Eleanor Roosevelt Dies: Champion of Human Rights

Eleanor Roosevelt was told by her mother-in-law what to wear, how to decorate her home, where to live, and how to raise her children. Sara Delano Roosevelt controlled every domestic detail of her son's household, and Eleanor endured it for years. She discovered Franklin's affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, in 1918 when she found their correspondence. She offered a divorce. Sara blocked it, threatening to cut Franklin off financially. The marriage continued as a political partnership. Born in New York City on October 11, 1884, Eleanor lost both parents by age ten and was raised by her maternal grandmother. She attended Allenswood Academy in London, returned to New York, married Franklin in 1905, and spent the next two decades largely in her mother-in-law's shadow. Franklin's polio diagnosis in 1921 changed the dynamic: Eleanor became his eyes, ears, and political legs, traveling where he could not and reporting back. As First Lady from 1933 to 1945, she held press conferences open only to female journalists, forcing news organizations to hire women. She wrote "My Day," a syndicated newspaper column, for 27 years, averaging 500 to 600 words daily. She traveled the country visiting coal mines, sharecropper camps, homeless shelters, and military bases. She resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 when they refused to let Marian Anderson, a Black contralto, perform at Constitution Hall. After Franklin died on April 12, 1945, President Truman appointed her as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. She chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights, which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on December 10, 1948. The document, which she shepherded through two years of negotiations among delegates from countries with deeply different political systems, has been translated into over 500 languages and incorporated into constitutions worldwide. She was 62 when she began that work, already past the age when most public figures retire. She continued her advocacy, writing, and activism until her death on November 7, 1962, at 78.