(1890 – 1995) The daughter of a Boston mayor, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on July 22, 1890 in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
Rose Fitzgerald was the eldest child of John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and his wife, who was also his second cousin, Mary Josephine Hannon.
As a young child, Fitzgerald lived in an Italianate/Mansard-style home in the Ashmont Hill section of Dorchester, Massachusetts and attended the local Girl’s Latin School. The home later burned down, but a plaque at Welles Avenue and Harley Street proclaims “Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Square”. The plaque was dedicated by her son, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, on Rose’s 102nd birthday in 1992.
Rose studied at the convent school Kasteel Bloemendal in Vaals, The Netherlands, and graduated from Dorchester High School in 1906. She also attended the New Englan Conservatory in Boston where she studied piano.
After being refused permission by her father to attend Wellesley College, Fitzgerald enrolled at the Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart (as it was known at that time), an institution which did not grant degrees at the time.
In 1908, Fitzgerald and her father embarked on a tour of Europe. She and “Honey Fitz” had a private audience with Pope Pius X at the Vatican.
On October 7, 1914, she married Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. after a courtship of more than seven years. They first lived in a home inBrookline that is now the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, and later a 15-room vacation home at Hyanni Port on Cape Cod, which became the Kennedy family’s lasting base.
Rose and Joseph had nine children over an eighteen-year period.
Her husband provided well for their family, but was unfaithful. While eight months pregnant with their fourth child, Rose went back to her parents. Her father reminded her that Catholics did not believe in divorce, and that she would have to live with her choice of husband. She returned to Kennedy with a stoic outlook, in spite of his dalliances, one of which was with film star Gloria Swanson. Even when Kennedy brought Swanson to their Hyannis Port home, Rose reacted with such poker-faced politeness that Swanson remarked, “Rose must be a saint, a fool, or just a better actress than me.”
In turning a blind eye to her husband’s affairs, Rose depended heavily on medication.
Rose was a devout Irish Catholic throughout her life. Even after her 100th birthday, she rarely missed Sunday Mass and maintained an “extremely prudish” exterior.
Rose stated that she felt completely fulfilled as a full-time homemaker. In her 1974 autobiography, Times to Remember, she wrote, “I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and a duty, but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it. … What greater aspiration and challenge are there for a mother than the hope of raising a great son or daughter?”
