Charlotte Gray's latest book looks at the mothers of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Charlotte Gray is back with another historical deep-dive. Her upcoming book, Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons, is a dual biography of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt the mothers of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons looks at the lives of these two women in the mid-19th century and the essential role they played in shaping their influential sons.

Gray is a noted historian and a member of the Order of Canada. She has written nearly a dozen books on Canadian history, covering everything from the Massey Murder to the Klondike Gold Rush. Her books include The Massey Murder, which won the Toronto Book Award and the Toronto Heritage Book Award, The Promise of Canada, Gold Diggers and Murdered Midas. 

She was a Canada Reads panellist in 2013 when she championed Away by Jane Urquhart.

Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons will be available on Sept. 12, 2023. You can read an excerpt below.

I decided to write about these two figures because I'm fascinated by the way that, whatever the restrictions on their lives, women have made choices and shaped the space available to their own purposes. Neither Jennie Jerome Churchill nor Sara Delano Roosevelt would have considered herself a powerful actor in the patriarchal society in which she lived, where financial and political power belonged to men and women were assessed almost entirely through the male
gaze.

At the same time, neither of these strong-willed women ever considered herself marginal to the society in which she flourished.

At the same time, neither of these strong-willed women ever considered herself marginal to the society in which she flourished. Because they moved in such privileged circles, both had access to the leading lights of their time in politics and society — and both would use that access. Their forceful personalities and dramatic experiences were in themselves enough to catch my interest.

Sara and Jennie are such delicious opposites — one so relentlessly old-fashioned, the other so daringly nontraditional. Raised with similar values, they made dissimilar decisions as they transitioned from daughters to young wives, to mothers and then to early widowhood. With that, and the fame of their sons, they seemed a natural for a double biography. We may see them as trapped in ridiculous assumptions about women's roles, but that is not how they saw themselves.

I wanted to approach each woman through her eyes and words in the moment, using many direct quotations from them so a reader can see the drama of the choices facing them. Twinning the biographies illustrates that women in uber-patriarchal societies could acquire agency through both conventional and unconventional behaviour — particularly if they
were as forceful as these two were. Their ambitious sons were lucky to have
such formidable mothers.

I wanted to approach each woman through her eyes and words in the moment, using many direct quotations from them so a reader can see the drama of the choices facing them.

There was a second reason to write about these two women. Their reputations, so different within their lifetimes, have both suffered since their deaths. The influence of each on her son has been minimized; both women have been shoehorned into harmful stereotypes. They (and particularly Sara) have rarely been portrayed in a sympathetic light since their deaths; in fact, their sons' biographers often disparage them — it is as though the Great Men of History must spring, like Athena, fully formed from the head of Zeus, without tiresome interventions from their mothers. Yet their sons both acknowledged their mothers as key figures in their own lives.

Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt clung to the memories of their parents. I wanted to strip away some of the harsher judgments that have been imposed on them since their deaths. I wanted to find the living, breathing human beings under the layers of criticism that historians have lacquered on.

Excerpted from Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt. Copyright © 2023 by Charlotte Gray. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster Canada, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.