America's Women

by Gail Collins

  Mainly, the soap operas reworked over and over again a single theme—the men had failed to live up to their duties, and women had to pick up the pieces. The heroines were strong in the face of male weakness. The men in their lives were handsome but unreliable. They had affairs—Senator Marlin’s itch for philandering was cooled only by his crash into the arctic tundra. They failed in business or made everybody miserable with their irrational jealousy. Or they were left helpless by blindness, amnesia, or some crippling trauma. “The man in the wheelchair has come to be the standard Soapland symbol of the American male’s subordination to the female and his dependence on her greater strength of heart and soul,” complained James Thurber. Meanwhile, in the real world, the Depression was under way. The men at the top had somehow run the economy into the ground, and the ones at the bottom had lost their jobs and were unable to pay the mortgage. The women had to soldier on, holding the family together and sympathizing with the woes of Helen Trent and Stella Dallas.

  “DOING IT YOURSELF THESE DAYS?”

  The Great Depression lasted from the fall of the stock market in October 1929 to America’s entry into World War II in December 1941. The country had faced other huge economic crises, but this was the first to arrive since America had developed a large urban middle class, families who were dependent on wage income and who believed that the necessities of life included not only food and shelter, but electricity, indoor plumbing, and an automobile. Few of those people went hungry or homeless during the Depression, but they lived in a constant state of fear and diminished expectation. Diana Morgan, a North Carolina college student, felt “the world was falling apart” when she came home for Christmas vacation and found the phone had been disconnected. Children were shocked by seeing their fathers put on overalls instead of a suit for work, or a mother trying to sell door-to-door products. The writer Caroline Bird said her worst memory was seeing a friend of the family, who she remembered as a proud captain in the U.S. Navy, taking tickets at the neighborhood movie theater.

  The average family income dropped 40 percent between 1929 and 1933, and while men took second jobs or searched for better-paying employment in an oversaturated market, most of their wives stayed home and struggled with what Eleanor Roosevelt called “endless little economies and constant anxieties.” At the bottom of the middle class, women worried about losing their homes and falling back into the class of renters—in Indianapolis, more than half the families with mortgages had defaulted on them by 1934. Those higher on the economic ladder simply had to figure out how to keep up appearances without the help of servants. (An ad for bleach showed a pair of elegant hands in a tub of dirty laundry and asked: “Doing it yourself these days?”)

  Of course, there were people on the very top who kept their fortunes intact during the crash, and they didn’t always have the good grace to keep a low profile. Sally Rand, a touring ballet dancer stranded in Chicago, was outraged when she read about women spending thousands of dollars to buy gowns for the exclusive Beaux Arts Ball. She hired a horse and rode into the hotel (un)dressed as Lady Godiva, the legendary tax protester who rode naked through the streets of London. She created a sensation and became the star of the Chicago World’s Fair, playing peekaboo with the audience behind a set of big fans. (Rand claimed she invented her fan dance—a less naughty version of the striptease—because she couldn’t afford a costume.) “I got my first $1,000 a week…and the first thing I bought with it was a tractor for my stepfather,” she said later.

  Looking back on the Depression decades later, some people got nostalgic about the way hard times produced family solidarity. The thirties-era media also claimed to see a silver lining. “Many a family that has lost its car has found its soul,” editorialized a paper in Muncie, Indiana. But most women remembered a vague unease or a larger sense of crisis. The marriage rate dropped. The nation declared a truce in its war against spinsterhood, and magazines once again ran articles about women who found happiness in life without a husband. Live Alone and Like It was a best-seller. “Do you realize how many people in my generation are not married?” asked Elsa Ponselle, who was working as a teacher when the Chicago school system ran out of money and started paying its staff with IOUs. Her own boyfriend, a commercial artist, vanished when he was laid off from his job. “It hit him like a ton of bricks,” she told journalist-historian Studs Terkel.

