and public figures (Henry Cabot Lodge) of her time. She published books on poetry, articles on art, and even wrote a biography of her brother.

Unfortunately, Corinne married a very boring man. He was a Scotsman who had made a lot of money in the real estate business, and her family thought it would be a good match. But Corinne remained unconvinced. Her mother (Mittie) tried to persuade her, saying, “I think you will be able to stand him. He’s very, very plain, but it’s not a bad plainness. It’s like quinine. It’s a clean plainness.”

Corinne did marry Douglas Robinson and had four children, which was a typical number for the Roosevelt women. But she kept a lot of powerful male friends. She also kept that adventuresome spirit. The story is told that when she went to the White House when TR was president, she was in a receiving line, and one of the ranchers she had met during her visit to the Badlands greeted her, “I’ll never forget how you wrassled that calf to the ground.”

Corinne’s life took a tragic turn when, in 1909, just as TR was leaving the White House, her favorite son Stewart died. He was attending Harvard, and on an early Sunday morning, he either fell or was pushed or jumped from his dormitory window. Corinne was distraught, and she did what most of the Roosevelt women did when they were grieving deeply: she took a long trip. In this case, Corinne went around the world, accompanied by her husband and another of her sons.

When she returned to the US, she divided her time between a home in the New York City area and another, Henderson House, an old Scottish castle in upstate New York. The entire Roosevelt family would gather there during summers, and it was there that Eleanor learned to swim.

But Corinne also began carving out a life of her own. She started giving speeches in public—for money. Topics ranged from divorce to politics and good government. She was such a good speaker that in 1920, the Republican Party asked her to address their nominating convention. It was the first time that a woman ever gave a nominating speech at a major party convention. She spoke to 14,000 people in a hot Chicago building, and she was evidently very effective. Henry Cabot Lodge later said that it was the one nominating speech he had ever heard that might have changed minds. However, her candidate lost out to Warren Harding who won the Republican nomination and the presidency that year.

On the Democratic ticket that same year, FDR ran as vice president. He lost and went back to New York State, got polio, dropped out of politics for awhile, then was elected Governor of New York and in 1932 ran for president. By this time there was considerable rivalry between these two branches of Roosevelts, the Franklins of Hyde Park and the Theodores of Sagamore Hill. The Theodores thought it was really their turn in 1932 and instead they saw Franklin, whom they had always considered a little incompetent, moving into the White House. Corinne insisted that she voted for Franklin in 1932, but she never made it to his inauguration because she died just before the event.

Edith Kermit Roosevelt, TR’s widow, was still alive. She had been his sister’s closest friend in childhood, and she became TR’s second wife after Alice died. My opinion of Edith changed when I looked at her more closely. When I wrote First Ladies in 1987, I described her as the perfect wife who never made a mistake, because that is what her biographers were saying. But when I got into The Roosevelt Women research, I discovered she made quite a few mistakes. I had heard that she wasn’t a good stepmother to Alice, but I found that she wrote terrible things about her own children. She complained to her sister about little Ethel, “I don’t know how I’m going to dress that child. She’s fat, and I can’t do anything to make her look well.” The best thing Edith could say about her own children was that they were “ordinary looking.” She wrote terrible things about other people, as well. When she and TR were living in Washington, she described one man who came to a party as deadly dull, two others as deadheads, one was oily like a cat, and another had used up all the hair dye in the state of Virginia.

Edith Roosevelt was organized and efficient, however, and in a way, she initiated modern first lady history. She was the first one to hire a social secretary, and she was very clever in giving out information. She would wear the same dress to two different events but instruct her social secretary to say that it was green one night, and blue the next night. At that time reporters didn’t carry cameras, so she could get away with it. A lot of people insisted that she managed Theodore very cleverly, without his being really conscious of it. But she clearly viewed her own background as a little better than his. Compared to her family, the Roosevelts were just uneducated Dutch peasants.

After TR died in 1919, Edith travelled all over the world. Within days of her husband’s funeral she was on a ship to France where she could see son Quentin’s burial place. The Roosevelts had a motto, “Let the tree lie where it falls.” In other words, if you died in France, you were buried in France. Another son, Kermit, died in Alaska, so he was buried in Alaska.

