Eleanor Roosevelt’s achievements as a pioneering First Lady are all the more remarkable when we consider the circumstances under which they took place: the ongoing crisis of the Great Depression, the relentless social pressure to confine herself to genteel hostessing in the White House, and her complicated relationship with her husband. In this lecture Sandra Opdycke will explore how Eleanor Roosevelt dealt with those challenges, using her extensive travels around the country during the 1930s to support her husband’s presidency, to hold his administration to its highest ideals, and at the same time to create some personal space for herself in a role that might easily have smothered her own aspirations.

Sandra Opdycke, Ph.D. is an historian. She recently published When Women Won the Vote, about the woman suffrage movement. She has also written books about the flu epidemic of 1918, the WPA of the 1930s, and Bellevue Hospital, as well as a biography of Jane Addams, an historical atlas of American women’s history, and several co-authored books and articles on social policy. She worked for a number of years at Hudson River Psychiatric Center, and later taught American History and Urban History at Bard, Vassar, and Marist Colleges. She serves as an occasional lecturer at the Center for Lifetime Studies in Poughkeepsie.