ontinued to write and speak publicly until 1976, four years before her death in 1980. However, the Depression was for both of them the publicly formative period, in which they came to be well known figures, and their association was largely with Depression era issues, especially poverty.
By the 1960s, they were both in a sense anachronisms, and it is notably that both of them were most prominent in, and identified with, the era of feminist slumber between the 1920s and the 1960s. Both had at one time been active suffrage advocates Dorothy Day, characteristically, went to jail for a suffrage demonstration at the White House1 but neither was later identified with feminism. Eleanor Roosevelt actively opposed the feminist inspired Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, while Dorothy Day was hostile to the re emerging feminism of the 1960s. These two women, in their lives and careers, thus play a complex, and to us seemingly contradictory role in the political development of women in the twentieth century.
Eleanor Roosevelt is most immediately famous as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's First Lady. As such, it is easy for us today to imagine that her public role was simply the standard role of
1Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (Albany: State University of New York, 1984), 22.
a First Lady: to symbolize, through public social action, her presidential husband's political agenda. As Nancy Reagan taped "Say No to Drugs" television spots, we might imagine, so did Eleanor Roosevelt though perhaps more energetically make public appearances on behalf of causes associated with the New Deal.
But Eleanor Roosevelt's concern with and committment to the cause of social justice long predated the New Deal; predated, in fact, her marriage to Franklin D. Roosevelt. She had been active in reform causes as a young women, set them aside for a decade and a half after her marriage a...