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

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NEW YORK, Thursday—We went last night as Mr. John Golden's guests to see Gertrude Lawrence in "Skylark." As the play opened, Miss Thompson and I kept wondering if we had seen this play before, and then we both remembered we had read the story. Of course, it was very different, but it gave one an odd kind of familiarity with the people.

The dialogue is excellent and Gertrude Lawrence makes the best of it. She is perfect in this type of play, I think, just as as she was in "Susan and God." Such little touches as the bachelor partner in the firm buying the gift for Tony Kenyon to give his wife on their tenth wedding anniversary, are particularly amusing and subtle. The last act, it seemed to me, lets down a good bit, but I enjoyed it all and think you will find it a pleasant evening's entertainment.

It seems to me that this play has a special message for the men and women of this country. We have all made such a fetish of financial success and forgotten frequently that success of any kind, when it does not include success in one's personal relationships, is bound in the end to leave both the man and the woman with very little real satisfaction.

Of course, I often wonder how men can be so stupid as to think they can give more thought to their careers than they do to home relationships, and still expect the women to develop with them, or to find satisfaction in their own interests and in the care of a house and children. So many men seem to live under the misapprehension that falling in love is a permanent state.

Because you are attracted and passionately devoted to "Jim" or "Alice" today, doesn't mean at all you are going to continue loving during the ensuing years if you happen to marry during that first flush of attraction. Real loving means work, thinking of each other day in and day out, unselfishness, and effort to understand the growth of the soul and mind of the other individual, and to adjust and complement that other person day by day.

Keeping up romance, keeping up constant interest in each other by a meticulous care for the little things which were important when you were in love, this is all part of loving. It sounds very simple, but as you look around you, I think you will discover that it is almost a miracle when it happens. It won't hurt us, however, to the think about an ideal!

E.R.

(COPYRIGHT, 1939, BY UNITED FEATURE SYNDICATE, INC.)


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About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, October 20, 1939

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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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
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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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