Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884 in New York City. Born into privilege, she received a fine education and married her distant cousin Franklin Delanor Roosevelt, who would soon become president of the United States. Her humanitarian efforts on behalf of children, the oppressed and the poor earned her the love of millions throughout the world.

With American entry in World War I, she became active in the American Red Cross and in volunteer work in Navy hospitals. After Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with polio in 1921, Eleanor Roosevelt became increasingly active in politics both to help him maintain his interests and to assert her own personality and goals. She participated in the League of Women Voters, joined the Women's Trade Union League, and worked for the Women's Division of the New York State Democratic Committee. She helped to found Val-Kill Industries, a nonprofit furniture factory in Hyde Park, New York, and taught at the Todhunter School, a private girls' school in New York City.

As First Lady, Roosevelt was an energetic and outspoken representative of the needs of people suffering from the Great Depression. Many of her ideas were incorporated into the New Deal Social Welfare Program. She was very active and traveled extensively around the nation, visiting relief projects, surveying working and living conditions, and then reporting her observations to the President. She also exercised her own political and social influence while becoming an advocate of the rights and needs of the poor, of minorities, and of the disadvantaged. During World War II, she expanded her activities to the world stage, working at the United Nations to help found UNICEF and establish the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

After her husband’s presidency she was appointed by President Truman to the United States Delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, a position she held until 1953. She was chair of the Human Rights Commission during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948.

In 1953, she resigned from the United States Delegation to the United Nations and volunteered her services to the American Association for the United Nations. She was an American representative to the World Federation of the United Nations Associations, and later became the chair of the Associations' Board of Directors. She was reappointed to, the United States Delegation to the United Nations by President Kennedy in 1961. Kennedy also appointed her as a member of the National Advisory Committee of the Peace Corps and chair of the President's Commission on the Status of Women. She received many awards for her humanitarian efforts and her life’s work to oppose prejudice, discrimination and oppression is an inspiration to all people.

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