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.
The First Lady and the Reporter
Hickok had encountered Eleanor before the 1932 presidential campaign, but it was during that campaign that their relationship deepened. Hick traveled with her, interviewed her, observed her political instincts, and listened as Eleanor confessed her anxiety about becoming First Lady.
The professional distance between journalist and subject gradually disappeared. Eleanor trusted Hick enough to speak candidly, while Hick became emotionally invested in the woman she was supposed to cover objectively.
They spent long hours together during the campaign and the transition that followed Franklin’s election. They attended dinners, traveled, talked privately, and began exchanging the emotional confidences that would soon fill thousands of pages.
Hickok fell deeply in love. The surviving correspondence strongly suggests that Eleanor reciprocated during the most intense period of their relationship, although the precise boundaries of their physical intimacy cannot be established with certainty.
That uncertainty should not be used to drain the relationship of its meaning. Their letters speak openly of kissing, holding one another, longing for physical closeness, jealousy, separation, and the hope of someday arranging a life more suited to their desires.
Whatever could not be spoken publicly was entrusted to paper.
A Love the World Could Not Recognize
Eleanor Roosevelt was not free to build an ordinary private life, even by the limited standards available to women of her generation. She was married to the incoming president, the mother of five surviving children, and a member of one of America’s most prominent political families.
Her marriage to Franklin had changed permanently after she discovered his relationship with Lucy Mercer in 1918. Eleanor offered him a divorce, but political, financial, and family pressures kept the marriage intact.
What survived was a complicated partnership. Franklin and Eleanor remained politically allied and continued to care about one another, but their marriage no longer provided the emotional intimacy Eleanor had once expected from it.
A relationship with Hick carried risks neither woman could dismiss. Same-sex relationships between women were rarely discussed honestly in public, and lesbian identity was increasingly pathologized by medical and social authorities.
Eleanor’s position made discretion even more essential. Any public suggestion that the First Lady was romantically involved with a woman could have damaged the administration, endangered Franklin’s presidency, and subjected both women to ridicule, hostility, and political exploitation.
Hick faced a different but equally painful danger. Her growing love for Eleanor compromised her professional independence and placed the career she had spent decades building in jeopardy.
They could not become an acknowledged couple. They could not marry, establish a protected household, or explain why separation caused them such anguish.
Their relationship had to exist in borrowed rooms, carefully arranged trips, private telephone calls, photographs kept close, and letters sent across the country.
The Night After the Inauguration
On March 4, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office as the United States confronted economic catastrophe. Eleanor entered the White House wearing a sapphire ring Hick had given her.
The following evening, with Hick no longer beside her, Eleanor wrote before going to bed:
“You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you.”
The sentence gives this story its title because it captures the emotional truth of their separation. Eleanor was surrounded by family, staff, politicians, visitors, and the machinery of the presidency, yet the absence of one woman made the White House feel empty.
Hick had become part of Eleanor’s inner life during a period of profound uncertainty. She was not merely a friend Eleanor missed, but the person whose presence helped make an unwanted future seem survivable.
The word empty also reveals the loneliness that public importance could not cure. Eleanor was about to become one of the most influential women in the world, but influence did not provide the intimacy she needed.
The White House could give her a platform. It could not give her Hick.
A Photograph Kissed Goodnight
During their separations, Eleanor kept Hick’s photograph in her sitting room. She told Hick that she kissed the picture in the morning and again before going to bed.
The gesture was simple, private, and almost painfully domestic. Eleanor could not kiss the woman herself, so she created a ritual around the image that remained.
Their letters were filled with similar acts of emotional substitution. Words replaced touch, photographs replaced bodies, rings replaced hands, and imagined embraces crossed the distance between Washington and wherever Hick’s work had taken her.
Eleanor repeatedly wrote that she wanted to hold Hick close. She described going to sleep thinking of her and sent love through what she called “thought waves” when physical presence was impossible.
