Women of the Roosevelt World: A Primary-Source Lesson

Theodore Roosevelt's story is usually told through the men around him. This lesson turns the lens. Using free primary sources from the Library of Congress, the Theodore Roosevelt Center and the Internet Archive, students meet Bamie, Alice, Ethel and Edith and ask a simple question: how did women with no vote, and no office, still make a mark on public life?

At a Glance

• Grades: 6–12 (notes below for adapting to middle or high school)
• Time: One 50-minute class period, or two periods with the extension activity
• Essential question: How did women in the Roosevelt family influence public life, and how do the surviving sources shape what can be known about them?
• Background: American women won the constitutional right to vote when the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920. Four of the five sources in this lesson come from before that date.

Learning Goals

Students will be able to:

1. Identify who created a primary source, when, for what audience and why.
2. Describe at least two different ways women in the Roosevelt family took part in public life (advice and correspondence, wartime service, public image, campaigning).
3. Explain how the kind of source (private letter, posed photograph, newspaper report) affects what it can and cannot reveal.
4. Write a short evidence-based claim about one woman, citing a source.

Standards Connections (C3 Framework)

From the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, Dimension 2, History:

• D2.His.3.6-8: "Use questions generated about individuals and groups to analyze why they, and the developments they shaped, are seen as historically significant."
• D2.His.3.9-12: "Use questions generated about individuals and groups to assess how the significance of their actions changes over time and is shaped by the historical context."
• D2.His.4.6-8: "Analyze multiple factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras."
• D2.His.4.9-12: "Analyze complex and interacting factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras."
• D2.His.6.6-8: "Analyze how people's perspectives influenced what information is available in the historical sources they created."
• D2.His.10.6-8: "Detect possible limitations in the historical record based on evidence collected from different kinds of historical sources."
• D2.His.10.9-12: "Detect possible limitations in various kinds of historical evidence and differing secondary interpretations."
• D2.His.13.6-8: "Evaluate the relevancy and utility of a historical source based on information such as maker, date, place of origin, intended audience, and purpose."
• D2.His.11.9-12: "Critique the usefulness of historical sources for a specific historical inquiry based on their maker, date, place of origin, intended audience, and purpose."
• D2.His.16.6-8: "Organize applicable evidence into a coherent argument about the past."
• D2.His.16.9-12: "Integrate evidence from multiple relevant historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument about the past."

The Document Set

Print each source, or project it, with its guiding questions. Every link below opens a free, full view.

Source A. A brother asks his sister's advice (1900)
Theodore Roosevelt to Anna "Bamie" Roosevelt Cowles, February 2 and February 5, 1900. Printed in Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 1870–1918 (Scribner's, 1924), pages 232–235.
View the source

Excerpts for students:

"I can see nothing whatever in the Vice-Presidency for me. It would be an irksome, wearisome place where I could do nothing." (Feb. 2, 1900)

"It was delightful to receive your note of the 3rd. Substantially I agree with your view." (Feb. 5, 1900)

Context for the teacher: T.R. was Governor of New York. Party leaders wanted him to run for Vice President. Bamie had moved to Washington the year before. In June 1900 he was nominated anyway, and in September 1901 he became President.

Guiding questions:

• What decision is T.R. facing? What does he think of the vice presidency?
• What do the letters suggest about Bamie's role, even though her side of the correspondence is missing?
• Why might a politician write more openly to a sister than to a fellow politician?
• What is missing from this source? (Hint: her letters to him.) How does that limit what can be said about her?

Source B. A President's daughter in a posed portrait (1902)
Frances Benjamin Johnston, "[Alice Roosevelt Longworth, half-length portrait, wearing hat and fur, seated, facing left]," c1902 Mar. 24. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Published 1902; in the public domain in the United States.
View the source

Context for the teacher: Alice was T.R.'s eldest child, 18 when this was taken, and already a celebrity. The photographer, Frances Benjamin Johnston, made many portraits of the Roosevelt family during the White House years.

Guiding questions:

• Describe what you see: clothing, pose, expression. What impression was the photographer trying to create?
• Who would have seen a portrait like this in 1902? Why would the public care about a President's daughter?
• Can a photograph show influence? What can this source tell about Alice, and what can it not?