  Society’s fight against contraceptives came to a virtual halt as well, partly because of national outcries against women on the dole who continued to have babies. In 1936, the federal court struck down all federal restrictions against birth control, in a case memorably named U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries. By 1940, only Massachusetts and Connecticut completely prohibited the dissemination of birth control. The birthrate plunged so low that for the first time in American history, the nation was not replacing itself. (The birthrate was about 3 million babies a year lower than it had been before the Crash.) In the 1930s, Caroline Bird recalled, the first thing friends asked a newly pregnant woman was “whether she had considered ‘doing something about it.’” Studies found high incidences of impotence in unemployed men—an easy metaphor for all those crippled husbands on radio series. The rate of divorce dropped, but abandonment soared. Lillian Wald’s visiting nurses in New York discovered a woman, the wife of an unemployed teacher, who had gone to the hospital to give birth to her first child and arrived home to find an eviction notice, no husband, and no furniture. He had emptied out the apartment before decamping.

  The people who suffered most during the Depression had generally been poor all along, and now they quickly got poorer. “I have watched fear grip the people in our neighborhood around Hull House,” wrote Jane Addams. Of all the terrible signs of the Depression, she felt, “That clutch of cold fear is one of the most hideous aspects.” In New York, Meridel LeSueur, writing an article for New Masses, said it was “one of the great mysteries of the city where women go when they are out of work and hungry.” Few women were actually on the breadlines, she noted, and there were no cheap flophouses for women as there were for men. A single woman, she concluded, “will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse so there are no social statistics concerning her.” (The New Masses, although it printed LeSueur’s impassioned essay, added an editor’s note criticizing the piece for being “defeatist in attitude, lacking in revolutionary spirit and direction.”)

  Certainly some single women slept in city parks and even traveled as hoboes on the rails—“dressed in slacks like men, you could hardly tell ’em,” one male itinerant said. Bertha Thompson, who called herself “Boxcar Bertha,” estimated that 500,000 to 2 million people were hoboes in the 1930s, and that perhaps a tenth of them were women. Most traveled in pairs, Thompson said, either with a man or another woman. “A few women traveled about with a mob or gang of men. These were of the hard-boiled bossy type usually, who had careless sex relations with anyone in their own group.” But mainly, the women who took to the road went with their families. Peggy Terry, who traveled as a migrant worker, remembered seeing a “Hooverville” in Oklahoma City. “Here were all these people living in old, rusted-out car bodies. I mean that was their home. There were people living in shacks made of orange crates. One family with a whole lot of kids were living in a piano box. This wasn’t just a little section, this was maybe ten miles wide and ten miles long.” The sense of solidarity among the poor was often—although certainly not always—strong. Housewives with very little still fed hungry tramps who came to their back doors. Pauline Kael, a teenager during the Depression who grew up to be a famous film critic, remembered her mother vowing: “I’ll feed them till the food runs out.” One of Lillian Wald’s visiting nurses went to teach a young woman how to give her firstborn baby a bath and found not one new mother and baby but two. The other girl had been in the next bed in the maternity ward, and when she confided she had no place to go, she was invited to the tiny tenement, where the husband gave u
p his half of the bed to the guest. “I can’t do much for her, but I can put a roof over her head,” said the first mother.

  “THE MOST LIBERATED WOMAN OF THE CENTURY”

  For Americans in the 1930s, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt loomed over everything. Times had been tough before, but people had never felt such a personal connection to the president who was trying to pull the nation out of its economic spiral. And the closest the country had come to an activist First Lady before Eleanor was probably when Dolly Madison saved the White House furnishings from the British during the War of 1812. Americans generally loved—or hated—the Roosevelts as a team. Eleanor was the most important woman in the Depression era, and possibly in the country’s history. During her husband’s administration, particularly in the early years before the threat of war, she was the great symbol of the left wing of the New Deal, the side that wanted not only to get the economy moving again, but also to lift up the majority of the population that had never gotten a share of the Roaring Twenties wealth. Eleanor’s people wanted to improve the housing of tenant farmers, give black people equal access to government services, and create model communities for impoverished coal mining families. They wanted to bring the ethic of the settlement houses into the federal government.

