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

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NEW YORK, Wednesday—Last Saturday night's variety show in the Poughkeepsie High School, put on by the Little White Russian Community and performed by professional Russian artists who are working in New York, was enjoyed very much by all of us. The community is raising money to build a church, and meantime has bought an old barn which is now being converted.

Miss Adelaide Enright and I drove down from Hyde Park right after church on Sunday afternoon and I made the 3:30 train for Philadelphia, and reached Camden, N.J., in plenty of time for my evening speech. I was back in New York City at 12:30 A.M., and Monday was a busy day.

I lunched on Monday at the United Nations with Mrs. Dorothy Lewis and Mr. Benjamin A. Cohen. Then I went to keep my television commitment with Tex and Jinx.

On Wednesday the book which Lorena Hickok and I wrote on women in politics was released. It is entitled "Ladies of Courage" and was published by Putnam's.

I think it is a very readable book, and I hope we have been fair in relating the stories of the various women, both Republicans and Democrats, who have achieved success in political positions. We faced the fact that politics is still largely a man's world, but women are becoming more and more a part of it. And I think there is a good deal that we have said that will be of interest to young people who are planning careers of different kinds and want to know something about the possibilities of work in the political field.

While I was on the Tex and Jinx show I was given the news of the unanimous Supreme Court decision that wiped out segregation in the schools. I am delighted this was a unanimous decision because I think it will be difficult for the states with segregated school systems to hold out against such a ruling.

If it were not for the fact that segregation in itself means inequality, the old rule of giving equal facilities might have gone on satisfying our sense of justice for a long time. It is very difficult, however, to ensure real equality under a segregated system, and the mere fact that you cannot move freely anywhere in your country and be as acceptable everywhere as your neighbor creates an inequality.

Southerners always bring up the question of marriage between the races and I realize that that is the question of real concern to people. But it seems to me a very personal question which must be settled by family environment and by the development of the cultural and social patterns within a country. One can no longer lay down rules as to what individuals will do in any area of their lives in a world that is changing as fast as ours is changing today.

E.R.

(WORLD COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART PROHIBITED.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, May 20, 1954

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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