Source C. A daughter comes home from war (1914)
New-York Tribune, December 24, 1914, page 4. Headline: "917 on Lusitania, Christmas Ship"; deck: "Dr. Derby and Wife Return from Hospital Work in France." Chronicling America, Library of Congress.
View the source

Context for the teacher: Ethel Roosevelt Derby, T.R.'s younger daughter, went to Paris in the fall of 1914 with her husband, a surgeon, and nursed wounded soldiers at the American Ambulance Hospital in Neuilly. The United States was still neutral. They came home on the Lusitania, which reached New York on December 23, 1914. Zoom in on the page image; the computer-read text for this page is too garbled to use.

Guiding questions:

• Find the line about the Derbys under the main headline. Whose name comes first? How is Ethel identified?
• Why might a newspaper describe a famous man's daughter this way in 1914?
• The United States was not at war yet. Why would Americans go to help?

Source D. A father describes the same service (1914)
Theodore Roosevelt to Edward North Buxton, December 19, 1914. Library of Congress Manuscript Division, via the Theodore Roosevelt Center digital library ("No known restrictions on publication").
View the source

Context for the teacher: In this one-page typed letter to an English friend, T.R. mentions that Ethel and her husband had been working at the American hospital in Paris for three months.

Guiding questions:

• How does T.R. describe Ethel's work? Compare his words with the newspaper's line about the Derbys in Source C.
• Who was the audience for each source? How might that change what each one says?
• Together, what do Sources C and D tell that neither tells alone?

Source E. A widow steps onto a political stage (1932)
Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), November 1, 1932, page 3: "Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Faces Big Throng Welcoming Hoover" (Associated Press). Chronicling America, Library of Congress.
View the source

Excerpt for students (as reported by the Associated Press):

"I am a real New Yorker," she said, "and it is fitting and right that I should welcome the President of the United States into this city, where I have spent my childhood and my early youth. I greet him with affection and admiration."

Context for the teacher: Edith Kermit Roosevelt, T.R.'s widow, was 71. She introduced President Herbert Hoover at Madison Square Garden on October 31, 1932, eight days before the election. His opponent was Franklin D. Roosevelt, her husband's distant cousin and the husband of her niece Eleanor. She rarely spoke in public.

Guiding questions:

• The reporter calls her "a shy lady in black." Why would a shy person choose to speak to a huge crowd?
• Women had been able to vote for twelve years by 1932. How does this source show a woman taking part in politics in a new way?
• This is a news report, not her own written text. How might that affect the quotation?

Lesson Sequence

Day 1 (50 minutes)

1. Warm-up (5 min). Ask: "If you could not vote or run for office, how could you still change things in your community?" List answers on the board.
2. Model (10 min). Analyze Source A together using four questions: Who made it? When? For whom? Why?
3. Source stations (25 min). Small groups rotate through Sources B–E (about six minutes each) and fill in a four-column chart: Source / What it shows / Kind of influence or service / What is missing.
4. Debrief (10 min). Return to the warm-up list. Which of the students' ideas appear in the sources? Which kinds of influence are easiest to see in the record, and which are hardest?

Day 2 (optional, 50 minutes): Write the Museum Label
Each student picks one source and writes a 60–80 word exhibit label, the kind a visitor would read beside the object in a museum. The label must:

• Name the person, the date and the type of source.
• Make one claim about how she took part in public life.
• Point to one detail in the source as evidence.
• Name one thing the source cannot tell.

Pairs swap labels and check each other's claim against the source. Share the strongest labels with the class.

Adapting the Lesson

• Grades 6–8: Use Sources A, C and E only, with the excerpts printed large. Do the four-question analysis as a whole class before stations.
• Grades 9–12: Add a written comparison of Sources C and D (D2.His.11.9-12), or ask students to rank all the sources by usefulness for answering the essential question and defend the ranking.
• A note on Alice's memoir: Alice Roosevelt Longworth's 1933 memoir, Crowded Hours, is not included here because its copyright status needs checking. Teachers with a library copy may add a short excerpt for classroom use.

Extension: Meet the Women of the Roosevelt World

Send students to the Library's online series to see how historians turn sources like these into stories. Ask them to find one fact in each page that could be traced back to a source from this lesson.

• Women of the Roosevelt World: The series home page, with every story in one place.
• Bamie, Theodore Roosevelt's Sounding Board: The older sister whose house became "the Little White House."
• Ethel Roosevelt Derby's First World War: Nursing in Paris in 1914 and waiting at home in 1918.
• Alice Roosevelt Longworth: From celebrity First Daughter to six decades as a Washington force.
• Edith Roosevelt After the White House: War, widowhood and a surprise turn in the 1932 campaign.
• Eleanor Roosevelt: The niece who became First Lady herself.