Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt

Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt, Charlotte Gray

In a rare exception to her long and storied-in-itself career of chronicling Canada’s history, Charlotte Gray steps out of country to examine the mothers of two of the last century’s most consequential politicians: Great Britain’s Sir Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt of the United States. Lady Jennie Churchill. Both were born in New York within a hundred miles of each other and strong personalities in a time when that was something anything but an asset for a woman. At the same time, they were quite different in manner: Jennie Churchill enjoyed the limelight and occasionally shocking high society on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean from her place of birth, while Sara Delano Roosevelt was a creature of The Establishment and mindful of its rigorous expectations. Both played important roles in their sons’ lives – again in quite different ways.  And each, as Gray reminds us, were very much notable figures in their own lives – women, and people, of substance.