best biography about eleanor roosevelt

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Eleanor review: sensitive and superb biography of a true American giant

With a flaws-and-all study of a woman who strode the world in the name of democracy, David Michaelis hits new heights

A s the 2020 US presidential election winds toward a tortuous and dysfunctional certification, it is tempting to imagine that intrigue and machinations belong only to this particular heated moment in American life and history. That would be wrong.

There is always intrigue in American politics, though nothing approaching the current state of near-sedition. We would be also be wrong if we dated the role of iconic first ladies only as far back as Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, or even Jackie Kennedy. Before there was Jackie or Hillary or Michelle, there was Eleanor. Niece to one president, wife to another; activist, global citizen; mother of the Democratic party in the mid-20th century, when the mother of the party was still a thing.

You will find all these identities in David Michaelis’s elegant new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt , but the beauty of this robust volume is that there are so many more Eleanors to meet. Awkward girl; yearning and unappreciated wife; shy but committed romantic; resolute partner; distant mother. Michaelis, a veteran biographer, shows us all these many faces, rendering a complex and sensitive portrait of a woman who bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, reimagining herself many times with both courage and resilience.

Born into the strictures of upper-class white womanhood, Eleanor was conversant with and adjacent to political power from an early age. Born to a beautiful, critical mother and an affectionate, drug- and alcohol-addicted father, she might well have been identified in the 21st century as an adult child of an alcoholic, with all the needy and compliant behavior implied. Her mother, Anna, consumed with keeping up appearances, was no better than any other woman of her class; indeed, her constant mockery of the young Eleanor certainly compounded the child’s insecurity and desire to truly belong. Michaelis writes with great sensitivity, utilizing Eleanor’s own recollections and other research materials to set the backdrop for recurring themes in his young subject’s life, including her mother’s “ritualized humiliation … as often as not in front of company”, including her mocking nickname of “Granny”.

With both parents and a brother dead by the time she was 10, Eleanor found herself introduced to tragedy – as well as to something steadfast within herself: “No matter what happened to one in this world, one had to adjust to it.” And adjust she did, to her grandmother’s strictures, her mother-in-law’s disdain, the ambitions of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This biography gives equal weight to Eleanor’s personal and political longings, her frustrations with her husband and her fury at his indiscretions; and her own loves, requited and otherwise.

At the same time, however, Michaelis reveals, again and again, that Eleanor found her truest self through duty, hard work and sometimes punishing overachievement. She felt most loved in partnership and was misled by the illusion of it. Longing to be the center of one person’s love, she settled instead for the larger, public love of a generation as she wrote, traveled and agitated to change the world. What is especially refreshing about this biography are the ways in which Michaelis refuses to hide the fact that Eleanor’s struggles for justice had limits, drawn not only by her grudging acceptance of a political spouse’s role, but also through the limitations of her race and class.

Impressively, the author does not sugarcoat or diminish the casual racism and xenophobia of the age, highlighting FDR’s use of the N-word and comfort with segregation, as well as the well-documented anti-Asian racism undergirding the internment of Japanese citizens during the second world war. Indeed, Michaelis’s framing of these deficiencies in American political life helps us to trace their provenance in our own era and allows us to see what Eleanor was up against in her bravest as well as her most timid moments.

Her commitment to global citizenship and human rights served to mirror white activists in that period as well as this one: they find the courage to fight for human rights and dignity in the far corners of the globe yet choke at the exact moment when their courage could be most effective. She found herself in full command of the symbolic gesture – making it possible for Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and resigning from the Daughters of the American Revolution but refusing to attend the concert herself, at a moment when such a symbolic gesture might have made a greater difference.

These sections will not surprise many African or Japanese Americans. Such readers will likely have personal experience with the failures of white Americans who talk a good game about democracy and equal justice under law, but who can’t deliver when the chips are down. Indeed, Michaelis does such an excellent job of outlining Eleanor’s grueling work to bring to fruition the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that the country’s domestic deficiencies during and after FDR’s presidency are drawn in sharp relief.

The breadth of Michaelis’s research has an unexpected side effect: the introduction and early appearances in Eleanor’s sweeping story of future American political and social figures. Readers will come upon “Bull” Conner , J Edgar Hoover, Thurgood Marshall and others in between, and get a foreshadowing of their roles in the story of America. (Spoiler alert: some people never change.)

