WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Our opening song is “Sophisticated Lady,” the Duke Ellington jazz standard, performed by Ella Fitzgerald, speaking of disillusionment and loss. There’s plenty of that to around in the life of Eleanor Roosevelt and her circle of family and friends.
Our show today is “Eleanor in Love and Politics.”
In the first part of the show we’ll be joined by Susan Quinn. We’ll discuss her biography of love and friendship, Eleanor & Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady. That first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, once called “First Lady of the World,” has also been christened the “First Lady of Gay Rights” and in Quinn’s new book we’re introduced to the woman who was likely Roosevelt’s first, and deepest, love, the journalist and writer Lorena Hickok. But, we’ll also hear about her love for Joe Lash and David Gurewitsch, the latter of whom Eleanor Roosevelt wrote or telephoned everyday for the last ten years of her life.
For part two of the show we’ll turn to historian Jane Marcellus to ask about Eleanor Roosevelt’s first book, the 1933 It’s Up to the Women, a work that Marcellus claims is a counter-statement to the propaganda project instigated by Edward Bernays for the presidential campaign of Franklin Roosevelt rolled out in the February 1932 Ladies’ Home Journal. What was “up to the women” according the father of propaganda and public relations? To save Democracy via Patriotic shopping, of course!
GUESTS
Susan Quinn has written for The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, and the Boston Globe Magazine, among others. Her biography of Karen Horney was awarded the Boston Globe’s Lawrence Winship award, and she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller residency at Bellagio in Italy for work on the life of Marie Curie.
Jane Marcellus is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University. Her scholarly work examines media representation of employed women in the early and mid-20th century. She is the author of Business Girls and Two-Job Wives: Emerging Media Stereotypes of Employed Women (Hampton Press, 2011) and co-author of Mad Men and Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness (Peter Lang, 2014), which was named to Teen Vogue magazine’s “most epic feminist reading list ever” in 2015.
RELATED
“Eleanor Roosevelt’s Close Relationship With the Journalist Lorena Hickok”
“The Charms of Eleanor” by Russell Baker
“Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady of Gay Rights”
The Museum of Public Relations – Edward Bernays
Rosie the Riveter: Real Women Workers in World War II
MUSIC
“Sophisticated Lady” performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington
“Autumn in New York” performed by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
“Rosie the Riveter” performed by the Kay Kyser Band
“Hooray for Love” performed by Ella Fitzgerald
UP NEXT
Do You Bite Your Thumb At Us, Sir?
What is Civil Discourse and why do politicians and pundits seem to resort to admonishment when discourse gets messy and less than civil. Also, what is civility in the first place and who gets to define it? We’ll talk to two scholars, Aurelian Craiutu and Teresa Bejan, both with new books that seek to center the meaning of civility in politics and religious discourse. Tolerance appears to be a resurgent watchword…but doesn’t tolerance imply a kind of superiority and condescension for the tolerated?
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon
Board Engineer: Jennifer Brooks
Executive Producer: Joe Crawford