Hick’s longing could be even more physically explicit. Writing to Eleanor on December 5, 1933, she attempted to recover the details of a face distance had begun to blur:
“Most clearly I remember your eyes … and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.”
This is not the language of abstract admiration. Hick remembered Eleanor through the intimate geography of her face and the physical sensation of kissing her.
The detail about the corner of Eleanor’s mouth makes the memory extraordinarily personal. It is the kind of knowledge acquired through closeness, preserved because the person once near has become painfully unreachable.
Hick was afraid Eleanor’s face might fade in her memory, but her body remembered what the mind struggled to reconstruct. Longing had turned a kiss into a landmark.
The Career Love Changed
The relationship quickly placed Hick in an impossible professional position. A journalist could not objectively cover a family whose most prominent woman had become the center of her emotional life.
Hick had already begun allowing Eleanor to review some of her stories before submitting them. Her instincts as a reporter were becoming inseparable from her desire to protect the woman she loved.
In June 1933, she left the Associated Press. It was an enormous sacrifice for someone who had fought through poverty, sexism, instability, and professional exclusion to reach the highest level of American journalism.
Eleanor helped Hick obtain work with Harry Hopkins at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The new position sent her across the country to document how the Great Depression was affecting ordinary Americans.
During the next three years, Hick traveled through thirty-two states. Her reports described hunger, unemployment, homelessness, racial injustice, rural poverty, and the humiliation experienced by people forced to ask the government for help.
Her observations influenced the administration’s understanding of the crisis. Her reports from West Virginia helped draw Eleanor’s attention to impoverished mining communities and contributed to the development of Arthurdale, a New Deal homestead project Eleanor championed.
The work was historically important, but it also kept Hick far from Washington. The very job that preserved her usefulness to the Roosevelt administration intensified the separation that was causing both women pain.
Their correspondence became both a record of love and a chronicle of a nation in crisis. Hick wrote to Eleanor about hunger and despair during the day, then confessed her own loneliness at night.
A Life More to Our Liking
Distance did not weaken their desire to imagine another kind of life. It gave that desire greater urgency.
On February 4, 1934, Eleanor wrote:
“Someday perhaps fate will be kind & let us arrange a life more to our liking.”
The sentence is hopeful, but its hope is constrained. Eleanor did not write that they would create such a life, only that fate might someday allow it.
She understood how little control they possessed over the conditions surrounding them. She could not abandon her family, public responsibilities, or political partnership with Franklin, while Hick could not indefinitely organize her life around moments stolen from Eleanor’s schedule.
Their imagined future did not require a dramatic escape. It meant something quieter: more time, greater privacy, fewer explanations, and the freedom to decide for themselves what their relationship might become.
Eleanor followed the hope with an acknowledgment that, for the moment, they were fortunate to have what they had. She was trying to teach both of them how to live with an incomplete love.
That compromise became central to their story. They possessed something profound, but they could not build their entire lives around it.
The Woman Behind the First Lady
Hick’s influence upon Eleanor extended far beyond romantic comfort. She helped Eleanor understand that the office of First Lady could become a platform rather than a cage.
Hick encouraged her to hold press conferences limited to women reporters. Because newspapers had to employ female journalists to attend, the policy created professional opportunities for women during a period when newsroom jobs were disappearing.
She encouraged Eleanor to write regularly and edited some of her work. She also helped shape the instincts that would eventually lead to Eleanor’s widely read “My Day” column.
Eleanor became a more confident public communicator, political advocate, and independent figure. She traveled into places other First Ladies avoided, spoke about poverty and racial injustice, challenged members of her husband’s administration, and insisted that public life carried a moral obligation to people excluded from power.
Hick did not create Eleanor’s humanitarianism, but she helped Eleanor trust her own voice at the moment she most feared losing it. Love became part of the environment in which the reluctant First Lady transformed herself into a historic advocate for democracy and human rights.
That transformation carried a painful irony. As Eleanor’s public life expanded, less of her time belonged to Hick.