Critics of this more expansive view of biography are quick to charge writers (and readers) with unfairness, claiming authors impose contemporary social values on far more narrow historic times. Yet Michaelis’s deft writing does nothing if not illustrate the striving for and the validity of, just those moments. What is fascinating is watching Eleanor move herself, from anti-suffrage to women’s rights advocate; from patronizing white woman, immersed in Washington’s segregated life with bigots on every side, to frustrated champion of desegregation in the face of her husband’s pragmatic racism; to tolerant globalist, seeing only dimly her country’s broken promises abroad as well as at home.

It is not easy to write so beautifully about political difficulties and disappointments. But readers who choose to immerse themselves in Michaelis’s version of this incomparable life may find it ending far too soon.

Rosemary Bray McNatt , a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, is president of Starr King School for the Ministry in Oakland, California. She is completing a spiritual autobiography, Full Circle

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By Gail Collins

• Oct. 6, 2020

ELEANOR By David Michaelis

Eleanor Roosevelt was the most important first lady in American history. Or at least until Hillary Clinton. But when Hillary was in the White House she claimed she was communing with Eleanor’s spirit , looking for inspiration.

Case closed.

Eleanor came from an important family — Uncle Theodore, after all, was president. But her upbringing was so grim that it’s a wonder she emerged functional, let alone one of our nation’s great humanitarians. Her haughty mother humiliated her by calling her “Granny.” Her alcoholic father was the beloved parent, but hardly someone you could count on in a pinch. Once she reached adolescence, Eleanor was installing triple locks on her bedroom door “to keep my uncles out.”

She compensated for feelings of unattractiveness and rejection with good works. As she grew to adulthood, Eleanor threw herself into the settlement house movement to serve the poor. Her boyfriend Franklin was impressed — and a little shocked — by her activities. He announced after she took him on a tour of tenement life on the Lower East Side: “My God, I didn’t know people lived like that.”

Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were distant cousins in a family that would probably not have chosen Franklin as most likely to succeed. The joke was that “F.D.R.” stood for “Feather Duster Roosevelt.” But he had grand ambitions, and David Michaelis , the author of biographies of Charles Schulz and N. C. Wyeth, suggests he “was wise enough to know (as only a boy named ‘Feather Duster’ knows) that if his will to power was to be taken seriously, he needed a woman of urgency by his side.”

Michaelis’s “Eleanor” is the first major single-volume biography in more than half a century, and a terrific resource for people who aren’t ready to tackle Blanche Wiesen Cook’s heroic three-volume work . At more than 700 pages it’s hardly a quick read, but it’s a great resource for people who don’t know a whole lot about her.

Eleanor and Franklin married in 1905 and she quickly had six children, five of whom survived. Her public story began in 1921, when Franklin came down with polio. The disease robbed him of his ability to walk, and Eleanor became his legs. She was an unstoppable force in his successful campaign for governor of New York in 1928. Her energy level always seemed to be someplace between prodigious and terrifying. Following her through the pre-White House era, you can already see how she’d evolve into a first lady who visited with more than 400,000 troops in the South Pacific in World War II.

“I’m only being active until you can be again,” she wrote him. “It isn’t such a great desire on my part to serve the world & I’ll fall into habits of sloth quite easily!”

Hahahahaha.

The marriage, sadly, was not working out nearly as well in private as it was in public. Eleanor, Michaelis says, “found the sexual side of their marriage less than pleasant and perhaps so did he.” If so, Franklin’s diffidence was apparently limited to his wife. Back in 1917 Eleanor discovered he had been having an affair with her social secretary, Lucy Mercer, which Michaelis suggests was an important moment in American history. Maybe it was, since the marriage became more of a political partnership than romantic attachment. Eleanor agreed to stay and Franklin vowed he would never see Lucy again, in what turned out to be one of American history’s more famous broken promises.

Eleanor’s own romantic life gets thorough treatment, given that much or all of it seemed to involve crushes rather than consummation. There was Earl Miller, a state trooper who tutored her in self-defense. And Lorena Hickok , an Associated Press reporter who would eventually leave her job to work in the White House. Eleanor was definitely in her thrall. (“Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close.”) But women of their generation often wrote letters to friends that sounded like mash notes and historians have had a hard time with the very specific question of whether Eleanor and her “Hick” did the deed. Michaelis’s description of their relationship suggests the physical details didn’t matter.

What’s really important to history is Eleanor’s public life once Franklin was elected president in 1932. She wanted to bring him stories about the real America and she traveled around the country bearing witness to the grief of its Depression-racked citizens. It was not at all what Americans expected of a first lady but as time went on, Michaelis writes, “fewer minded that the wife of the president was driving alone by night through villages and four-corners hamlets and stopping for gas on the outskirts of town.”

