Eleanor Roosevelt & Dorothy Day
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The pioneering feminists and other women reformers of the nineteenth century created roles and opportunities for women which never previously existed. During the first half of the twentieth century these roles were expanded, first by the woman suffrage movement, and then by the increasing impact of prominent, reform minded women whose program was often not explicitly feminist, and who therefore, in some respects, could more readily escape being "ghettoized" as concerned only with "women's issues." The Great Depression played a signficant role in separating the role of woman reformers from feminism per se, and created new linkages between quasi traditional women's roles and the most critical social issues of the day. Women had long been involved as poverty workers, in one way or another and the harsh effect of the Depression was to bring poverty to the fore as a public concern. Two women who between them could characterize and in a way symbolize the role and nature of the Depression era woman reformer were Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Day, co founder and long time leading figure in the Catholic Worker movement. Although they evidently never met, and worked in very different spheres, Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Day had much in common. Both were born in the late nineteenth century and grew up in comfortable (in Eleanor Roosevelt's case, considerably more than comfortable) surroundings. Both came to the fore as public figures in the Depression,
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inism," in Hoff Wilson and Lightman, 226. protective of women's supposed frailties and special status as actual or prospective wives and mothers.
As a result, there was a profound tension between social reformers, who wanted to extend what protection they could to at least part of the work force particularly women and children and feminists, who saw such "protection" as at least equally a limitation, and whose demand was for equal rights, not special protection.7
This had a particular bearing on the political positions which the two national political parties took regarding the Equal Rights Amendment. Today, the Democratic Party has embraced it, while opposition has been centered in the Republican right wing's "social issue" conservatives. In 1940, however, the Republican Party was the first to give a limited endorsement to the ERA, while social and labor interests among the Democrats including Eleanor Roosevelt long continued to oppose it.8
In fact, this represents a tension that has continued to exist between feminists and many other elements of the "progressive" movement in the contemporary U.S. The feminist movement has made relatively few inroads among minority women, or among blue an
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Approximate Word count = 2765
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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