The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Digital Edition > My Day
My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt

[Original version of the column. Text in red are tagged with <sic> (needs correction); text in purple are tagged with <orig> (needs regularization); and text in blue are tagged names of persons or organizations. View emended version]

      

ATLANTA, Friday—We left Washington last night at midnight, the evening for me was fairly hurried. After I went to the Mayflower Hotel with my husband the big dinner there and greeted the assembled throng, Mr. Lawrence Robert, Secretary of the Democratic National Committee, escorted me to the New Willard Hotel where I greeted first the young Democrats in the downstairs dining room and then went up to the usual banquet room which was more crowded than I had ever seen it before. They told me they had some fourteen hundred people dining there. Because of the fact that I could not stay very long, they interrupted their dinner and Mr. Maury Maverick, of Texas, the Toastmaster of the evening introduced me. I had not expected to make a speech and so only said a few words and then proceeded into another dining room and greeted the young Democrats there before leaving the hotel.

I must say that it is encouraging to find so many young Democrats growing up to strengthen the Party, and I hope they will retain their youth on into old age for we need the flexibility and enthusiasm of youth to make any political party respond to the needs of today.

I wish very much that F.P.A. and the New York Herald Tribune had not parted company so suddenly for I miss his column greatly. If this could have been done in a more leisurely fashion we might have been able to find his column in another paper and I really miss the contact.

I noticed two little items in the paper the other day and much as I like Mr. John Golden, I am going to differ with him! He says:

"A writer of great plays must have lived, gone through most of the valleys, and over most of the hills of experience. Men can do that but women can not."...... "There will never be any really great women writers in the theatre, because women do not know as much as men."

It is certainly true that a writer of great plays must have experience and the possibility of experiencing emotion in order to interpret it, but to say that men are the only ones who can have this experience is ludicrous, and to say that for these reasons: "there will never be any really great women writers in the theatre", is equally funny because as a rule women know not only what men know but much that men will never know. For how many men really know the heart and soul of a woman?

We slept late this morning and went into the dining car for breakfast enjoying the glorious sunshine which poured in through the windows. One little girl, looking very stolid and entirely bewildered was brought up to me to shake hands. I can not help wondering if in the future these children will be at all interested to know that they once shook hands with a President's wife? They certainly are not very much interested at the moment, and show distinct relief when their fond parents lead them away.

E.R.


Names and Terms Mentioned or Referenced

Persons
Geographic
  • Atlanta (Ga., United States) [ index ]


About this document

My Day by Eleanor Roosevelt, March 6, 1937

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962
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Digital edition created by The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project The George Washington University 312 Academic Building 2100 Foxhall Road, NW Washington, DC 20007

  • Brick, Christopher (Editor)
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  • Regenhardt, Christy (Associate Editor)
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  • Black, Allida M. (Editor)
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  • Binker, Mary Jo (Associate Editor)
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  • Alhambra, Christopher C. (Electronic Text Editor)
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Digital edition published 2008, 2017 by
The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project

Available under licence from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

Published with permission from the Estate of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt.

MEP edition publlished on June 30, 2008.

TEI-P5 edition published on April 28, 2017.

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Transcription created from a photocopy of a draft version of a My Day column instance archived at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. My Day column draft dated March 5, 1937, FDR Library, Hyde Park, NY
TMsd, 5 March 1937, AERP, FDRL