Eleanor Roosevelt

Long before the United Nations called her to a world stage, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was a serious child in Manhattan, born on October 11, 1884, into the wealthy Roosevelt and Livingston families. She preferred her middle name, Eleanor. Her family stood close to power, as she was a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, yet privilege did not spare her from early sorrow. Her mother died when Eleanor was young, one of her brothers died soon after, and her father died in 1894. Those losses left her prone to depression, and they also gave her an early acquaintance with fear, loneliness, and responsibility.

Raised after her parents’ deaths in the household of her maternal grandmother in Tivoli, New York, Roosevelt grew up insecure and hungry for affection. At 15, she was sent to Allenswood Boarding Academy in London, where she was deeply influenced by its founder and director, Marie Souvestre. The education she received there helped draw out a wider sense of self and of the world. In 1905, she married Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her fifth cousin once removed. Between 1906 and 1916, she gave birth to six children, one of whom died in infancy.

The Roosevelt marriage changed after Eleanor discovered Franklin’s affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, in 1918. With the liaison officially ended through the mediation of Sara Roosevelt, Franklin’s mother, Eleanor and Franklin began keeping more independent agendas. Eleanor joined the Women’s Trade Union League and became active in the New York state Democratic Party. When Franklin was stricken with a paralytic illness in 1921, she helped persuade him to remain in politics. After his election as governor of New York in 1928, and throughout the rest of his political career, she regularly made public appearances on his behalf.

As first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms as president, Eleanor Roosevelt became the longest-serving first lady in American history and greatly expanded what the role could be. She traveled, spoke, listened, and argued in public. She was the first presidential spouse to hold regular press conferences, write a daily newspaper column, write a monthly magazine column, host a weekly radio show, and speak at a national party convention. Her outspokenness made her controversial, especially her promotion of civil rights for African Americans. She also advocated expanded roles for women in the workplace, the civil rights of African Americans and Asian Americans, and the rights of World War II refugees.

After Franklin’s death in 1945, Roosevelt carried her work into international life. She pressed the United States to join and support the United Nations, served as a United States delegate to the UN General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, and became the first delegate to the committee on Human Rights. As the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, she oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and helped win international support for it. When the assembly adopted the declaration in 1948, she received a standing ovation. President Harry S. Truman later called her the “First Lady of the World.”

Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962, by then widely regarded as one of the most esteemed women in the world. Her words still speak with unusual directness because they came from a life that did not hide from pain, conflict, or duty. “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face,” she said. It is the kind of sentence that explains why readers still turn to her: not for comfort alone, but for a firmer way to stand.