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

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HYDE PARK, Thursday—If the feminine readers of this column haven't yet seen the book, "Women Are Here To Stay" by Agnes Rogers, I recommend it for a very entertaining time when you come across it. The subtitle is quite delightful, "The Durable Sex in Its Infinite Variety Through Half a Century of American Life."

The first pictures in the book remind me of family albums.

The ladies are dressed as my mother dressed, and the things they did belong to my mother's era. There is the coach and four and the game of croquet in skirts that sweep the ground. There even is a picture of a gentleman and lady ice skating. The gentleman is attired in high, practical knickerbockers, with long knit stockings to the knee. The lady is dressed in flowing skirts that come to her ankles. Tennis skirts were just as long and some ladies even added a dark veil around their faces just below the eyes. The bathing suits of the Gibson girl era were something unbelievable!

The pictures also bring you through to the days of the depression. And included in the book is a letter that is addressed to "Mrs. Herbert Hoover and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt," which was published in McCall's Magazine in October 1932.

It was a good letter, really, because it pointed out that there were good things that had come to people through the depression.

We virtually were forced to become neighborly. The woman who wrote the letter said she was 47 years old and probably would never have known her neighbors if the depression had not hit them all. Now she was really important to them.

She had not felt as useful since her own children were small. People in her block were doing the type of thing that their grandparents had done to help each other over the rough spots.

The thing that troubled her was that this was a good beginning, but she wanted to know where it was to end.

What could we, as women, she asked, do outside our home as well as in it to make the United States a better place in which to live?

E. R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1949, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC., REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

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Geographic
  • Hyde Park (Dutchess County, N.Y., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, August 12, 1949

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

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MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a UFS wire copy of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
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