Cook, an out lesbian and a professor of History and Women's Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University in New York, created a template of how a woman's life should be studied. For more than 20 years, Cook produced and hosted her own program for Pacifica Radio. She has also appeared frequently as a television news commentator and was the co-founder and co-chair of the Organization of American Historians' Committee on Research and Access to Historical Documentation.

During her research, Cook discovered evidence of a passionate friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and a woman journalist named Lorena Hickok - and she wrote about it. Suddenly, the biography was a scandal. But what Cook really did was perform an act of feminist historiography. She looked at Eleanor Roosevelt as a political figure but also examined her personal life, taking seriously the feminist adage "the personal is political."

She showed how this woman took the unhappiness of a lonely marriage and transformed it into a passion for social justice. As a reviewer in The Washington Post wrote, "Cook has resurrected a woman who changed the lives of millions."

Cook published her 1992 biography, Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume I, 1884-1933, and she was accused of transforming an icon of American liberalism into something in her own image. Members of the Roosevelt family were outraged; other Eleanor Roosevelt biographers screamed. The controversy was something akin to the current row over the Ronald Reagan biography Dutch, by Edmund Morris--with one big difference: Cook hadn't made anything up.

Then, in 1999, Viking Penguin published Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume II, The Defining Years: 1933-1938, to much friendlier comment. At a recent book party in Cook's honor, several members of the Roosevelt family were even seen in attendance.

She is now working on the third and final volume. For more than twenty years, she produced and hosted her own program for Pacifica Radio and has appeared frequently as a television news commentator. She also was cofounder and cochair of the OAH's Committee on Research and Access to Historical Documentation.

Cook's other works include editing the book Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (1978), and writing The Declassified Eisenhower (1981).