  Eleanor was a member of one of America’s great families, niece to Teddy Roosevelt and a distant cousin of her future husband. But she was not raised to be anyone significant. In fact, it’s surprising she survived her upbringing at all—one cousin called it “the grimmest childhood I had ever known.” Her father was an alcoholic who kept abandoning the family. One of her two brothers died when she was five years old, and her mother, who she remembered as “kindly and indifferent,” died when she was eight. Her father, who Eleanor worshiped despite his endless betrayals, died two years later. The orphan was sent to live with her grandmother, a stern woman with two alcoholic adult sons whose advances caused a teenage Eleanor to put three locks on her door. When she met Franklin, he was a student at Harvard and was known in the family as the not particularly impressive only son of a domineering widow. Eleanor got pregnant right after her wedding and spent the next ten years having six children and wriggling under her mother-in-law’s thumb. (“I was your real mother; Eleanor merely bore you,” Sara Roosevelt told her grandchildren.) During World War I, Eleanor discovered that Franklin had been having an affair with her social secretary. “The bottom dropped out of my own particular world,” she later told her friend Joseph Lash. Eleanor had a gift for intense friendships with both men and women, and one of the hallmarks of her confidence was the moment when she would sit down with a new friend and confide the story of Franklin and the social secretary.

  Although Eleanor had been growing increasingly active and independent, and showed a surprising taste for politics, she was released to become the woman we know in history when Franklin was stricken with polio in 1921 and crippled from the waist down. From then on, her primary duty, as she would famously explain, was to serve as his legs, to go where he could not go. She was no longer expected to live at home with her unfaithful spouse and his difficult mother and a houseful of children who she loved but never seemed to feel entirely comfortable with. Her job, as a wife and a woman, was to travel around—first through New York, and later through the entire country. She turned out to be one of those peripatetic women, heir to the restless spirit of Catharine Beecher, Clara Barton, and Susan B. Anthony. (“Mrs. Roosevelt Spends Night at White House,” jibed one newspaper headline.) She laid the political groundwork for her husband’s quick ascent from invalid to governor to president, then became the heart of the Roosevelt administration’s assault on the Depression, delivering news to her husband about what was happening around the country, pestering him about the things she had discovered, and introducing him to people she felt he needed to know. She averaged 100,000 pieces of mail a year, most from people who felt they had a personal connection with her from the movie newsreels, the radio, her lectures, her syndicated column, and her myriad articles for the national magazines. She answered up to 100 letters a day, sometimes enclosing personal checks.

  She was far ahead of her time when it came to things like civil rights, and she befriended people who were too controversial for her husband to associate with. (The FBI’s secret file on her eventually reached 4,000 pages.) But she took the edge off her radicalism by putting everything she did in the context of her role as a loyal wife. She went down into coal mines or flew off to the Pacific to visit American troops because her husband needed her to go on his behalf. She presented herself as the equivalent of the eighteenth-century Yankee merchant’s spouse, or the nineteenth-century plantation mistress, running the family business while her husband was far away. When she wrote and spoke, she made constant references to her role as mother and wife.

  The people accepted her work as the president’s substitute, just as they accepted all those widow-congresswomen who kept going to Washington to fill their husbands’ seats. A 1939 Gallup poll showed 67 percent of the public approved of Eleanor’s performance as First Lady, more than supported her husband at that time. “Eleanor, I think she’s the greatest thing that happened to anybody,” said Elsa Ponselle, the Depression-era Chicago schoolteacher. “I think of the way they talked about her, about her looks, about her voice. I used to get rabid.” Eleanor was no beauty, as she very well knew herself. “My dear, if you haven’t any chin and your front teeth stick out it’s going to show on the camera plate,” she told a friend who tried to coach her on how to pose for the photographers. And her high, fluty upper-class voice was an eager target for mimics. The gossip about her was vicious. The same people who spread rumors that Franklin was a syphilis-ridden madman locked up in a padded room in the White House claimed that Eleanor had a black lover, or that the Roosevelts were both part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the American government. But remarkably, her many enemies never seemed to notice the reality of her extremely unconventional personal life. In Eleanor’s time the White House was stuffed with her friends of both sexes, and Franklin’s friends of both sexes, who sometimes lived with them for months, or even years. Many of these friendships had an intense sexual undertone. Historians have never figured out whether Franklin was able to have sexual relations with anyone after his illness, or whether Eleanor ever had an actual affair with Lorena Hickok, the wire service reporter who gave up her career rather than give up her relationship with the First Lady. But they saved their strongest and most intimate feelings to share with people other than each other.