Edith also traveled to South America. In her sixties, she took the Trans-Siberian Railroad from China all the way across Siberia. This trip is very difficult, even today, because there are large areas where it gets very cold in winter, and Edith traveled there in winter. But without a complaint. That’s the way she dealt with grief.

Moving on to the next generation, we will look at Mittie’s four granddaughters, none of whom she lived to see. She died two days after her first granddaughter (Alice) was born.

Perhaps the least known of Mittie’s four granddaughters was Corinne Robinson Alsop, the daughter of Corinne Roosevelt Robinson whom I mentioned earlier as Bamie’s little sister. The younger Corinne married young and had four children, just like her mother. Her husband was a tobacco farmer in Connecticut, and he was also active in politics. In the early part of the century, when Bamie and the others opposed the vote for women, Corinne was out organizing voters in Connecticut. She is the only one of the Roosevelt women we’re discussing today who ran for office, and she won. She served three terms in the Connecticut state legislature.

The younger Corinne also produced three sons who became famous. Two of them, Stewart Alsop and Joe Alsop, were famous Washington columnists. The third son, John Alsop, became Governor of Connecticut and originated the phrase “egghead” in the 1950s, referring to Adlai Stevenson.

The younger Corinne was an excellent public speaker, just like her mother and her cousin Eleanor, and she accepted speaking dates well into her 80s. Her son told me that one day she called him and asked him to speak in her place because she wasn’t feeling well. He did so and then stopped on his way home to check on her. Only then did he realize how ill she was. She died a few days later.

Another granddaughter of Mittie’s was Ethel Roosevelt Derby, TR’s younger daughter, his only daughter by his second wife Edith. Ethel was the perfect child in the White House, always doing what she was supposed to, never making headlines. Ethel married a doctor, Richard Derby, a good friend of her favorite brother Kermit. She was the first of the Roosevelts, of either sex, to get involved in World War I. She and her husband left their infant son behind in 1914 and went to Paris to work in a hospital. After they came back, they had two more daughters, and then, in 1924, the son died, causing enormous grief for the whole family. The Derbys spent the next 15 years or more trying to deal with their grief. They did a lot of traveling and spent a lot of time in Europe.

We have a pretty good record of the last thirty years or so of Ethel Derby’s life because of the letters she wrote to her oldest daughter who lived on the West Coast. Each Wednesday morning, Ethel would sit down at her desk on Long Island to write Edith Williams in Washington state; Edith answered every Saturday. The letters continued for decades, except when the two women were together, and they give real insight into their lives. Ethel could be very funny in these letters. For example, when one of their cousins, who already had four daughters named Miranda, Melissa, Melanie, and Melinda, had a fifth daughter, Ethel suggested that an appropriate name would be Mercy.

I often quote Ethel, because she was such a wise person. She advised her daughters, “If it comes to reading a book or cleaning the house, read a book,” and “You don’t need to clean house until the dust rises up to meet you.”

There was considerable jealousy and envy among the Roosevelt cousins. The rivalry between Alice and Eleanor is well known. I wouldn’t say Ethel was jealous, but she didn’t feel any deep love for Eleanor. When Eleanor died in 1962, the funeral was in Hyde Park, only about 60 miles from where Ethel was living, but she didn’t attend. She wrote her daughter to explain: “You go to a funeral for one of three reasons. Either you loved the person very much, you are close to those who are left and you want to show support, or you think nobody else will be there. In this case, none of those apply.”

I am going to round this out by briefly mentioning the other two of Mittie’s granddaughters. We already discussed Corinne and Ethel. The other two were much more famous. Eleanor is often thought of as ugly or unattractive, but in the family letters, particularly when she was young, she wasn’t viewed in this way. She was tall, she had beautiful skin and eyes, and she had an excellent figure. Alice, who is usually remembered today as slim and sophisticated, got very different treatment in the family letters. If we can believe what her stepmother Edith wrote about her, Alice had a weight problem. At one point, Alice wrote to Edith that she had finally lost 20 pounds, and her stepmother (the woman often remembered as kind and gentle) wrote back, “It would do you good to lose another 20 pounds.”

The one adjective we often attach to Eleanor is “poor Eleanor,” the one with the bad teeth, the one whose husband preferred other women. But the story is much more complicated than that.

As it is with all the Roosevelt women. A single adjective does not do justice to any of them.