If You Ask Me
by Eleanor Roosevelt

I am afraid it has not changed very much. He is a fine soldier and a good man. He was that when he was elected, and he is that today.

I can remember a time when in New York City society was supposed to be composed of 400 people, some belonging to "old" families who had come over here one or two generations before, frequently families who had made a great deal of money in the intervening time between their arrival and the early 1900s. Society, as it was then known, was somewhat different perhaps from café society today, but in essentials not very different because to most of these families amusing themselves and having enough money to make a little more show than their neighbors was important. If it was not money, being able to say your people had been important in some European country before they came here was considered a mark of distinction.

There were charming people and cultivated people in that restricted group in early New York, but in almost every group that you mix in today in New York's vastly larger population you can also find charming and cultivated people. Society has to be made up today of people who move in many different circles. Sometimes they cross lines, sometimes they do not, but there can't be the old differentiation which existed when the city was smaller.

On the question of standards, your mother-in-law probably means that there is a change in moral standards and in manners. But I don't think you can limit this to any one group. It seems to me to be much more an individual matter.

I regret that the Girl Scouts were intimidated into changing any of the wording which they had in their last book. There has been nothing subversive in anything they said in the past, and it seems to me the present handbook has become a weak and wishy-washy document.

I would not have the slightest desire to prevent an atheist from airing his or her views. I would feel, however, that equal time should be given to anyone else who wished to protest or answer these views. There are atheists in the world, and preventing them from saying what they think is certainly not going to wipe out atheism.

Not always. It just depends on the kind of meal it happens to be.

I have seen some very delightful homes where I should be entirely contented to go and live if I were no longer able to live in my own home. It is a mistake, I think, for older people to move in with a young family. I know it was frequently done years ago. Having Grandmother in the house was often useful and valuable for the children, but modern life is lived in smaller quarters, it is more hurried and less leisurely, and I think it is harder for different generations to adjust to each other. Personally, therefore, I should prefer to try to find a home in which I felt could have some privacy and live contentedly during my old age.