Bamie was afflicted by a spinal ailment (possibly polio or Pott's disease) that led to her being partially disabled and confined by corrective steel braces as a child.

[6] Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice once remarked that had Bamie, with her incredible intelligence and energy, been born a 19th-century man, without the social restrictions that the era placed on women, she would have been president instead of her brother.

She apparently reconsidered this notion, however, and clarified that "Auntie Bye was more like Mark Hanna, the maker of presidents, than presidential material herself.

"[8] Although she was not seen as a stunningly gorgeous woman like her mother or her sisters-in-law, her natural intelligence and energy was magnetic to both men and women.

's elder daughter Alice remarked that Bamie almost seemed to be born into middle age, so significant were the adult responsibilities put into her hands from childhood.

Unlike many children in a similar situation, Bamie had the natural maturity, judgment, and wisdom to "hold the family together," Alice said.

When the young and vivacious Alice became more than her stepmother, Edith Kermit Carow, or her father could handle, they would send her up to Auntie Bye for a dose of discipline and to give her the structure that the Roosevelts in the White House were not able to exert.

's elder daughter Alice also broke with Eleanor over this highly distasteful (to Theodore's family) political activity that included Eleanor's riding up to Ted's speaking engagements with a teapot on her car to remind voters of Ted's supposed (but later disproved) connections to the Teapot Dome Scandal.

Bamie and her niece, Eleanor Roosevelt, eventually reconciled, and in an article in the Ladies Home Journal, "How to Take Criticism," Eleanor referred to her Aunt Bamie, saying, "I can honestly say that I hate no one, and perhaps the best advice I can give to anyone who suffers from criticism and yet must be in the public eye, would be contained in the words of my aunt, Mrs. William Sheffield Cowles.

I had asked her whether I should do something which at that time would have caused a great deal of criticism, and her answer was: 'Do not be bothered by what people say as long as you are sure that you are doing what seems right to you, but be sure that you face yourself honestly.