The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

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WASHINGTON—We left Mrs. Glenn Work's house this morning, just outside of Morgantown, at seven o'clock and had a beautiful drive through the mountains of West Virginia.

I could not help reflecting on the different types of girls and women that I had seen in the short space of three days—the gay, prettily dressed and on the whole more sheltered group belonging to the Chi Omega and dining at the Greenbrier Hotel; the mixed group at Alderson Prison, ranging from old to very young, entirely illiterate to highly educated, totally impassive to high-strung and sensitive; the young people who graduated yesterday from high school at Arthurdale, children of homesteaders, thinking already of marriage and homes of their own, no economic security and a trust in the future and the hope of youth in their eyes. The older people in the audience at the second part of the music (festival) last night were enthusiastic, applauded the dancers, deeply interested and critical too because they knew all the different sets. They were able to forget hardships and enjoy it and yet many of them could tell tales of kaleidoscopic lives, drab enough in spots and hum drum enough but with a desperate excitement arising from the one great adventure of searching after some kind of security which will make tomorrow's bread an assured thing!

Back in Washington to find everybody hard at work. Mrs. Scheider and I had a hurried lunch in my sitting room and started at once on the mail, two visitors, one a woman on her way to England for a World Fellowship Meeting and one who came to discuss how vocational education should be acquired. It seems to require the whole library of books and a very representative group of people to really discuss it satisfactorily. Then a young Philippine lady, Mrs. Geronima Pecson, principal of a school in Manila, to tell me of the things of interest to women in the Philippines. Women everywhere seem to have much the same interests.

Dinner and the whole evening on my mail which does seem to have accumulated a little!

E.R.


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, June 26, 1936

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

  • Brick, Christopher (Editor)
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  • Regenhardt, Christy (Associate Editor)
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  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
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  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
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  • Alhambra, Christopher C. (Electronic Text Editor)
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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project

Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

Published with permission from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

TEI-P5 edition published on April 28, 2017.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a draft version of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. My Day column draft dated June 25, 1936, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 25 June 1936, AERP, FDRL