If You Ask Me
by Eleanor Roosevelt

I should advise any young woman who does not marry to take a deep interest in young people, so that she will have the same satisfaction with other children that she might have had with her own. I should also advise her to build up very warm friendships and cultivate her interest in some kind of work which will tie her down to obligations, so that she will never find time hanging heavily on her hands and feel that her existence is profitless.

There is no such thing, from my point of view, as overeducation, nor being above any people because of formal education that you might have been fortunate enough to acquire. Anyone with character and the opportunity can acquire a formal education, and many people who have not had a chance for book learning are wiser than those who have had. If education hasn't given you enough understanding so that you can get on with people around you and appreciate their quality, and perhaps help them through your opportunities to more opportunities of their own, so that their interests may coincide with yours, then I am afraid your education has done you more harm than good.

Yes, I have always felt there should be Social Security for those who do housework. It is rather complicated to work out because the collections come from so many people, but Great Britain has done it by a stamp system, and I think we will eventually work it out here. There is agitation every year to have household workers and farm labor included in Social Security, but so far the pressure hasn't been great enough on Congress to get them to do so.

No, I certainly would not go against my mother if I were you. I think probably if you introduced to her whoever is to be with you as a chaperon, when you go to neighboring cities for school games, she might be more willing to let you go. Perhaps in time your father and mother may give you a little radio which you can use in your own room, but they are right, I think, in not wanting you to waste your time on murder-mystery books or too much listening to the radio when you should be doing other things. At your age, there are many things which still are an obligation to do every day. You might plan with your parents for some free time when you could do as you wish, and that would allow you to listen to such radio programs as you wanted during that time. If you make sure that your parents know the people with whom you want to "go places," they probably will be more willing to have you go; and if you show them that your taste in people and in reading and in radio is good, that will probably make a difference in their allowing you more freedom of choice

Because in the nineteenth century the individual had comparatively few liberties. There was no recognition that the government owed an individual certain things as a right. There were charities, but at that time the government was not conceived as doing away with charity. Now it is accepted that the government has an obligation to guard the rights of an individual so carefully that he never reaches a point which needs charity.

Nowadays the government controls which are advocated by the liberals are all to safeguard, in a modern and very complicated world, some of the things which individuals have come to feel they have a right to achieve. For instance, we insist that the government must see that every man who wants to work is able to get work suitable to his ability and at a wage on which he and his family can live. The nineteenth-century liberals did not have to face that problem and therefore no regulation was needed. Regulations have come only as our complicated civilization has made them necessary.

I am now busy writing the second volume of my autobiography and I hope to be through in the course of the next few months.