Eleanor Roosevelt's License to Pack Heat

[Parker 213]

Found this on a New York forum. Thought it was interesting enough to share. (I like old stuff, I find it fascinating.)

 

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/05/20/eleanor_roosevelt_the_first_lady_s_license_to_carry_a_pistol.html?fb_ref=sm_fb_share_blogpost

 

At the FDR Library, one exhibit holds the contents of Eleanor Roosevelt’s wallet. While many of the cards and slips of paper from the wallet are fascinating (a Met membership card, a scrap of a poem about the importance of good cooks), this pistol permit is perhaps the most surprising.

Roosevelt was a peripatetic traveler, covering large distances in service of the many projects she pursued both during and after the FDR presidency. It was Eleanor’s determination to drive her own car that led to her pistol ownership. The Secret Service begged her to take an agent, a police escort, or at least a chauffeur; she refused. The pistol was a compromise: a small bit of protection to put their minds at ease.

The argument that women should carry weapons to protect themselves wasn’t a common one during the 1930s and 1940s. Laura Browder, author of Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America, writes on her website that while early twentieth-century ads selling guns to women touted firearms ownership for personal safety, the theme vanished during the midcentury (and re-emerged again in the 1980s). Eleanor’s situation, as a stubbornly independent First Lady, was clearly an unusual one.

Although Eleanor told the fascinated press, when she first got the weapon, that she was a “fairly good shot,” a New York Times reporter at the 1972 dedication of the Eleanor Roosevelt Wings of the FDR Library interviewed several of Eleanor’s friends who said that she carried the permit, but not the pistol.

 

[CageFighter 236]

NYC restrictions were BS back then too, WTF!

[JustJoe 0]

NYC restrictions were BS back then too, WTF!

Exactly what I was thinking.

[cigarsnscotch 0]

That is cool I agree. I too enjoy old history stuff like this.

[Krdshrk 3,878]

72 years old and 5'10"?  She was a tall lady.

[Parker 213]

[raz-0 1,259]

As I understand it, she started carrying as she became more involved with the civil rights movement. 1957 is when she more or less told the souther democrats to go F themselves on the issue. You will notice that is the year on the permit to carry. 

[TheLugNutZ 21]

interesting!