Dorothy Howell Rodham

Early life

Dorothy Howell was born in Chicago, the daughter of Edwin John Howell, Jr. (1897–1946), a Chicago firefighter, and Della Murray (1902–1960). Her sister is Isabelle Howell (born 1924). Her ancestry included Welsh, English, Scottish, French, and distant Dutch; her paternal grandfather was an immigrant from Bristol in Gloucestershire, and many of her recent forebears had lived in Canada.

Dorothy's childhood has been described as Dickensian. The family lived as boarders in a crowded house. The parents were dysfunctional and unhappy and prone to sometimes violent fights; they moved Dorothy amongst various schools, and paid only sporadic attention to the children before divorcing in 1927.

The children were then sent on a train by themselves, unsupervised (Dorothy was eight, Isabelle younger), to live with their paternal grandparents in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra, California. The sisters endured harsh and unloving treatment from their grandparents. The grandmother favored black Victorian dress and punished the girls for trifling acts. After Dorothy was caught trick-or-treating during one Halloween, an activity the grandparents forbade, she was confined to her room for an entire year except for attending school, and was not even allowed to eat in the kitchen or play in the yard.

Having had enough, Dorothy left home at age 14 at the height of the Great Depression, working as a $3-per-week housekeeper, cook, and nanny for a kind-hearted woman in San Gabriel, California. Encouraged by her employer to read and go to school, Dorothy attended Alhambra High School, where she joined several clubs and benefited from two teachers.

After graduating from Alhambra in 1937, she moved to Chicago for a failed reunion with her mother, who by then had gotten married to Max Rosenberg. Subsequently, she moved into her own apartment there and took office jobs to support herself. She later said, "I'd hoped so hard that my mother would love me that I had to take the chance and find out. When she didn't, I had nowhere else to go." Hillary Rodham Clinton later attributed her interest in children's welfare to her mother's life as well as her belief that caring adults outside of family can fill a child's emotional voids.

Marriage and family

While applying for a job as a clerk typist at a textile company, she met traveling salesman Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, eight years her senior, in 1937. After a lengthy courtship, they married in early 1942. She became a full-time homemaker, raising three children, Hillary, Hugh, and Tony, in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois. She encouraged Hillary to have a love for learning and to pursue an education and a career, though she had never done so herself. In contrast to her husband's staunch Republican views, Dorothy Rodham was, as her daughter later wrote, essentially a Democrat, "although she kept it quiet in Republican Park Ridge."

In 1987, Rodham and her husband moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, to be closer to their daughter and help take care of their granddaughter, Chelsea. An excellent student as a youth, Rodham now took college courses in subjects such as psychology, logic, and child development, although she never graduated. Her daughter later wrote in her 2003 memoir Living History, "I'm still amazed at how my mother emerged from her lonely early life as such an affectionate and levelheaded woman."

Subsequent life

Hugh Rodham died in 1993, shortly after their daughter became First Lady of the United States. Dorothy Rodham remained active but valued her privacy and almost never spoke to the media. She spent more time at the White House and accompanied Hillary and Chelsea on trips to France, India, and China; she also enjoyed life in Washington, D.C. At the 1996 Democratic National Convention, where Bill Clinton was nominated for re-election, she appeared in a video message, saying "Everybody knows there is only one person in the world who can really tell the truth about a man, and that's his mother-in-law." Following the Lewinsky scandal she reportedly was angry at the president and encouraged her daughter to seek her own political career.

When her daughter was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000, she moved to Washington, D.C., living along Connecticut Avenue. She appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2004. Once living alone became too much for her, in 2006, she moved into the Clintons' large Whitehaven house in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington. There she would often sit and discuss the day when her daughter came home from work.

Starting in December 2007, she made a rare public appearance in Iowa and other early primary states to campaign for her daughter's presidential nomination bid. She appeared at some events concerning women's issues and also appeared in a Clinton campaign television advertisement. She was seen wiping away a tear when her daughter conceded her presidential bid in June 2008, but then was in attendance in January 2009 when her daughter was sworn in as Secretary of State.

In her final years, her health began to fail due to heart problems. Dorothy Rodham died at George Washington University Hospital on November 1, 2011, in Washington, D.C., with Secretary Clinton cancelling a foreign trip in order to be by her side. Other family members were present as well, and a small memorial service was held for her, in the Whitehaven house.

In her 2014 memoir Hard Choices, her daughter wrote of her, "No one had a bigger influence on my life or did more to shape the person I became." The struggles that she went through became a major theme of the June 2015 kickoff event to her daughter's 2016 presidential campaign.