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

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote. The attainment of voting rights brought to a climax the efforts of several generations of women political figures who had labored for decades to build a powerful grassroots movement behind female suffrage and then leveraged it to force the amendment's enactment. At the time, many believed that the enfranchisement of women would empower the movement's leaders to assume commanding positions within the hierarchy of the nation's major political parties and to gain real concessions for the nation's women in doing so. This goal proved short-lived, however, as women leaders instead found themselves marginalized within Democratic and Republican institutions dominated by men and lacking the support of an energized women's network, which had declined in intensity and fractured into opposing camps once the unifying goal of suffrage had been attained. Some, like Carrie Chapman Catt, all but abandoned electoral politics to focus on different pursuits, while others, like Alice Paul, sought to re-create the women's movement under the auspices of a National Woman's Party. A fellow organizer in her own right, Eleanor Roosevelt disagreed with both directions and sought to point the way toward a third in a 1928 article titled “Women Must Learn to Play the Game as Men Do.”

At the time, Roosevelt was actively organizing women in New York State behind Al Smith's presidential campaign, and her husband was running for governor. Both experiences confirmed Roosevelt's sense that women had not yet achieved political equality with men. She writes:

In those circles which decide the affairs of national politics, women have no voice or power whatever.… They are called upon to produce votes, but they are kept in ignorance of noteworthy plans and affairs.… Beneath the veneer of courtesy and outward show of consideration universally accorded women, there is a widespread male hostility—age-old, perhaps—against sharing with them any actual control.

One solution that Roosevelt rejected was the formation of a separate party for women. With her reference to a “Woman's Party,” she alludes to the work primarily of Alice Paul, a leading suffragist of the early twentieth century. Paul and her associates gained notoriety by picketing the White House for two and half years in an effort to persuade President Woodrow Wilson to support a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Paul turned her attention to the larger issue of equal rights for women and wrote the earliest version of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1921. She and other members of the National Woman's Party, which Paul had helped found in 1916, remained active in trying to nominate women for office and in securing passage of an equal rights amendment. Rather than following Paul's lead, however, Roosevelt instead advocated intense party-based organization at the local, state, and national levels, culminating in the designation of female “bosses” with enough clout to field and elect candidates, press legislation, and dispense patronage, just as men did. “Our means is to elect, accept and back women political bosses,” she wrote. “If women believe they have a right and duty in political life today, they must learn to talk the language of men. They must not only master the phraseology, but also understand the machinery which men have built up through years of practical experience.”

Roosevelt knew that her call for direct engagement in the most rudimentary, unglamorous, and even unsavory political work on the part of women would strike many of her contemporaries as unladylike, but she insisted upon its necessity in order to make women's equality a reality. As she puts it,

Certain women profess to be horrified at the thought of women bosses bartering and dickering in the hard game of politics with men. But many more women realize that we are living in a material world, and that politics cannot be played from the clouds. To sum up, women must learn to play the game as men do.

Interestingly, Roosevelt did not necessarily blame men for this state of affairs, at least not entirely. She notes that women had had the vote for only ten years and that their participation in political affairs was something completely new. Both men and women conformed to the prejudices of the past, so she raises the question of whether men can be blamed for finding it difficult to adapt to modern life as the old prejudices were being thrown off. She was also critical of women for not being more politically engaged. Although many resisted her call at first, Roosevelt applied this reasoning to her own public career, which for thirty years sustained her as the most powerful woman in the Democratic Party—a “boss” of tremendous capacity, enduring influence, and an outsize historical legacy.