This is a song I wrote called "Lorena Hickok". I wrote it in honor of one of my biggest idols, Eleanor Roosevelt. ER was a very strong woman who became disillusioned with...well, everything, after her husband, FDR, cheated on her with her best friend.
ER realized after that happened that she needed to take her life into her own hands in a big way. She didn't want to depend on him anymore. She became her own woman in so many ways...she started vigorously promoting the causes she was interested in (mainly, human rights), travelling abroad alone (which was unheard of at the time), and just generally being a badass and a TRUE feminist--not some bitch who sits in a cave with sweaty armpits hating on men, but someone who went out there and set a great example for women all over the world.
Lorena Hickok was ER's life-long lover. They began their decades-long relationship in 1933, before FDR's inauguration. Lorena, or Hick (as ER called her) was a highly successful reporter, and ER was about to become First Lady. They shared an emotional and romantic relationship that peaked in passion and later developed into a friendship that endured until death.
When their relationship began, ER was not a naive, inexperienced woman. Biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook states that after 1920, many of her closest friends were lesbians, and that she both honored their relationships and preserved their privacy. The relationship these two women shared has been--not surprisingly--heavily censored over the years. While they lived, photographs of family dinners were cropped to remove Hick's image. If she was included in a photograph, she was not identified. And she was certainly not talked about, even to biographers. After ER's death, Hick herself edited and retyped much of their correspondence. She burned some of ER's letters and many of her own. After Hick's death, her sister Ruby read the original versions of their first year of correspondence and then threw them in the fireplace, saying, "This is nobody's business." Most of the correspondence between the two has been burned or heavily edited, which I think is a great tragedy, as we know both women were INCREDIBLE writers.
Doris Faber, biographer and author of The Life of Lorena Hickok: ER's Friend was horrified by the correspondence. She tried to get the letters sealed from the public until after the year 2000, and when she couldn't do that, she decided to ignore content that reflected on the relationship. About one particularly romantic passage, she declares that there can be little doubt that "it could not mean what it appears to mean."
So here's the song for two beautiful, accomplished, brilliant women who inspire me in many ways.
ER realized after that happened that she needed to take her life into her own hands in a big way. She didn't want to depend on him anymore. She became her own woman in so many ways...she started vigorously promoting the causes she was interested in (mainly, human rights), travelling abroad alone (which was unheard of at the time), and just generally being a badass and a TRUE feminist--not some bitch who sits in a cave with sweaty armpits hating on men, but someone who went out there and set a great example for women all over the world.
Lorena Hickok was ER's life-long lover. They began their decades-long relationship in 1933, before FDR's inauguration. Lorena, or Hick (as ER called her) was a highly successful reporter, and ER was about to become First Lady. They shared an emotional and romantic relationship that peaked in passion and later developed into a friendship that endured until death.
When their relationship began, ER was not a naive, inexperienced woman. Biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook states that after 1920, many of her closest friends were lesbians, and that she both honored their relationships and preserved their privacy. The relationship these two women shared has been--not surprisingly--heavily censored over the years. While they lived, photographs of family dinners were cropped to remove Hick's image. If she was included in a photograph, she was not identified. And she was certainly not talked about, even to biographers. After ER's death, Hick herself edited and retyped much of their correspondence. She burned some of ER's letters and many of her own. After Hick's death, her sister Ruby read the original versions of their first year of correspondence and then threw them in the fireplace, saying, "This is nobody's business." Most of the correspondence between the two has been burned or heavily edited, which I think is a great tragedy, as we know both women were INCREDIBLE writers.
Doris Faber, biographer and author of The Life of Lorena Hickok: ER's Friend was horrified by the correspondence. She tried to get the letters sealed from the public until after the year 2000, and when she couldn't do that, she decided to ignore content that reflected on the relationship. About one particularly romantic passage, she declares that there can be little doubt that "it could not mean what it appears to mean."
So here's the song for two beautiful, accomplished, brilliant women who inspire me in many ways.