Sublime

“I’m not raising babies,” she’d tell us. “I’m raising adults.”

“He’ll have to take me,” thought Maud Martha. “For the envelope is addressed ‘Mr. and Mrs.,’ and I opened it. I guess he’d like to leave me home. At the Ball, there will be only beautiful girls, or real stylish ones. There won’t be more than a handful like me. My type is not a Foxy Cat favorite. But he can’t avoid taking me—since he hasn’t yet thou

Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

Perkins spent the twelve years of Roosevelt’s presidency doing more than anyone other than FDR himself to make the New Deal a reality. Everything on her list became law, most notably social security, changing the basic relation of Americans to their government. She also desegregated the Labor Department cafeteria, tried (and failed) to bring large

Eleanor had no desire to become a ceremonial first lady, relegated to serving in her husband’s shadow. She had grown accustomed to a different role: teacher, writer, and political activist in her own right.