The Theme Of Silence In Eleanor Roosevelt's 'First Lady Bird'

Public opinion is a driving force in society. It influences every action and aspect of our lives from laws, stereotypes, and people’s roles in society, but these opinions can sometimes be extremely harmful and force people into silence. In First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson’s tribute to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at the first-anniversary luncheon of the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation in 1964, she inspires her audience, especially the women in the crowd, to speak out against the wrongs of society using a recurring theme of women’s empowerment, allusions to the empowering words of others, and Roosevelt’s example. Roosevelt was a role model for thousands and a revered public figure, but behind her idol persona, Johnson

Johnson regards the word silence in negative connotations as she says, “She [Roosevelt] would have taken the greatest risk of all if she had remained silent in the presence of wrong.” She repeats the same sentiment when she quotes a Jewish rabbi during the time of the Holocaust, “ The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful, and the most tragic problem— is silence,” and once more when she states that “silence is the greatest sin.” Her pairing of the word “silence” with words such as risk, shameful, disgraceful, tragic, and sin, strongly signifies that the worst thing to do is not to say anything at all whilst invoking guilt and creating a call to action by demonstrating the effect of no action. This message is especially prevalent to women who were not allowed a voice during the

By directly addressing the audience, Johnson creates a connection and directly calls the audience to action by invoking a fire within them. Johnson further inspires by using parallelism, saying, “She saw an unemployed father, and so she helped him. She saw a neglected Negro child, and so she educated him. She saw dictators hurling the world into war, and so she worked unflinchingly for peace.” The repeated grammatical structure emphasized the contextual difference between each example. It started minutely with helping a single person find a job, then continued to snowball to helping the entire world find peace, proving the domino effect of one’s actions and how simple it can be to make an