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

[This column has emendations. View original version]

      

WASHINGTON—New York State certainly did well in its delegation to the Rural Women of the World's Conference. I invited this delegation to come over today at twelve-thirty to see the White House, and when I went down into the East Room it was half filled with women! Mrs. Morgenthau and Mrs. Wallace were there to help me but I gave a little lecture before we started on all the things we were going to see because I felt it was impossible to get some many women into any of the smaller rooms at once! After seeing the House I bade them goodbye, finding amongst them many old friends and feeling very happy to have a chance to welcome individually our own state delegation.

Afterwards we had lunch on the porch at which Lady Reading, Mrs. Greenway, Mrs. Wallace and Mrs. Morgenthau joined us. Mrs. Bridgen and Mrs. Young stayed for luncheon also which pleased me for they are both working so hard over this Conference that I feel whenever I can get them to rest for a few minutes, it is quite a victory.

I went directly from luncheon to receive thirty-six women from Alabama who are here for the Conference and who are making a Goodwill tour of the East. They have worked out a plan for their county which they feel, in cooperation with the Federal Farm Rehabilitation, will perhaps prove a possible and practical solution for many other southern counties. They made a careful survey of housing conditions and have discovered that these conditions are deplorable—many, many homes with no sanitation and in very poor condition. Of course, this could be duplicated in county after county in the south and in quite a few in other parts of the country.

After that I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Maxwell Hylop, one of the officials of the Cunard Line who came over on the "Queen Mary II " He is a cousin of mine so he came down for the day. Then I went down to listen to forty of our New York City tenement dwellers make a plea or the aid of the federal government in slum clearance. Such tales as they told, many of the women crying as they heard a man describe how his family was lost in a tenement fire while he was at the high school with the one child now left to him.

Then I talked on camps for women, and problems of young people. Finally I visited a friend in a hospital and had a number of people for tea and a few guests for dinner. A busy day and a hot one also!

E.R.


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Persons
  • Isaacs, Stella, Marchioness of Reading, Baroness Swanborough, 1894-1971 [ index ]
         British philanthropist; founder of Women's Royal Voluntary Service
         [ Wikidata | SNAC | UK Nat. Archives | ODNB ]
  • King, Isabella Greenway, 1886-1953 [ index ]
         American politician; U.S. Representative (AZ) from 1932 to 1936; chaired the American Women's Voluntary Services Organization
         [ LC | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC ]
  • Maxwell, Maxwell Hyslop, 1862-1937 [ index ]
         British official of the Cunard Shipping Line
  • Morgenthau, Elinor, -1949 [ index ]
         American Democratic Party activist; spouse of US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
         [ LC | ISNI | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC | FAST | US Nat. Archives ]
  • Wallace, Ilo [ index ]
         American second lady; founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company; spouse of American politician Henry A. Wallace
         [ LC | VIAF | Wikidata | SNAC | FAST ]
Organizations
Geographic
  • Washington (D.C., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, June 4, 1936

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
[ ERPP bio | LC | VIAF | WorldCat | DPLA | Wikidata | SNAC ]

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)
    [ VIAF | ORCID ]
  • Regenhardt, Christy (Associate Editor)
    [ ISNI ]
  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
    [ VIAF | ISNI ]
  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
    [ VIAF | ORCID ]
  • Alhambra, Christopher C. (Electronic Text Editor)
    [ VIAF | ORCID ]

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.

XML master last modified on May 2, 2022.

HTML version generated and published on May 3, 2022.

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 3, 1936, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 3 June 1936, AERP, FDRL