Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt
Government will never be the same after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency. The Great Depression increasingly got worse under Hoover's presidency. FDR did not have anything left but to try to use direct governmental intervention to reverse the effects of the Great Depression. We all know the end of the story. WWII ultimately terminated the greatest economic misery in the history of the country. Predictably, the President had too much on his "plate." Economic disaster, war in Europe and the Pacific, and racial riots in Detroit and Los Angeles made it impossible to even consider how to address women's rights. However, in the middle of this madness the President took two steps that had a beneficial effect on women.
The first one was to nominate the first ever woman to a presidential cabinet position (Frances Perkins as secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945). The ensuing close relation with the executive office of the President will be the most important link women needed to push their agenda from within rather than against it. This will become obvious by the time Kennedy established the President Commission on the Status of Women in 1963. The second decision was to listen to his wife's suggestions about equal rights for women. Seldom has a wife of a President played such an important role.
Suddenly, women could count on a powerful ally opening the doors to executive position for qualified women. When her recommendations were ignored, she held press conferences to inform female voters to speak up their minds. Some of the most important recognitions of women's rights included better living wages, better labor conditions, and union's rights. Unemployed women during the New Deal had an opportunity to contribute to their family finances by joining organizations like the She–She–She camps and inclusion in Federal programs such as the National Youth Administration and the Federal Arts Programs.
Eleanor Roosevelt linked the historical women's movement for equal rights started in 1848 with the Declaration of Sentiments to the second wave of feminism that gathered strength in the 50s after the publication of Simon de Beauvoir's seminal work The Second Sex. Her husband could not have possibly advanced such a controversial topic such as women's equal rights in the midst of the country's greatest economic depression and most destructive war in human history. The First Lady, however, shifted away destructive critique of the President by becoming actively involved to promote concerns of women, and opening government started a network among professional women. It will come to an age in the 1970s when the number of women's organizations representing their interests will be reflected in a growing number of elected women to important government positions.
It appears as if male presidents are always too busy to tackle the issue of women's equal rights in the 20th century. Certainly, this was not a problem for the Presidents in the 19th century. Sometimes, I like to envision them holding a copy of the Constitution and while reading it they are waiting for that perfect moment to reassure the country about the legitimacy of the work being done by the two Houses. Simply do not take sides. The funny thing is that it took a woman to show how much can be done for the advancement of racial and gender justice even in the middle of crisis of Biblical proportions.
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