page_title: Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, first and second terms
section_title: Women
hierarchical_section_title: Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, first and second terms / First term domestic affairs / Other domestic policies / Women
caption_attribution_description: English: Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly right. depicted person: Eleanor Roosevelt (age: 48.77)
context_page_description: The first and second terms of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt began on March 4, 1933, when he was inaugurated as the 32nd President of the United States, and ended with Roosevelt's third inauguration on January 20, 1941. Roosevelt, a Democrat from New York, took office after defeating Republican President Herbert Hoover, who had presided over the start of the Great Depression. Roosevelt led the implementation of the New Deal, a series of programs designed to provide relief, recovery, and reform to Americans and the American economy. He also presided over a realignment that made his New Deal Coalition dominant in the Fifth Party System.
  During his first hundred days in office, Roosevelt spearheaded unprecedented major legislation and issued a profusion of executive orders. The Emergency Banking Act helped put an end to a run on banks, while the 1933 Banking Act and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 provided major reforms in the financial sector. To provide relief to unemployed workers, Roosevelt presided over the establishment of several agencies, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Public Works Administration, and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
context_section_description: Women received recognition from the Roosevelt administration.  In relief programs, they were eligible for jobs if they were the breadwinner in the family. During the 1930s there was a strong national consensus that in times of job shortages, it was wrong for the government to employ both a husband and his wife. Nevertheless, relief agencies did find jobs for women, and the WPA employed about 500,000. The largest number, 295,000, worked on sewing projects, producing 300 million items of clothing and mattresses for people on relief and for public institutions such as orphanages. Many other women worked in school lunch programs. Between 1929 and 1939, the percentage of female government employees increased from 14.3 percent to 18.8 percent, and women made up nearly half of the workforce of the WPA. From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million. Few women worked in the high-unemployment sectories like mining and heavy industry. They worked in clerical jobs or light factories (such as food).  
  Roosevelt appointed more women to office than any previous president. The very first woman in the cabinet was Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Roosevelt also appointed Florence Ellinwood Allen to the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, making her the first woman to serve on a federal appeals court. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt played a highly visible role in building a network of women in advisory roles and in promoting relief programs.  The New Deal thereby placed more women in public life--a record that stood until the 1960s.  In 1941 Mrs. Roosevelt became co-head of the Office of Civil Defense, the major civil defense agency. She tried to involve women at the local level, but she feuded with her counterpart, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, and had little impact on policy.  Historian Alan Brinkley states that gender equality was not on the national agenda:
  Nor did the New Deal make much more than a symbolic effort to address problems of gender equality....New Deal programs (even those designed by New Deal women) continued most mostly to reflect traditional assumptions about women's roles and made few gestures toward the aspirations of women who sought economic independence and professional opportunities. The interest in individual and group rights that became so central to the postwar liberalism... was faint, and at times almost invisible, within the New Deal itself.
caption: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt
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