The woman Hick helped liberate could not be confined within the relationship that had helped make that liberation possible.
Jealousy, Distance, and Unequal Need
Their love was never emotionally equal in a simple or consistent way. Hick appears to have needed Eleanor with a concentration that Eleanor could not always return.
Eleanor’s life was crowded with family, friends, political work, travel, correspondence, and obligations to countless people. She could love Hick deeply while still moving outward into the world.
Hick’s emotional world was narrower. She had given up the career that once anchored her identity, spent long periods traveling alone, and found herself dependent upon brief reunions with a woman who could rarely belong to her completely.
Longing turned into jealousy, frustration, anger, and occasional attempts to pull away. Hick wanted to be first in Eleanor’s life, but the First Lady of the United States could not make one person the center of hers.
The imbalance should not be mistaken for proof that Eleanor felt nothing. Her letters contain unmistakable tenderness, physical longing, and emotional dependence.
Yet love can be real without being equal. Two people may share the same bond while needing different things from it, and those differences can become the wound around which the relationship repeatedly turns.
By the middle of the 1930s, the most intensely romantic phase was fading. The relationship did not end, but it began changing into something more complicated, blending affection, loyalty, resentment, dependence, history, and care.
Living Under the Same Roof
In 1940, Hick became executive secretary of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. Eleanor invited her to live at the White House, where she remained for significant periods during Franklin’s third term.
The arrangement might appear to have fulfilled their earlier dream of greater closeness, but proximity could not restore the relationship to its first intensity. By then, Eleanor’s public world had grown too large, and Hick understood that she could not occupy the place she once hoped to hold.
They were living under the same roof, yet their lives did not truly belong to one another.
The contradiction would have been familiar to many LGBTQ+ people of their generation. It was possible to live near the person one loved while remaining publicly undefined, socially invisible, and uncertain of one’s rightful place.
Hick was introduced as a friend, adviser, political colleague, or houseguest. Each description was true, but none contained the whole truth.
She remained close to Eleanor during the Second World War and through the pressures of the Roosevelt presidency. Their bond had survived, though its form had changed.
After Franklin
Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. Eleanor left the White House days later and faced another moment when the life around her had abruptly ended.
In an April 19 letter to Hick, she described the White House as desolate and without purpose. She also expressed hope that they might work together in the future and told Hick she was glad Hick would be waiting at the apartment.
The old pattern remained visible. At a moment of tremendous loss and transition, Eleanor turned toward Hick.
Their romantic relationship did not return to what it had been in 1933. Eleanor instead entered another period of extraordinary public service, becoming a delegate to the United Nations and chairing the commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Hick continued moving through political and writing positions while struggling with diabetes, poor health, financial insecurity, and declining eyesight. Eleanor helped her find work and attempted to stabilize her finances.
In 1954, Hick moved to Hyde Park so she could be near Eleanor. That same year, the two women published Ladies of Courage, a book about women’s participation in American political life.
The collaboration was not the life they had once imagined, but it was another form of endurance. Their relationship had outlived its first passion and become woven into work, memory, responsibility, and care.
The Letters That Were Not Destroyed
Hick preserved thousands of their letters, but she appears to have destroyed some of the most intimate correspondence. She understood the power of what remained and feared how the world might use it against Eleanor.
This act places her in a painful position familiar throughout LGBTQ+ history. She wanted their relationship remembered, but she also felt responsible for protecting the woman she loved from posthumous exposure.
The letters Hick kept were sealed among her papers and entrusted to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. They became publicly available in 1978, ten years after her death.
The surviving collection includes 2,336 letters from Eleanor to Hick and 1,024 from Hick to Eleanor. The correspondence begins in 1933 and continues until Eleanor’s death in 1962.
Historians have disagreed about how the relationship should be named. Some earlier biographers reduced it to an unusually emotional friendship, while later scholars argued that such interpretations reflected a refusal to recognize same-sex love even when the evidence appeared directly before them.
No archive can tell us everything that occurred when two people were alone. We cannot know the complete physical history of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, nor should responsible storytelling claim certainty where the record does not provide it.
What the record does provide is substantial. They kissed, longed to hold one another, exchanged intimate gifts, imagined a shared life, struggled with jealousy, feared exposure, and remained emotionally connected for thirty years.
To refuse to call that love would require more speculation than acknowledging it.
The Final Goodbye
Eleanor Roosevelt died in New York City on November 7, 1962, at the age of seventy-eight. Hick had lost the woman who had shaped the central relationship of her adult life.
Their final years had not resembled the passion of 1933. Time, ambition, illness, other relationships, and emotional imbalance had changed what they could be to one another.
Yet Hick remained part of Eleanor’s life until the end, and Eleanor remained the defining love of Hick’s.
Lorena Hickok lived for another five and a half years. Her diabetes, failing eyesight, and declining health narrowed her world, but the letters she preserved ensured that the relationship would not vanish completely.
She died in Hyde Park on May 1, 1968, at the age of seventy-five and was buried in Rhinebeck Cemetery.
Ten years later, the boxes opened.
The woman history knew as a pioneering First Lady and the woman often remembered only as her close friend emerged as something more intimate, vulnerable, and human. Their public accomplishments remained, but behind them stood two women trying to make a life from whatever moments the world allowed them.
Still In Love
Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok did not receive a simple ending. They never established the life they once imagined, and their romantic closeness did not remain unchanged.
Hick paid a professional and emotional price for loving Eleanor. She surrendered a celebrated reporting career, endured long separations, and spent years wanting more than Eleanor could give.
Eleanor carried a different burden. She loved within a life claimed by marriage, motherhood, politics, public service, and history, and she could not offer Hick the exclusivity or domestic future Hick desired.
Their relationship could wound because it mattered. Jealousy, disappointment, and unequal need do not cancel love, but reveal how much each person hoped the relationship might become.
The letters preserve more than romance. They show how love can awaken courage, shape public purpose, survive disappointment, and continue after its original form has become impossible.
Hick helped Eleanor enter the White House without surrendering herself. Eleanor gave Hick a love that was incomplete, sometimes painful, but impossible to dismiss as insignificant.
They lived in a world that could not recognize them as a couple, so their relationship survived through private language. A sapphire ring became a promise, a photograph received the kisses distance prevented, and the northeast corner of a mouth became a place memory could return to.
Eleanor had entered the White House surrounded by history and discovered that it felt empty without Hick.
Years later, the letters opened that private room to the rest of us.
What they reveal is neither a perfect romance nor a political scandal. They reveal two women who loved one another, lost the future they once imagined, and continued to matter to each other long after love had changed its shape.
The world gave them no name that felt safe enough to use.
Their letters gave us the truth.
Source and correspondence credit
The first excerpt was written by Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickok on March 5, 1933, the evening after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first presidential inauguration. The second was written by Lorena Hickok to Eleanor Roosevelt on December 5, 1933. The third was written by Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickok from the White House on February 4, 1934.
The correspondence appears in Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, by Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena A. Hickok, edited and annotated by Rodger Streitmatter and published by Free Press in New York in 1998. The volume contains approximately 300 selected letters from their surviving correspondence. Readers can view the complete bibliographic record and borrow the authorized edition through the Internet Archive or find the book through Google Books.
The original letters are held in the Lorena Hickok Papers, 1913–1962, at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, which is administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. The eighteen-box collection includes 2,336 surviving letters from Roosevelt to Hickok and 1,024 from Hickok to Roosevelt. Readers can explore the Lorena Hickok Papers finding aid and the FDR Library’s archival finding-aid portal.
Additional biographical and historical information is available through the National Park Service profile of Lorena Hickok and the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University. The Papers Project also provides a transcription of Eleanor Roosevelt’s April 19, 1945 letter to Hickok, written shortly after Franklin Roosevelt’s death.
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