Eleanor Roosevelt

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York in 1884 and was orphaned by the age of ten. She married her distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1905 and became active in New York Democratic politics in the 1920s. As First Lady from 1933 to 1945 she held her own press conferences, wrote the daily column My Day and lobbied for New Deal programs. President Truman appointed her to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations in 1945, where she chaired the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She remained a leading voice in the Democratic Party until her death in 1962.

Admirers regard Eleanor Roosevelt as the most influential First Lady in American history, who redefined the role and used it to advance civil rights, labor and the needs of the poor, and later helped establish the modern international human rights framework. Truman called her the First Lady of the World. In her own time she drew heavy criticism. Southern segregationists attacked her civil rights work, conservatives objected to her wartime statements linking racism and fascism, and congressional criticism forced her to resign from the Office of Civilian Defense in 1942. Historians also note that she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment for decades and did not become an ardent supporter of integration until the 1950s, and her deepest regret at the end of her life was reportedly that she had not pressed Franklin to admit more refugees from Nazism.