2014 Annual Eleanor Roosevelt Lecture: Professor Tony Badger on Women and the New Deal

Eleanor Roosevelt had very significant influence in shaping Franklin D. Roosevelt’s willingness to appoint women to important positions in New Deal programmes. As a consequence a network of women New Dealers became influential in Washington DC. Its roots lay in the Progressive movement and the suffragette movement. Its key figures included Molly Dewson, Frances Perkins, and Ellen Sullivan Woodward. However, its foremost member was the First Lady - even though she never held an administrative post. More than anyone else, Eleanor Roosevelt helped to make the 1930s a unique era for women in American government.

Tony Badger is Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and Master of Clare College. A renowned scholar of American history in the Great Depression, his publications include: The New Deal: The Depression Years; New Deal/New South, and FDR and the First Hundred Days. The latter was chosen by Prime Minister Gordon Brown as his personal book of the year in 2008 because it helped shape his own approach to combatting the Great Recession. Tony Badger is presently writing a political biography of Albert Gore Sr and his role in the modernization of the American South.