Somewhere between the two extreme images of Eleanor Roosevelt—that of the shallow busybody first lady and that of the humanitarian reformer and consummate politician—stands a complex figure full of contradictions and paradoxes," observed Tamara Hareven in the anthology that marked the centenary of Eleanor's birth in 1984. The collection was titled Without Precedent, and Hareven's essay on "ER and Reform" led off the volume's concluding section on "Paradoxes." Author of an admiring biography, Eleanor Roosevelt (1968), Hareven conceded in 1984 that Eleanor's "omnipresence and involvement in many different causes, her paradoxical statements, and her support of seemingly contradictory causes bewildered her contemporaries and left even her Supporters feeling that her activities had no coherent pattern." The editors of Without Precedent explained that a scholarly reassessment was needed because the contradictions in Eleanor Roosevelt's long and eventful life were not explained by the soap opera elements of the standard litany. According to this melodrama, Eleanor survived an orphaned and loveless childhood, a faithless husband and domineering mother-in-law, and emerged as an independent personality only after her husband was felled by polio in 1921. Her need to serve so long as Franklin's eyes