Eleanor Roosevelt Visit to Seattle photographs, March 24, 1938

Photographs from Eleanor Roosevelt's visit to Seattle in March, 1938, during which she visited several local sites related to the Works Progress Administration (WPA), including the local Household Service Demonstration Project house, a Federal Art Project exhibit, a West Seattle recreation center, a Boy Scout Camp, and a flood control project featuring a model of the Puyallup river. Roosevelt is accompanied in several images by her daughter Anna, who worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer during this period.

The Household Service Demonstration Project, initiated as part of the WPA in July 1937, was designed to train women for domestic employment, with instruction in cooking, table setting, child care, laundry, budgeting, and cleaning. Demonstration sites were located in several cities across the United States; in Seattle the project ran classes out of a house located at 1708 Interlaken Blvd, where trainees worked under the auspices of the National Youth Administration (NYA), another New Deal-era agency. The Household Service Demonstration Project lasted until January 1942 and trained thousands of women.

Photographs in the collection are arranged by date in accordance with details in Roosevelt's national syndicated newspaper column My Day , one of the few complete chronicles of her public actions. See the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project for further details and digitized versions of My Day .