Remarks at the Opening Session of the Women's Bureau Conference.

Mr. Secretary, Miss Miller, and members of the Women's Bureau Conference:

It is certainly a pleasure for me to be over here this morning. When I told Admiral Leahy and the aides that I was coming over to address a conference of good-looking women, you should have seen them run to get into the car!

When Miss Miller opened her remarks, she started off by saying that you represented workers, homemakers, citizens. I want to reverse that order. I want to say homemakers, workers, citizens. If it were not for the homemakers, we would have neither the citizens nor the workers.

Not often is there a meeting in Washington of a body of women as widely representative in their interests as the group gathered here today. The occasion is an especially happy one for me because it permits me to speak of some of the things that are dose to my heart and that I know are close to yours as well.

First, let me say how delighted I was to learn that the Department of Labor was planning this conference of women leaders to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, where the movement for women's rights and women's social freedom was launched. I feel that I am among friends of the most valued kind-those whose hearts and minds are devoted to making this country a better place to live in, for all our people. That is the true patriotism.

I am proud that under my administration women are serving in a number of positions of influence in international affairs. The speaker who will address you this evening, Dean C. Mildred Thompson of Vassar College, was twice governmental delegate to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. That is what UNESCO stands for. If anybody wants to take it down, they will know what UNESCO means now. Miss Dorothy Kenyon, a member of your Thursday morning panel, is the United States member on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt heads the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. And I want to say to you she is doing a wonderful job. Mrs. Roosevelt has made a wonderful contribution to the welfare of this Nation since the President died. He is the only President I ever think of as President.

These outstanding women are your ambassadors to the international world; they are there because of the long, hard, devoted work of women like yourselves and those you represent. You women come from many walks of life; you have varying backgrounds and interests. But you have joined together--and this is the great contribution you are making--in giving form and substance to the social, political, and economic aspirations of our country.

You are all bringing your talents and experience to serve a common purpose-to carry out a program in which you could join together, sinking minor differences because of your vital common objectives. There should be monuments to the successes that have crowned these common efforts during the hundred years you are celebrating-successes like women's suffrage, social legislation, greater economic opportunities for women, the opening up of higher education to women, the successful battle for civil and political rights. We are working for those very same things for a large number of our population.

You have still before you many unfinished tasks. Not all of them can or need be enumerated here. You have been studying them and seeking remedies that will increase the dignity and usefulness of women in our society. These things cannot be accomplished all at once, or all by the same means. Some of them are now before the Congress, like equal pay for equal work, and the ending of specific discriminations against women, such as limitations on the right to serve on Federal juries. It is within your strength to accomplish these things in which you believe, but only if you make your goals known and persist in demanding action. There isn't a single man in Government can resist you, if you really want him to do SO.

Women's organizations have at hand a ready weapon which they have not yet used to its full capacity--the power of the consumer. It has been said over and over again that women control the bulk of the Nation's wealth; they certainly channel its day-to-day spending for food, for clothing, for education, for all the things that make for better living. This is a weapon which you can use together to combat one of the enemies that now threaten us--the high cost of living. And I think you are having some effect on it right now.

Women have learned the arts of peace. They have discovered ways of making peace exciting and full of challenge. They know, better than men, that the war against poverty and fear and disease and hunger is the war to which we can, as yet, see no end. Even in the United States, where the standard of living is higher than anywhere else in the world, much remains to be done.

It is your special responsibility to carry on this fight, to persuade the men to support you in it, so that the United States can push on toward the goal of a better life for all our people.

In this task I wish you all Godspeed.