Dorothy Rodham, who overcame years of struggle to become a powerful influence on the life and career of her daughter, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first lady, senator from New York, presidential candidate and now secretary of state, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 92. Her family announced her death. Mrs. Clinton canceled a trip to London and Istanbul to be at her mother’s side.
As her daughter rose to prominence, Mrs. Rodham stayed mostly in the background, appearing only occasionally in public and rarely giving interviews. But Mrs. Clinton credited her mother with giving her a love of the higher learning that Mrs. Rodham never had, a curiosity about a larger world that Mrs. Rodham had not seen, and a will to persevere — about which Mrs. Rodham knew a great deal.Her childhood had been Dickensian. She was abandoned by dysfunctional, divorced parents at the age of 8 in Chicago, sent unsupervised on a cross-country train with a younger sister to live with unwelcoming grandparents in California and, at 14, escaped into the adult world of the Depression as a $3-a-week nanny.
On her own, she attended high school and became a good student, though her job left little time for other activities. Her employers were kind to her, however, and she had two influential teachers. College proved to be out of the question, but she got a job as a secretary in Chicago, and after years of lonely toil she married a gruff traveling salesman and settled into a life of cooking, cleaning and raising three children.
In her autobiography, “Living History” (2003), Mrs. Clinton recalled her mother’s hardships. “I thought often of my own mother’s neglect and mistreatment at the hands of her parents and grandparents, and how other caring adults filled the emotional void to help her,” she wrote.
Mrs. Clinton portrayed her mother as a caring beacon of strength in the family, offering intellectual stimulation and teaching her children to be calm and resolute. “I’m still amazed at how my mother emerged from her lonely early life as such an affectionate and levelheaded woman,” she wrote.
Dorothy Emma Howell was born on June 4, 1919, in Chicago, the oldest of two children of Edwin John Howell Jr., a firefighter, and the former Della Murray. Her sister, Isabelle, was born in 1924. They lived as boarders in a house with four other families. The parents fought often and sometimes violently, according to Cook County records of the time.
Mr. Howell sued for divorce, accusing his wife of abandonment and abuse of the children. She did not show up in court; her sister, Frances Czeslawski, testified against her, and Mr. Howell was granted the divorce and custody of the children in 1927. But unwilling or unable to care for them, he put them on a train to Alhambra, Calif., where his parents, Edwin Sr. and Emma, lived.
The grandparents were ill-prepared to raise the girls. Mr. Howell, a laborer for the city, left the task to his wife, whom Mrs. Rodham recalled as a strict woman in black dresses who discouraged visitors and parties and berated and punished them for small infractions. When she discovered that Dorothy had gone trick-or-treating one Halloween, she ordered her confined to her room for a year, except to go to school.
In 1934 Dorothy moved out and became a housekeeper, cook and nanny for a family in San Gabriel. Her employers gave her a room, board and $3 a week and encouraged her to read and go to school. Dorothy enrolled at Alhambra High School, where she joined the Scholarship Club and the Spanish Club.
Years later, Mrs. Rodham recalled two teachers: Miss Drake, who taught speech and drama, and Miss Zellhoefer, who taught her to write. “She taught English and was very strict,” Mrs. Rodham wrote in a book marking the school’s centennial in 1998. “We came from her class with respect for her and a solid ground in English. What made her special was her desire that we develop critical thinking.”
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