  Eleanor was generally unconcerned about physical comfort, clothes, or good food, much to the dismay of her husband and their dinner guests. (She happily set an example for the nation by serving 7-cent meals in the White House that any Depression-era family could eat, although few would have wanted to.) She never really forgave Franklin for the social secretary, and he often bridled at her nagging about political causes. But she had an extraordinarily fruitful political partnership with the most powerful man on earth. And she had learned how to live the life that suited her. She never let anyone, including the Secret Service, keep her penned up. She went flying with Amelia Earhart. She carried her own bags from the train if no one happened to be around to grab them away from her. She drove by herself and, when her guards protested about the danger, took target practice and carried a gun. One historian called her “the most liberated woman of the century.”

  “I DIDN’T LIKE THE IDEA OF BEING IMPEACHED”

  Once women got the right to vote, almost every president made it a point to give at least one woman a federal post. But until Franklin Roosevelt those jobs were not very important or very numerous. “Twelve appointments by five presidents in 24 years was not an exhilarating record,” said Molly Dewson, an official of the Democratic Party who was the chief lobbyist for female candidates for jobs in the Roosevelt administration. Dewson was very successful. Frances Perkins, who had been Roosevelt’s chief labor adviser when he was governor of New York, became the secretar
y of labor—the first woman ever to hold a Cabinet-level position. Nellie Tayloe Ross, that reluctant governor of Wyoming, resurfaced as director of the Mint. Businesswoman Josephine Roche was named assistant secretary of the Treasury. The Roosevelt appointees were generally middle-aged, overachieving products of the turn-of-the-century woman’s culture. (Florence Allen, who became the first woman federal appeals court judge in 1934, wrote in her autobiography that her earliest memory was sitting on her father’s lap while he taught her a sentence in Greek.) The Roosevelt administration women dined together, sent each other notes, and supported each other in times of trial. When the Gridiron Club of Washington journalists invited all the Cabinet members except Frances Perkins to their annual dinner, Eleanor Roosevelt organized a counterevent at the White House for female government officials—and female reporters, who weren’t invited to the Gridiron, either.

  The women’s network was above all Eleanor’s network. “When I wanted help on some definite point, Mrs. Roosevelt gave me the opportunity to sit by the President at dinner and the matter was settled before we finished our soup,” said Dewson. Mary McLeod Bethune, the Negro Affairs Director for the National Youth Administration, had a medium-level post but she used Eleanor’s access to carve out a powerful role as the emissary between black Americans and the White House. Bethune, the founder of a college in Daytona, Florida, was one of the most gifted organizers in American women’s history—a Frances Willard with far less money and a needier constituency. While she lobbied for jobs and programs for her people, she gave as well as took, boosting the Roosevelts among black voters, and, later, mobilizing African American support for the war.

  Frances Perkins, the labor secretary, was the highest-ranking woman to serve in the federal government and a lightning rod for conservative opponents of the Roosevelt administration. She rarely showed much emotion, having been trained to a certain stolidity by her parents, who made it a point to warn their small daughter that she was not pretty, so she would learn to face unpleasant facts squarely. As she became more influential, she began to wear rather old-fashioned black dresses, under the theory that men responded best to powerful women who reminded them of their mothers. She was singularly unflappable. Early in her career, a Philadelphia brothel owner named Sam Smith decided that Perkins’s reform work interfered with his business and followed her home one night with some of his thuglike associates. Perkins ducked down a dark alley, opened her umbrella, and let the men turning the corner walk into it while she screamed “Sam Smith!” as loudly as she could. The men ran away, and Smith was eventually put out of business. When Perkins worked for Roosevelt, she repeatedly calmed down labor crises by getting government officials to withdraw their police and state troopers and let the employers and strikers work out things on their own. On one of those occasions, the grateful workers took her to a house where she watched men emerge from the basement with sacks and suitcases full of dynamite they had been planning to use to blow up their factory. They dumped it into a nearby canal instead.