Reflections on "My Day": Eleanor Roosevelt- providing security, connection and trasfomation through action and over 1,000,000 words

So, I’ve just spent most of my day reading My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936-1962, and right now one question and one remark echo through my brain on repeat, “Why was I never taught anything about Eleanor Roosevelt? She’s amazing!” The reason that I probably never learned anything about her is because every year in my history classes in elementary and high school we never seemed to get past reconstruction and carpet baggers. The reality that my grandparents and parents lived through, the realities that probably shaped the way that they raised me and therefore, had a huge effect on the person that I’ve become, were never really seen as important in the eyes of the New York State Board of Regents. I do remember taking the initiative to do a report on Eleanor Roosevelt in the 5th or 6th grade. I remember my class being taken to the library and shown the biography section. We were told to pick one book on a famous person to take out and write a report on. I remember staring at book upon book of famous men. Then seeing one on Florence Nightingale that one of the other girls immediately snatched, and being left with a book on Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t really remember getting much out of that report because as a 11 or 12 year old I just couldn’t get past the fact that she married her cousin (Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were 5th cousins once removed). But reading this I’m sad and a bit frustrated that I was never given the opportunity to learn about a woman who did so much.

For me this reading brings up a lot about gender and a lot about the power of honesty and sincerity has for building connection. First, let me pretend to wrap my head around the issues of gender that a swirling around in my head, thoughts that I can feel making me slightly uncomfortable which means they are probably effecting something more than my head as well, my heart perhaps? The thoughts below are not well formed simply because I have never felt comfortable expressing them. But how can our thoughts be improved, clarified or changed if we never acknowledging them in the first place? How can we really write to change the world or ourselves, if we are hiding behind a curtain of fear? What I am trying to express below is simply my own personal muddled understanding of the world, and I greatly welcome anyone’s voice that can help me work through them.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady for three terms (1933-1945). She acted as more than the hostess of the White House, but also as her husband’s eyes and ears , since his polio made it difficult for him to travel. She trekked the country visiting small Appalachian towns, inspecting the conditions of factories and juvenile detention centers, and she was known to always give FDR her honest opinions on national policy. As a woman myself, these acts make me proud and eager to look to her as an example of female leadership. But it is her writing in “My Day,” a daily column that she produced everyday from December 1935 to just before her death in 1962 (writing over 1,000,000 words), which for me shines as an example of feminine power. My day was a simple letter to her readers, she always wrote as if she were writing to a long time friend. Some letters covered the basic day-to-day realities of a wife, mother and grandmother. She talked about playing with her grandchildren and even being sick in bed with the flu. Other letters covered her reflections on recent national events and how they made their way into the domestic sphere of her life.

I believe very much that the female experience of life is distinctive, just as I believe that the male experience, the black experience and the Latina experience is distinctive. I also believe in a continuum that connects the two experiences of femininity (attributes of life-giving and nurturing qualities of motherhood, birth, intuition, creativity, life-death-rebirth and biological life cycle) and masculinity (attributes of logic, independence, a go-getting nature, strength, self control and a physical nature). I don’t believe that all women are or should be feminine or that all men are or should be masculine. I don’t even believe that individuals act with the same amount of femininity or masculinity in all situations. I do however, believe that there are valuable lessons and insights to be gained through looking at the world through the eyes of the masculine and the eyes of the feminine. I of course believe this because I believe in wholeness. I also believe that the feminine viewpoint has often been discredited in the public sphere. I personal identify with being feminine more than I do with being a woman, simply because the category of women is too large for me to even begin to find my place and I have found many woman that I relate less to than many men in my life. I identify with creation, nurturance and the act of transformation.

Anyway, I worked through all of that to say that I was floored by the feminine voice that Eleanor held on to throughout all of her writing, even as she talked about issues that were very much part of the public sphere. She advocated for birth control and divorce, she stated that housewives should be paid wages, she praised prohibition being taken off of the books as she remained dedicated to her stance against alcohol, and she spoke out against war. But she didn’t do this from a logical, rational, separate lab-like space? She didn’t spew out facts and figures. She talked from the heart and tackled this concepts as she let people into her home as she shared her experiences providing for her grown children, traveling to Minnesota for her son’s surgery to remove his wisdom teeth, and all the way to Seattle for her daughter’s third pregnancy, and her experiences making guest feel at home in the White House, and her stories of making people feel loved and not forgotten in the mountains of Appalachia and in the very living rooms of her readers. This following comment from Mary Marshall who was writing for the Nation in 1938 may be read as demeaning and/or paternalistic but I challenge that initial reaction. Mary Marshall wrote, “To prisoners of newspapers where wars are always raging ‘My Day’ is like a sunny square where children and aunts and grandmothers go about the trivial but absorbing pursuits and security reigns. In the sense of security it generates, lies the deepest appeals of ‘My Day.’

The word that may strike many when reading this comment is “trivial.” If this is the case, anger and frustration are often ignited. The reader focuses on the statement that children and grandmother’s lives are trivial, without real meaning the larger scope of world affairs. But what if one focuses on the world “security?” Then all of sudden, Eleanor becomes the provider of one of the most basic human needs, one that it is her husband’s (the President) job to provide an entire country. Suddenly, when we focus on the need to provide our children and grandmothers and their sunny squares with security there trivial lives and sunny square also appear to have a strong value to society. It is within this realm of security that I see Eleanor’s writing changing the world. Her daily writings provided radical thoughts and progressive reflections, and these thoughts were able to be received and digested because she was also providing a sense of security, as sense of normalcy, hope and love. She was not only able to form a connection between her and her reader, but also between her readers lives and the larger national and international happenings.