Marriage and Family Life
On October 7, 1914, she married Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy, Sr. after a courtship of more than seven years. He was the elder son of Patrick Joseph "P. J." Kennedy (political rival of Honey Fitz) and Mary Augusta Hickey. They first lived in a home in Brookline that is now the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, and later a 15-room vacation home at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, which became the Kennedy family’s lasting base. They had nine children.
Joe, Sr. provided well for their family, but was unfaithful. His affairs included one with Gloria Swanson. While eight months pregnant with Kick, Rose temporarily went back to her parents, but remained married. In turning a blind eye to her husband's affairs, Rose depended heavily on medication. Ronald Kessler found records for prescription tranquilizers Seconal, Placidyl, Librium, and Dalmane to relieve Rose's nervousness and stress, and Lomotil, Bentyl, Librax and Tagamet for her stomach.
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's strict beliefs often placed her at odds with her children. She refused to attend her daughter Kathleen's wedding in 1944 to William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, an Anglican, who was the eldest son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. Normal relations eventually resumed, particularly after the death of Kathleen's husband during World War II. However, when Kathleen herself died in a plane crash in 1948 (along with her new fiance, the 8th Earl FitzWilliam, a divorced Anglican), only her father attended her funeral and burial at the Devonshire family seat.
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?"
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