Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter Read Online Free PDF

the virtue of humility . . . True humility will render a Child of Mary full of deference for her Superiors, and even for her companions; she will gladly renounce her own will and judgment to submit to that of others.”But the challenges of marriage and raising children tested Rose’s commitment to self-sacrifice. Humility would be, for her, perhaps the most difficult of virtues.
    Rose’s private struggles with her commitment to being an ideal Catholic mother and wife were not made easier by the very public gains in liberties and advantages experienced by many American women as the 1920s dawned. The movement for universal suffrage was at fever pitch; in August 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment would give women the right to vote. The New Woman of the 1920s demanded more rights in the workplace and better access to education, jobs, and political power. Fashions were changing rapidly: hemlines were creeping up, corsets were thrown in the trash, and new, supple fabrics fit the curves of a woman’s body less restrictively, allowing for greater flexibility and movement. There were sharp distinctions between attitudes of the nineteenth and the twentieth century toward smoking, drinking, sex, and independence, particularly for privileged white women. Women were experiencing, and enjoying, far fewer restrictions on their behavior and using their newly won freedoms to ensure greater autonomy and equality both at home and in public. Thoughwomen still endured second-class status in society—many professions remained closed to women or severely limited them, women’s wages lagged behind those of men, and civil and legal equality would take decades more—the 1920s ushered in new choices and options redefining the lives of American women.
    Publicly, Rose appeared apolitical on the question of woman suffrage; the years of acting as her father’s helpmeet in the political sphere had been enough for her. She demurely suggested that she hadn’t developed a solid “impression of the suffragettes” during a visit to England in 1911, when tens of thousands of them had marched on London.Her father ridiculed Boston suffragists, and a majority of Massachusetts politicians and certainly the Catholic leadership remained opposed to enfranchising women.Considering the near-constant reporting of the woman suffrage movement’s gains and losses during her early married life in Boston, it is unlikely that Rose remained uninformed or that she lacked an opinion on the subject. Perhaps her Catholic friends did not talk about suffrage, but her suffragist mother-in-law, Mary Kennedy, certainly did.
    Rose was yearning for active engagement in something important in the outside world—if not the politics of her father’s world, then the business dealings of her husband’s world. Her participation in the Ace of Clubs—a women’s club that hosted guest speakers on history, culture, and contemporary issues which she had established with friends after she returned from school at Blumenthal, in 1911—provided some inspiration, but a monthly club meeting did not deliver the deeper stimulation she sought.Each evening that she was left alone by her husband, and each day that she spent focused on tending to her children’s needs and managing her small staff—Mary O’Donohue, a thirty-year-old Irishwoman, and Alice Michelin, a twenty-six-year-old recent immigrant from France—was increasingly painful. The conflict between the vows she had taken as a Child of Mary and a wife and the personal freedoms evident in the modern world around her would plague Rose for the rest of her life.
    Rose reached a breaking point near the end of her fourth pregnancy. She abruptly moved out of the Beals Street house, leaving Joe behind with the three children—Joe Jr., Jack, and Rosemary—and their nursemaids. She could no longer bear that “life was flowing past.” The demands of children, marriage, and pregnancy threatened to swallow her up.
    Separating from Joe and the