If You Ask Me
by Eleanor Roosevelt

No. I have Miss Thompson, who has been with me for over twenty years, and she has one assistant. I also have, on part time, one person and occasionally two, for research work.

I think it often is conducive to more concentration if you kneel when you pray, but I do not think it at all essential. Some of the most heartfelt prayers have been offered while men and women were doing some very active work.

Your question is rather a large one. One of things that you can do is to stop passing on the type of thing which creates rumors of war. You do not know whether the Administration's foreign policy is inadequate or not. We are passing through a period which is bound to be confusing and I think it would be only fair to wait a little while before making such a sweeping statement. I see absolutely no reason for saying that the induction and discharge of servicemen is "unprincipled." They are discharged according to rules laid down by the Army and Navy which are worked out with as great care as possible, and the men are inducted because they are needed in different parts of the world at the present time in the service of their country.

I think the best way to avoid a third world war is to work as hard as we know how for a strong United Nations Organization, with a security section that has some power and a good economic section that will try to solve economic and social questions which are confronting every nation in the world today.

I haven't the faintest idea. Women nearly always go where men go. In the long run, it seems to me, the important thing is to make whatever place people go to a decent place in which to be.

It is very difficult for anyone to give personal advice such as you ask, but there is one general rule, and that is that it takes two people to talk things over, and that one of them usually has to make the first advance. Suppose you try asking your mother to talk with you. You might find that she is just waiting for an invitation.

Certainly not. I have lived more than sixty years and I have heard young people condemned many times. I think nearly every generation is better than the last, and I certainly admire the present one.

No, I do not know of any actual cases, and I do not know whether I believe in love at first sight or not. I have seen love develop very quickly between two people and I have heard people say that they knew the minute they found themselves with the man or woman whom they later married, that there was immediately a great attraction, but I haven't the faintest idea if it was love at first sight or not.

I really have given this very little thought. I never liked the feel of nylon as much as I like the feel of silk. If we could get silk for hose from China, it might be a good thing, but I do not know how the transportation situation is as yet, nor whether the silk-making industry there is able to provide us with the raw silk.

It was an original saying, if there is anything really original!

As workers in organizations I think sometimes women are more sensitive to supposed slights and get their feelings hurt more easily than men. When you say "in public," I suppose you mean in public office, and I should say this same trait is visible there. They find it hard to stand up under unfair criticism, and they are easily discouraged.

As individuals I think you have a more difficult question because every woman is different just as every man is different, and what you might say about one group even might not be true about another.

There is a large group of women, however, who lack self-confidence as individuals when they undertake anything outside of the traditional spheres in which women have always moved. Even as individuals the same sensitiveness to criticism is a drawback in family and social relationships. I think women are often superior to men in their intuition about people; in their executive ability when they are handling detailed work; and in their ability to subordinate themselves to a cause or to another individual if they think that is the way to serve a cause. You will laugh, ladies, but I think women often talk less and act more quickly than men.

I do not, and neither does anybody else, know how many more wars there will be, or whether we will have the intelligence to take the opportunity that lies before us and really build a peaceful world. It seems to me that we have only two alternatives, since we now have the power for the complete destruction of civilization in our hands. We must either have a peaceful world or run the risk of total destruction.

I do not think the President asked for national military training to sustain our military supremacy only. I think he felt the need at the present time to continue the training of our young men for military work. We none of us know just what kind of training will be needed for real defense in the future, and we will have to wait and review our whole defense problems, I think, before we make any final decisions.

No. I see no signs of a lost generation at present.