Eleanor Roosevelt Born: Activist Who Redefined First Lady

Eleanor Roosevelt was so shy as a child that her own mother, a beautiful socialite, called her "Granny" as a mild cruelty, teasing her plain appearance and serious demeanor. Her father, Elliott Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt's brother, was an alcoholic who was eventually committed to an asylum. He died when she was ten. Both parents were dead by the time she was ten years old. Born in New York City on October 11, 1884, she grew up feeling unwanted by her mother's family and adored by a father who was rarely present. She was sent to Allenswood Academy outside London at fifteen, where the headmistress, Marie Souvestre, recognized her intelligence and encouraged her independence. Those three years were, by her own account, the happiest of her early life. She married her fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1905. Theodore Roosevelt gave the bride away. The marriage was complicated from the start by Franklin's domineering mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who controlled the household. Eleanor discovered Franklin's affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, in 1918. The marriage survived but was transformed into a political partnership. As First Lady from 1933 to 1945, she redefined the role. She held press conferences open only to female reporters, which forced newspapers to hire women to cover the White House. She wrote a daily syndicated newspaper column, "My Day," for twenty-seven years, averaging six hundred words a day. She traveled constantly, visiting coal mines, sharecropper homes, and military bases. She advocated publicly for civil rights, resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution when they barred Marian Anderson from performing at Constitution Hall. After Franklin's death in April 1945, she was appointed by President Truman as a delegate to the United Nations. She chaired the commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948, a document whose thirty articles have since been incorporated into more national constitutions than any other single text. She called it her greatest achievement. She died on November 7, 1962, at 78, of aplastic anemia complicated by tuberculosis.