Eleanor Roosevelt

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, in New York City, the niece of Theodore Roosevelt. Her privileged childhood was also a sad one: her father struggled with alcoholism, and by the time she was ten her mother, her father, and a brother had died. She was raised by a harsh, critical grandmother who wounded her self-esteem. At fifteen she was sent to Allenswood, a girls’ school near London, where the headmistress, Marie Souvestre, encouraged her independence and opened her mind to social issues. Back in New York she taught immigrant children at the Rivington Street settlement house.

In 1905 she married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt; her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, gave the bride away. For years she lived under the thumb of her domineering mother-in-law, Sara Roosevelt, and between 1906 and 1916 she bore six children, one of whom died in infancy.

Her public life began in earnest during World War I, when she volunteered with the Red Cross and in Navy hospitals. After Franklin was stricken with polio in 1921, she kept his political career alive while building her own — in the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the women’s division of the Democratic Party — and she helped establish Val-Kill Industries, a nonprofit furniture factory, and taught at a girls’ school in New York City. By 1928 she was better known publicly than her husband.

In the White House she told the nation not to expect a symbol of elegance but “plain, ordinary Mrs. Roosevelt” — and became the most politically active First Lady in history. She held the first press conferences by a First Lady, admitting only women reporters; wrote her column “My Day” from 1935 until her death; traveled the country inspecting relief projects and working conditions; and lobbied her husband to appoint women, among them Frances Perkins, the first woman to head the Department of Labor. She championed racial justice, and when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the singer Marian Anderson from their hall in 1939, she resigned from the organization and helped arrange Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial for 75,000 people. During World War II she visited England and the South Pacific to lift the morale of American troops.

After Franklin’s death in 1945, President Truman appointed her a delegate to the new United Nations. As chair of its Human Rights Commission, she worked tirelessly on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948. President Kennedy later reappointed her to the UN and asked her to chair the President’s Commission on the Status of Women.

Roosevelt believed government had a duty to the poor, minorities, and the disadvantaged, and that democracy at home and peace abroad depended on human rights for all. Initially wary of women’s suffrage, she became a determined advocate of women’s political participation. She spoke out against McCarthyism in the 1950s and urged faster federal action on housing desegregation and protection for the Freedom Riders.

Her marriage was strained: in 1918 she discovered that Franklin had had an affair, and while she stayed in the marriage and remained his political partner, she built an increasingly independent life, often at her Val-Kill cottage. Her very public activism was itself new and unsettling for a First Lady; her resignation from the DAR came, as the National Women’s History Museum notes, “with much media fanfare.”

Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962, and is buried beside her husband at Hyde Park. The Commission on the Status of Women, which she chaired, released its groundbreaking report on sex discrimination the following year. For decades after her death she ranked at the top of polls of the most respected American women, and in 2023 she was honored on a U.S. quarter that shows the scales of justice, a tribute to her work for human rights.