Alice Roosevelt Longworth - Relationship With Step-mother Edith Carow

Relationship With Step-mother Edith Carow

After returning east, and running for and losing the election for mayor of New York City in 1886, Theodore Roosevelt went to London where he married a childhood friend, Edith Kermit Carow. He and Edith would have five children and remain married until his death in 1919. Edith would outlive both her husband and his famous cousin Franklin, dying in 1948. There were strains in the relationship between Theodore and his daughter, and he had very little interaction with her during her earliest years, leaving the work to other people, such as his sister Bamie, Longworth's maternal grandparents and even his second wife, Edith. Longworth was continually shuffled about from one house to another, even as a teenager, and she later said she often felt like he loved her "one-sixth" as much as the other children.

There were also tensions in the relationship between young Longworth and her stepmother, who had known her husband's previous wife and made it clear that she regarded her predecessor as a beautiful but insipid, childlike fool. As Longworth later recalled, her stepmother once angrily told her that if Longworth's mother, Alice Lee Roosevelt, had lived, she would have bored her father to death. Despite these strains, it would be Edith, the demanding stepmother, who would save Longworth from a life possibly in a wheelchair or on crutches when Longworth came down with a mild form of polio in one leg, causing its muscles to grow shorter than in the other leg. By Edith's uncompromising regimen of nightly forced wearing of torturous leg braces and shoes, even over Longworth's sobs, Edith ensured that Longworth would grow up with almost no trace of the disability. Longworth was able to run up stairs and touch her nose with her toe well into her 80s.

Longworth, always spoiled with gifts, matured into young womanhood and, in the course, became known as a great beauty like her mother. However, continuing tension with her stepmother and prolonged separation and little attention from her father created a young woman who was as independent and outgoing as she was self-confident and calculating. When her father was governor of New York, he and his wife proposed that Longworth attend a conservative school for girls in New York City. Pulling out all the stops, Longworth wrote, "If you send me I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will."

In later years, Longworth expressed admiration for her stepmother's sense of humor and stated that they had shared similar literary tastes. In her autobiography Crowded Hours, Longworth wrote of Edith Carow, stating "That I was the child of another marriage was a simple fact and made a situation that had to be coped with, and Mother coped with it with a fairness and charm and intelligence which she has to a greater degree than almost any one else I know."