Remarks at Presentation of the Final Report of the President's Commission on the Status of Women.

I WANT to express my very great appreciation to Mrs. Peterson and to Professor Lester, who has performed many public services over a great many years, and also Senator Neuberger and Mrs. Green and Members of Congress and to the others who worked on this report.

I think this is an extremely vital matter with which we are dealing. This used to be an old story, that a civilization could be judged on how it treated its elderly people. But I think it can also be judged on its opportunities for women.

I think that we should concern ourselves with two or three main areas: one, working women, what arrangements we can make for them so that they can maintain themselves, their homes, their husbands, their children, make sure that their children are protected; and that we give encouragement to the de.velopment of institutes, structures in our society which will make it easier for women to fulfill their responsibility to their children--which of course is a most important matter to them-but also permit them to use their powers and to develop their talents. So that I think we have a great obligation to the mass of women who work.

Then, we have an obligation to the skilled, the trained, the unusual women. I see thousands of women getting out of colleges every year and I wonder what happens to all these skills. What contribution do they make? What chance do they have to make full use of their powers? To the Greeks, to find happiness is full use of your powers along the lines of excellence. And I wonder whether, in our society, women have the chance to use their powers, their full powers, intellectual powers, emotional powers, and all the rest, along the lines of excellence.

So I think that this report is very useful to us and like all reports it will only be important if we can do something about it. I want to assure you, and I think that the Members of Congress who are here and others who participated in the work of this group will try to do something about it on the administrative level, Executive, and in the Congress and, I think, in the country.

I think we ought to look, as a society, at what our women are doing and the opportunities before them. Other societies, which we don't admire as much as our own, it seems to me have given this problem particular attention. I think we ought to, too, and therefore I express my very sincere thanks to the members of the Commission; of course, to Mrs. Roosevelt. This represents a legacy of hers in a very real sense. So I want to express my very warm thanks to you all and I do so on behalf of our country and women everywhere.