Feminist Looking Glass

I was doing a crossword puzzle recently and one of the questions was to name the person who said:

A woman’s place in public is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight.

I didn’t know the answer, but it turned out that the speaker was former “first lady” Bess Truman, wife of President Harry Truman.  She gave the quote while Harry was a senator and still believed it when Harry became President.  (Even though she apparently did quite a bit of work behind the scenes to help Harry.)  Her stance of trying to be invisible in public was, and is, particularly jarring because her immediate predecessor as “first lady” was Eleanor Roosevelt, who was, of course, a national force.  Bess Truman seemed to go out of her way to distance herself from Roosevelt.  For instance, she ended Roosevelt’s weekly meetings with female reporters, giving as her reason that “[y]ou don’t need to know me. I’m only the president’s wife and the mother of his daughter.”

One way of looking at this is to see how things have changed since the 1950’s.  Another way to look at it is to have even more gratitude for Eleanor Roosevelt.

Filed under: Politics, Stereotyping Tagged: | Bess Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt