Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and its impact on US.

Essay by SexySlave987High School, 11th gradeA+, June 2004

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The Great Depression was a watershed in American history. Soon after Herbert Hoover assumed the presidency in 1929, the economy began to decline, and between 1930 and 1933 the contraction assumed catastrophic proportions never experienced before or since in the United States. Disgusted by Hoover's inability to stem the collapse, in 1932 the voters elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt, along with a heavily Democratic Congress, and set in motion the radical restructuring of government's role in the economy known as the New Deal. It included relief programs for the unemployed, the expanded regulation of agriculture, industry , finance, the establishment of a legal minimum wage, creation of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and income supplements for dependent children in single-parent families, the aged poor, the physically handicapped, and the blind.

During the depression it was customary for married women to be fired. In several states, all married schoolteachers, university professors, and hospital workers were fired.

Within two years, thousands of women in government service were dismissed. Home mortgages were foreclosed; life savings were lost. The formerly working wives and children of army and navy personnel went on relief. FDR's First 100 Days did nothing for an estimated 140,000 homeless women and girls who wandered U.S. streets and railroad sidings. New programs ignored the needs of almost four million unemployed women. The plight of single, divorced, and widowed women was also ignored. Dismayed that no specific program existed to alleviate the suffering of women, Eleanor Roosevelt sponsored a White House Conference on the Emergency Needs of Women in November 1933. Within two months, under Ellen Sullivan Woodward's direction of the Women's Division of FERA, over 300,000 women were employed. By January 1934 every state relief administrator received sixty job descriptions and was ordered to hire a women's division coordinator to recruit women of...