The Franklin D. Roosevelt
Presidential Library and Museum
will present "Eleanor Everywhere"
a Women's History Month
author talk and book signing
with Sandra Opdycke author of
THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL
ATLAS OF WOMEN IN AMERICA
Wednesday, March 21, 2018 at 4:00 p.m.
Henry A. Wallace Center at the
FDR Presidential Library and Home
HYDE PARK, NY -- The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum will present "Eleanor Everywhere" a Women's History Month author talk and book signing with
Sandra Opdycke author of THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL ATLAS OF WOMEN IN AMERICA on Wednesday, March 21, 2018. The program will begin at 4:00 p.m. in Henry A. Wallace Center at the FDR Presidential Library and Home. Following the presentation, Opdycke will be available to sign copies of her book.
Eleanor Roosevelt invented a new way to be First Lady. During her White House years she spoke out regularly on public issues. She based her comments on what she learned from her vast correspondence, her huge network of personal contacts, and especially from her extensive travels around the country. Besides accompanying her husband on his occasional campaign trips, Mrs. Roosevelt traveled constantly on her own, often covering more than 40,000 miles a year.
One typical 12-hour day in 1936 involved traveling many miles by car, giving several speeches, and visiting a school, a chicken farm, a tearoom, a craft shop, several dozen new low-cost homes, and a vacuum-cleaner assembly plant. Such trips were neither leisurely nor scenic, but because of the way that Eleanor Roosevelt looked at people and the way she listened to them, she was able to see what was unique and human in each place she visited. As a result, her travels accomplished two important things: first, she made the New Deal a vivid presence for millions of people; second, she provided her husband with a remarkable perspective on what was happening to ordinary Americans during the Great Depression.
THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL ATLAS OF WOMEN IN AMERICA
Looking at general trends and specific items such as life in a tenement, women working overseas in World War I, the production of cosmetics in the 1920s, and new female immigration, THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL ATLAS OF WOMEN IN AMERICA portrays the history of American women from a vivid geographical and demographic perspective. In a variety of colorful maps and charts, the atlas documents milestones in the evolution of the social and political rights of women including the rise of reform movements such as temperance, women's suffrage, and abolition during the 19th century, and contraception, abortion rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment in the 20th.
Sandra Opdycke is a social historian with a particular interest in women's history and urban history. Besides the ROUTLEDGE HISTORICAL ATLAS OF WOMEN IN AMERICA, her books include NO ONE WAS TURNED AWAY: THE ROLE OF PUBLIC HOSPITALS IN NEW YORK CITY SINCE 1900, JANE ADDAMS AND HER VISION FOR AMERICA, THE FLU EPIDEMIC OF 1918: AMERICA'S EXPERIENCE IN THE GLOBAL HEALTH CRISIS, and THE WPA: CREATING JOBS AND HOPE IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION. She also serves as an occasional lecturer at the Center for Lifetime Studies, and is currently working on a book about woman suffrage.
