Q: Describe the beginnings of Eleanor's coming out into the world.
A: Well, as soon as Eleanor Roosevelt gets back to New York, she meets Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read and Narcissa Vanderlip, who was then president of the League of Women Voters. And she gets very involved with this new circle of friends and with the League of Women Voters. And she becomes political. They remind her of the circle that she left at Allenswood: independent women. They live in Greenwich Village, and they read poetry aloud, they have champagne candle-lit dinners, and they're carefree, in their private lives, and totally committed to political action. They run a magazine called City, State, and Nation, and Eleanor Roosevelt very quickly becomes editor of that magazine. And she becomes very involved, on a new level, with her own independent political world, which is now a world of women activists.
Q: She finds some strengths here. What does she discover about herself?
A: Well, they really appreciate her strengths. They see that she's good at organizing, at fundraising, at writing. The woman we later know as a journalist becomes a journalist in 1920. She edits this magazine, City, State, and Nation. She becomes treasurer of the League of Women Voters of New York. She is a terrific fundraiser and organizer. She holds big meetings. And she is very popular, once again a leader, and admired as a leader. So she's really in her element with Esther Lape, Elizabeth Read, Narcissa Vanderlip, and very quickly she meets other women in New York: Nancy Cook, Marion Dickerman, Caroline O'Day. And she begins to have a very wide world of former suffragists and activists. She herself was not a suffragist. She herself did not support the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, but she is now in that world. And it's a world that she relishes and enjoys.
During the campaign of 1924, she's put in charge of women's activities. And she wants to get office space and delegate space to equal the men's space. And this becomes, you know, I mean, in the campaign of ‘24 and in ‘28 and ‘32, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt insists that women have equal floor space. And this is a great victory over time. Then she wants women represented in equal numbers as men. And she wants the women to name the delegates. And the men want to name the delegates. Well, Eleanor is absolutely furious. And because they don't want her to walk away in 1924, she wins. And this is a great political victory. She has floor space equal to the men, and she has the right to name the women.
But she is also put in charge of the platform committee. And the platform of 1924 becomes the platform of the New Deal. You know. She wants an 8-hour day. She wants an end to vigilante violence and the Ku Klux Klan. She wants health care for everybody. She wants jobs for everybody. And it's an incredibly visionary platform. She's worked very hard on it. She's enlisted all the great social work pioneers and leaders: Jane Adams, Lillian Wald, Mary White Ovington of the NAACP. And this is the first time the Democratic Party has ever asked the NAACP to participate, 1924. And she's all prepared with this wonderful platform. And she sits outside with her team. The platform committee is meeting. The door is locked, and they don't let her in. And Eleanor Roosevelt vows that will never happen again. And she is very angry.
So in 1924, Eleanor Roosevelt really gets a sense of what the limits of the battle and the contours of the battle are going to be. The men are contemptuous of the women, and the women really need to organize. She writes an article which becomes an article she writes in different ways over and over and over again: Women need to organize. They need to create their own bosses. They need to have support networks and gangs so that they are a force. You know. Politics is not an isolated, individualist adventure. Women really need to emerge as a power to be the countervailing power to the men. And Eleanor Roosevelt's really the dynamo and the spearhead of that effort.
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