She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker

John Thomas McGuire, She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker, Journal of American History, Volume 98, Issue 2, September 2011, Pages 566–567, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jar311

Extract

The 2007 publication of the first volume of Eleanor Roosevelt's post–World War II papers became a clear sign of the closer attention scholars now pay to that stage of her career. While Brigid O’Farrell's new book concentrates on Roosevelt's involvement with the labor movement in the United States from approximately 1917 through her death in 1962, it makes its most significant contribution by illuminating four facets of that relationship after World War II.

First, O’Farrell clearly links Roosevelt's concern for labor issues with her international work, particularly with the 1948 enactment of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Second, she demonstrates how Roosevelt used her “My Day” columns and articles to support labor, particularly in opposing the Taft-Hartley Act and right-to-work laws. Third, the author deftly evokes the friendships between Roosevelt and labor leaders such as David Dubinsky and, most notably, the United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther. Finally, and most important, She Was One of Us also contributes to the development of one of the most significant interpretations of post–World War II feminism. In The Other Women's Movement (2004), the historian Dorothy Sue Cobble described how working-class women in the United States engaged in “labor feminism.” One question deserving further exploration is whether former national social justice feminist leaders such as Roosevelt continued their reform activities after 1945. O’Farrell demonstrates how Roosevelt worked with the leading labor feminist Esther Peterson and how she also dealt with public service workers such as hospital employees.