Well, in Washington, this is a very hard time for Eleanor and Franklin. This is when Lucy Mercer first appears. And Lucy Mercer is Eleanor Roosevelt's own secretary. Very beautiful young woman, not unlike Eleanor Roosevelt: tall, blonde, thick haired. And FDR is having an affair with her, which Eleanor Roosevelt finds out when FDR returns from Europe in 1918 with the famous flu of 1918.

And of course, FDR was very charming. At 6'2", he was tall enough to be her beau, and they made a beautiful couple. And she could encourage him. His mother also encouraged him. So this notion of a woman with ideas of her own and a spirit of her own and a style of her own was very congenial to Franklin. And he loved her. And their romance was a very dear and true and deep romance.

I mean, in the campaign of '24 and in '28 and '32, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt insists that women have equal floor space. And this is a great victory over time. Then she wants women represented in equal numbers as men. And she wants the women to name the delegates. And the men want to name the delegates. Well, Eleanor is absolutely furious. And because they don't want her to walk away in 1924, she wins. And this is a great political victory. She has floor space equal to the men, and she has the right to name the women.

One of the things for me, as a biographer, that is so significant is for Eleanor Roosevelt - the child who never had a home of her own, who lives in her grandmother's home and then goes to school and then gets married and lives in her mother-in-law's homes, and then in public housing (like the White House and the State House) - housing becomes for Eleanor Roosevelt the most important issue.

But it's also the beginning of another level of liberation for her]Eleanor Roosevelt], because when she returns to New York, she gets very involved in a new level of politics. She meets Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, and becomes very involved in the women's movement, and then in the peace movement. And ironically, the years of her greatest despair become also the years of her great liberation.

I think that, very often there's a pain that's just too painful to touch. You'll break apart. And I think her mother's death and disappearance and abandonment was something she just never could deal with. Eleanor Roosevelt, when she's really very unwell in 1936, she takes to her bed. She has a mysterious flu.

It's interesting to me that really one of the first things she [Eleanor Roosevelt]did as First Lady was to collect her father's letters and publish a book called The Letters of My Father, essentially, hunting big game, The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt. And it really was an act of redemption, really one of her first acts of redemption as she entered the White House. She was going to redeem her father's honor. And publishing his letters, reconnecting with her childhood really fortified her to go on into the difficult White House years.