Eleanor Roosevelt - If You Ask Me: Essential Advice from Eleanor Roosevelt

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For Roland and Tony

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Copyright 1946 by Eleanor Roosevelt

Copyright renewed 1974 by the Estate of Eleanor Roosevelt

Editors introduction, annotations, and revised material copyright 2018 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Portions of this material previously appeared in If You Ask Me, copyright 1946 by Eleanor Roosevelt, copyright renewed 1974 by the Estate of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Ladies Home Journal and McCalls magazine, reprinted here by permission of the Estate of Eleanor Roosevelt. The editor thanks the Estate for permission to reprint additional extracts from the columns written after 1946.

Copyright 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945 by The Curtis Publishing Company

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Interior design by Dana Sloan

Cover design by Nick Misani

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962. | Binker, Mary Jo, editor.

Title: If you ask me : essential advice from Eleanor Roosevelt / edited and with an introduction by Mary Jo Binker.

Other titles: Ladies home journal

Description: New York, NY : Atria Books, 2018. | Adapted from a corpus edition of The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers--Title page. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018029491 (print) | LCCN 2018033977 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501179815 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781501179792 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884-1962--Political and social views. | Advice columns. | Conduct of life. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / 20th Century.

Classification: LCC E807.1.R48 (ebook) | LCC E807.1.R48 A42 2018 (print) | DDC 973.917092--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029491

ISBN 978-1-5011-7979-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-7981-5 (ebook)

M Y GRANDMOTHER ALWAYS encouraged keeping an open mind and seeking as many different opinions as one had time for. She claimed it helped to clarify her own thinking. Eleanors story was a progression from timidity to self-confidence. She felt she could choose the right answer if given time for thoughtful deliberation and if she maintained respect for those around her even if she didnt share their views.

The passage of time has only proved how prescient she was. She saw clearly how things could change for the better, and she saw that the only possible solution was for people to take greater responsibility for their community, their country, and their world. Here, in If You Ask Me, she gives us advice both timeless and timely, worth reading for the time it grew out of as well as the timelessness of its observations on human nature and values.

Eleanor speaks to us from a familiar milieu: the Progressive Era and the Gilded Ageso gilded that wealthy white women, at least during daylight hours, left their townhouses en masse for the tenements of New York Citys Lower East Side. It is easy to dismiss these privileged social reformers, but we should also remember their victorieschild-labor and sanitation laws, womens suffrage, and contraceptive rights. Even Prohibition, though set against a backdrop of anti-immigrant zeal, was intended to combat a real culture of drug and alcohol abuse still destroying families today.

Eleanor was not a teetotaler. She drank socially, though not during Prohibition. She smoked because she sometimes felt it made others more comfortable for her to do so. She accepted the end of Prohibition as having been a foolhardy attempt to legislate morality, primarily because it had encouraged the consumption of spirits over wine and so made the problem only worse.

Grandmre knew that as First Lady people looked to her first as a symbol, but she infused a ceremonial role with warmth. As Franklin was president through the Great Depression and World War II, Eleanor provided a sign of continuity to rally around during uncertain times, representing the tenderhearted wing of her husbands administration. And yet, it is for the humanity of the New Deal and Franklins accessibility in his fireside chats that the F.D.R. presidency is best remembered.

Because of her modesty, it is up to us to recognize that Eleanor Roosevelt fundamentally changed the role of First Lady. This transition is reflected in the book of questions and answers that follows. Its funny to read some of the early answers that appear wrongheaded now, and its humbling to see how many are questions we are still grappling with today.

Throughout, Eleanors wit and personality shine through. Her response to the mother of an adolescent girl whos grown tall too fast and feels gangly and awkward as a result is sweet to read when one knows how Eleanor struggled with the same feelings. People wrote to her as an authority on everything from foreign policy to raising adolescents, and she repaid this faith placed in her by treating every letter writer with respect and care.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, quoting a nineteenth-century theologian, said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Grandmre, an eternal optimist, would have agreed, chiefly because she had great faith in the ability and the willingness of people to ensure that it did so.

Nancy Roosevelt Ireland

A DVICE COLUMNIST is not the first term that comes to mind when you think of Eleanor Roosevelt. Feminist icon, first lady, diplomat, humanitarian, politician, teacherthese are the more common ways she is described and remembered. Yet, for more than twenty years, from the time she was first lady until her death in 1962, she wrote an advice column that dealt with everything from how to achieve world peace to how to attain personal happiness. Her column, If You Ask Me, was no empty public relations exercise designed to demonstrate her supposed empathy. She genuinely cared about people and their problems. Forthright, honest, and insightful, her answers to readers queries are also surprisingly modern and strikingly relevant to our own tumultuous times.