Eleanor Roosevelt on drawing power from a physical disability

    Beginning in 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt conducted a monthly department in the Ladies’ Home Journal, in which she answered readers’ questions. One was this:

    Do you feel that your husband would have been as truly great a man had he not been stricken, as he was, with infantile paralysis? Being physically handicapped myself, I am interested in learning whether you think an illness or infirmity can be instrumental in awakening powers that might otherwise have remained undeveloped.

    Her answer:

    I think it depends largely upon the individual’s strength of character and ability to use to good advantage whatever happens to him in life. In the case of my husband, he accepted infantile paralysis as a challenge. I never but once heard him complain, and never did he take the attitude that he was going to be a useless member of society. With that as a beginning, I think that the years of discipline and suffering which he went through made him the great individual that he became. He understood human suffering and he knew it could be overcome. He also knew that one must have physical and spiritual courage; and, if one had that, there was no situation that could not be met.

    (Quoted from page 48 of If You Ask Me, by Eleanor Roosevelt. Curtis Publishing Company, 1946)
    For a brief biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, click here. For images of or relating to Eleanor Roosevelt, click here.