Empty Without You: Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok
Their relationship unfolded inside the White House, across thousands of letters, and through a world that offered two women neither the freedom nor the language to claim their love openly.
By J. H. Irwin
Author | Storyteller | Capturing Life, Memory, and Meaning
One was preparing to become the most visible woman in America. The other was a pioneering journalist who had fought her way into a profession dominated by men. Their relationship unfolded inside the White House, across thousands of letters, and through a world that offered two women neither the freedom nor the language to claim their love openly.
In the winter of 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt stood at the edge of a life she did not want.
Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected president during the darkest years of the Great Depression. His victory would place Eleanor in the White House, where tradition expected a First Lady to remain gracious, ornamental, politically restrained, and safely subordinate to her husband.
Eleanor had already spent years refusing that role. She taught, wrote, traveled, organized women, supported labor reform, and formed relationships with women whose independence challenged the conventions of their time.
Still, she feared the White House would become a gilded prison. Its ceremonies, surveillance, political obligations, and relentless public attention threatened the identity she had fought to create.
Lorena Hickok understood that fear in a way few others did.
Hickok, known simply as Hick, was one of the most successful female journalists in America. She had survived an abusive and unstable childhood, left home at fourteen, worked as a maid, and struggled through assignments typically reserved for women before earning her place as a hard-news reporter.
By 1932, she was a nationally recognized Associated Press correspondent who had covered politics, sports, the Lindbergh kidnapping, and other major stories. She had competed with men who rarely believed a woman belonged beside them and had become what she proudly called the top female reporter in the country.
Then she was assigned to cover Eleanor Roosevelt.
