Eleanor Roosevelt: “Women Must Learn to Play the Game as Men Do”

Eleanor Roosevelt cast a long shadow over the American political landscape. Her life spanned the crises the nation faced as it confronted two world wars, the Great Depression, the cold war, the birth of the United Nations and the human rights movement, and the resurgence of intense debates over civil rights, civil liberties, and feminism. Her transition from progressive reformer to New Dealer to human rights activist put a human face on the policies promoted by her husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, and on the United Nations, the Democratic and Republican parties, and liberalism and its critics.

In late 1936 Roosevelt moved beyond writing books and a monthly newspaper column for Pictorial Review to writing “My Day,” a syndicated column distributed six days a week to more than forty newspapers across the nation until 1962, when illness forced her to reduce her output to three days a week. In 1941 she embarked on her own radio career, interviewing noted political leaders, average citizens, and authors on issues of current interest. From 1948 through 1961 she hosted more than three hundred radio broadcasts featuring interviews with many of the world's major leaders and commentary on the most pressing issues of the day, and she appeared as a guest on more than seventy news programs. As television became a feature of the American landscape, Roosevelt embraced the new medium, and from 1959 until early fall 1962 she anchored Prospects of Mankind, a news-hour program for Education Television (the forerunner of public television) usually broadcast from Brandeis University. Roosevelt used her program to call Americans to embrace their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic nation and a world shattered by crises, both domestic and foreign.

As a child, Roosevelt never envisioned a political career, even though her uncle Theodore became president of the United States. Born on October 11, 1884, to aristocratic lineage and privilege, raised by a mother who mocked her looks and timidity, and orphaned by the age of ten, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt spent her childhood combating fear and disappointment. Her confidence developed when she sailed to London to attend the Allenswood Academy, whose bold, outspoken headmistress, Marie Souvestre, was devoted to Roosevelt and gave her the encouragement she needed to overcome the rejection that had dominated her early life.

Roosevelt returned to New York upon graduation, made her debut in society, and threw herself into settlement work and other progressive reforms. In 1905 she married Franklin D. Roosevelt, her fifth cousin once removed, and over eleven years gave birth to six children. Child rearing replaced progressive politics until the Roosevelts moved to Washington when Franklin joined the administration of Woodrow Wilson as secretary of the navy in 1913. With children in school and the world at war, Roosevelt threw herself into wartime relief efforts and began to find her own voice. She translated for international women's labor meetings and developed close friendships with the reformers who would spur her activism. By 1920, as she accompanied Franklin, then the Democratic vice presidential nominee, on the campaign trail, she knew that politics would define her life. Ironically, she thought it would be her husband's work rather than her own that would shape her future.

When James Cox and Franklin Roosevelt lost in the 1920 presidential election and polio temporarily sidelined Franklin's public career, Eleanor reentered the political arena in new ways—as a spokesperson and organizer. By 1928, when New Yorkers elected Franklin as governor, Eleanor had become a significant political player in her own right. She had helped manage the women's divisions of the state and national Democratic Party, edited their newsletters, chaired legislative committees of national reform organizations, testified before Congress on an international peace plan, and designed grassroots campaigns for Democratic candidates across the state. She urged women to become actively engaged in policy and politics, championed housing reform, supported the right to organize, and learned “to play the game as men do,” a phrase she used in the title of a 1928 article.

In 1933, when Roosevelt returned to Washington, D.C., as first lady, she had to adjust her public profile and craft a role that supported her husband. After negotiating with her husband and his aides, she assumed the role of the president's eyes and ears, traveling around the country to investigate New Deal programs (the president's sweeping economic plans to lead the nation out of the Great Depression), and then reporting her findings upon her return. Her unprecedented travel and outreach to citizens generated widespread public support. A record-shattering four hundred thousand Americans wrote to her in the first six months of the Roosevelt administration.

This support gave Roosevelt a platform to address the issues to which she devoted her life—housing reform, education, labor, and the living wage—and the recovery, relief, and reform policies the New Deal promoted. She championed the inclusion of women and young people in emergency programs and played a key role in the formation of the National Youth Administration, the Federal Project Number One programs (to put artists and writers to work), and the construction of the so-called She-She-She camps to provide work for unemployed women. Working closely with Mary McLeod Bethune (an adviser to the president and the founder of what is now Bethune-Cookman College) and Walter White (executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP), she became the administration's face for civil rights and minority concerns and played a lead role in securing the Lincoln Memorial as the venue for a concert by the renowned black contralto Marian Anderson. She also urged her husband to sign the executive order banning discrimination in wartime defense industries. As the nation prepared for war, she promoted civil defense plans, tried to prepare women and young people for the sacrifices war would inflict, and spoke out in defense of civil liberties. Again defying precedent, she flew to London in 1941 to examine the damage German bombs had inflicted, and in 1943 she spent five weeks visiting seventeen war-torn islands in the Pacific. These actions generated intense passion from both her supporters and detractors, making her one of the most beloved and most despised first ladies in American history.

Franklin's sudden death on April 12, 1945, presented Roosevelt with different challenges. She confided to Lorena Hickok, a reporter with whom she had a close personal relationship, that her husband's death marked the end of a historical period, leaving her wondering what she could achieve on her own. Rejecting pressure to run for office, lead a college, or administer a political action committee, Roosevelt remained focused on “My Day,” reassuring friends and colleagues that she would not be silenced. In December 1945, despite her early misgivings, she accepted President Harry Truman's request that she join the first U.S. delegation to the United Nations. For the next seven years, Roosevelt devoted the majority of her time to the United Nations, where she shepherded the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, helped develop UN refugee and humanitarian relief policies, and spoke out forcefully in support of the creation of Israel. Although her tenure ended at the close of the Truman administration, Roosevelt remained devoted to the United Nations, volunteering to help organize the United Nations Association and to defend the United Nations against conservative attacks.

Roosevelt also remained politically active, campaigning for liberal Democrats and serving on the boards of civil rights, labor, and education associations. She spoke out against Senator Joseph McCarthy, known for sensational accusations of Communism in government in the early 1950s, and had a very public dispute with Francis Cardinal Spellman, the archbishop of the New York diocese and a cardinal in the Catholic Church, over federal aid to parochial schools. In 1956 she chaired the civil rights division of the Democratic Platform Committee and traveled widely in support of Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign. She also traveled the world, circling the globe three times and chronicling her observations for readers. In 1961 she pressured President John Kennedy to appoint more women in upper levels of his administration. The president responded by appointing her chair of his Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962, in New York City.