Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 - 1962) was an American diplomat, newspaper columnist and activist who served as First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, the longest tenure in that role. [1] She redefined the position as a platform for advocacy on labour, poverty and civil rights, and after her husband's death became a United States delegate to the United Nations. [3] As chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights she led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948. [2]
Early life
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on 11 October 1884 in Manhattan into a wealthy New York family; her uncle was President Theodore Roosevelt. Both her parents died before she was ten, and she was raised by her maternal grandmother. At fifteen she was sent to Allenswood Academy near London, where the headmistress Marie Souvestre encouraged independent thought and social conscience, an influence Roosevelt later described as formative. [1]
Returning to New York, she taught at a settlement house on the Lower East Side and joined the National Consumers League. In 1905 she married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with whom she had six children. [3]
Political partnership
After her husband was disabled by polio in 1921, Roosevelt took on a public political role on his behalf, working with the Women's Trade Union League and the Democratic Party's women's division and becoming an effective speaker and organiser in her own right. She also taught at and part-owned a girls' school in New York, and studied at The New School. [1]
First Lady
When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, Eleanor Roosevelt broke with precedent almost immediately. She held regular press conferences open only to women reporters, which obliged news organisations to employ women, and from 1935 wrote a syndicated daily newspaper column, "My Day", which she continued for more than a quarter of a century. She travelled widely to inspect relief programmes, coalfields and, during the war, military hospitals and bases. [3]
She pressed the administration on civil rights, supporting anti-lynching legislation and fair employment measures. In 1939 she resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution after the organisation refused the singer Marian Anderson the use of Constitution Hall, and helped arrange the open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial that followed. She also supported the training of Black military aviators at Tuskegee. [1]
The United Nations
President Harry S. Truman appointed her a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in 1945. She was elected chair of the Commission on Human Rights, and over three years of negotiation between states with sharply opposed systems she steered the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the General Assembly adopted on 10 December 1948. [2]
She remained active in Democratic politics and in international causes afterwards, supporting the founding of Israel, refugee relief and the early civil rights movement, and receiving the Nansen Refugee Award in 1954. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy appointed her to chair the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. [3]
Death and legacy
Eleanor Roosevelt died in New York City on 7 November 1962. She was posthumously awarded the first United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, and she received honorary doctorates from universities in the United States and Europe. [1]
The Universal Declaration remains the foundational document of international human rights law, and Roosevelt is consistently ranked among the most admired and influential American public figures of the twentieth century. [2]
