Theodore Roosevelt’s high-spirited daughter Alice. Her father said of her “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.” In 15 months she attended 407 dinners, 350 balls and 300 parties
Her mother died when she was born. Roosevelt later remarried and Alice was raised partially by an aunt because she never got along with her stepmother, who liked to claim that if she’d lived, Teddy’s first wife would have ‘bored him to death’.
They once got mad at her for her fierce independence (ironically inherited from her father), and they threatened to send her to some strict girls boarding school as punishment. She responded in a letter, writing “If you send me I will humiliate you. I will do something that will shame you. I tell you I will.”
