Letters to Eleanor: Voices of the Great Depression examines how the flood of letters from ordinary Americans to the First Lady established a bond of hope and trust. Through this paper trail, Eleanor Roosevelt was able to help many petitioners find jobs, food, housing, and clothes. To others she offered the encouragement and support many need in the bleak Thirties. Through it all Eleanor Roosevelt exhibited a tradionalist social outlook by her support of homemakers and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. But as the New Deal matured, she became an ardent reformer who fought for an anti-lynching law and job opportunity for women in the federal service. Buy beneath her incessant activity to help others there was an inner Eleanor who constantly sought emotional support from female colleagues or her distant correspondents, a support she did not receive form FDR or her family.

Examines broad shifts in American work values from their Calvinist origins to present controversies involving work, welfare, and affirmative action.

American Work Values: Their Origin and Development examines the broad shifts in American work values from their European origins to the present. It analyzes shifts from work as salvation to work as opportunity and alienation, and concludes with a more recent focus on self-fulfilling employment in a context of industrial downsizing.

Beginning with the Lutheran-Calvinist support of work for the glory of God, the book's focus shifts to the change in work values that occurred from early deindustrialization in America to the end of the Great Depression, a period characterized by both opportunity and alienation. The modern trends that followed led to the empowerment of employees even as that empowerment tested the values of such participation in a climate of rampant downsizing. The book also deals with the debates related to work and welfare that simmered during these transformations. Whether it involved policy-makers in sixteenth-century Europe or wonks in the Washington of 1996, controversy over public assistance to the deserving and undeserving poor remained a raging controversy that spilled over into the debate on affirmative action.

Letters to Eleanor: Voices of the Great Depression examines how the flood of letters from ordinary Americans to the First Lady established a bond of hope and trust. Through this paper trail, Eleanor Roosevelt was able to help many petitioners find jobs, food, housing, and clothes. To others she offered the encouragement and support many need in the bleak Thirties. Through it all Eleanor Roosevelt exhibited a tradionalist social outlook by her support of homemakers and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. But as the New Deal matured, she became an ardent reformer who fought for an anti-lynching law and job opportunity for women in the federal service. Buy beneath her incessant activity to help others there was an inner Eleanor who constantly sought emotional support from female colleagues or her distant correspondents, a support she did not receive form FDR or her family.