Michaelis is careful to point out the ways in which the younger Eleanor was not ahead of her time. He has a collection of examples of her early anti-Semitism. And she told white Southerners she “quite understood” their point of view on racial matters.

But she evolved, way ahead of most of the nation. In 1938, she attended a memorable meeting of human rights groups in Birmingham, where the not-yet-notorious Sheriff Bull Connor banned integrated audiences. So Eleanor sat on the side where the Black participants were cordoned off. When the police ordered her to move, she put her chair in the aisle and sat down.

After Pearl Harbor, Eleanor insisted on going to the Pacific war zone to support the troops. A visitor asked Franklin if that kind of trip wouldn’t leave her exhausted. “No,” her husband replied. “but she will tire everybody else.”

Eleanor’s worry was different — she was afraid that the troops would hear rumors about a female visitor, imagine a glamorous entertainer and be disappointed when she walked into the room. Not a problem. She toured the hospitals, speaking to each wounded soldier, and got up at 5 in the morning so she could have breakfast with the enlisted men. Fleet Adm. Bull Halsey, who had lobbied vigorously against her trip, recanted, declaring, “She alone accomplished more good than any other person or any group of persons who passed through my area.”

Eleanor was not with Franklin when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the presidential retreat in Warm Springs, Ga., in 1945. And she was shocked when she discovered his old lover Lucy Mercer had been there, and that her daughter Anna had set up Mercer’s trip to give her ailing father the kind of comfort his wife never seemed able to provide.

Harry Truman cannily appointed Eleanor to a high-profile job in the new United Nations General Assembly, which was about to open in London. Early on she kept a low profile, working “six and a half days a week, 18 to 20 hours a day.” Her goal was adoption of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1948, it happened. Moments after the vote, Michaelis reports, she quietly walked into the room, wearing no ceremonial clothes or makeup. “Her fellow delegates then accorded her something that had never been given before and would never be given again in the United Nations: an ovation for a single delegate by all nations.”

Her private life had evolved in a radical new way — her last great unconsummated love, Dr. David Gurewitsch , had married a young art dealer and set up housekeeping in Manhattan. In 1959, after “three decades in which Eleanor had spent no more than 10 days in a row in any one apartment or home, or even in any one town and city,” Michaelis writes, she bought half a share of a townhouse in Manhattan where from age 75 on, she “lived under the same roof with the man she loved — and with that man’s wife.” She was a kind of precursor to the Gray Panthers, in a commune of her own choosing.

She died on Nov. 7, 1962, exactly 30 years after the day Franklin was first elected president. She had wanted a simple funeral, but, as Jackie Kennedy noted, it turned into an event “as complicated as an inauguration,” with the president, vice president, two ex-presidents, three first ladies (past, present and future) and the chief justice of the United States among the mourners.

Gail Collins is a columnist for The Times.

ELEANOR By David Michaelis Illustrated. 720 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35.

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Eleanor Roosevelt

“First Lady of the World” Eleanor Roosevelt used her platform as First Lady of the United States and as a member of the wealthy and prominent Roosevelt family  to advocate for human and civil rights. She was a prolific author, speaker, and humanitarian, and chaired the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission.  She connected with the public through a popular syndicated column, 'My Day,' in which she recounted her daily adventures from 1935 until her death in 1962.

Born on October 11, 1884 in New York City, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the first of Elliot and Anna Hall Roosevelt’s three children. Her family was affluent and politically prominent, and while her childhood was in many ways privileged, it was also marked by hardship: her father’s alcoholism, as well as the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers before she was ten years old. She was raised by her harsh and critical maternal grandmother, who damaged Eleanor’s self-esteem.

In 1899, Roosevelt began her three years of study at London’s Allenswood Academy, where she became more independent and confident. Her teacher, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, with her passionate embrace of social issues, opened Roosevelt up to the world of ideas and was an early force in Roosevelt’s social and political development.

Roosevelt returned to New York for her social debut in 1902. She became involved with the settlement house movement, teaching immigrant children and families on Rivington Street. In 1905, after a long courtship, she married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a charming, Harvard graduate in his first year of law school at Columbia University. Her uncle and close relative, President Theodore Roosevelt, walked her down the aisle.

The Roosevelts settled in New York, where Eleanor found herself under the thumb of her controlling mother-in-law, Sara Roosevelt, who, like her grandmother earlier, was harsh in her criticism of her daughter-in-law. While Franklin advanced his career, his wife raised their daughter and four sons under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law.

All that changed in 1911, when Franklin was elected to the New York State Senate, and the couple moved to Albany, away from Sara. Two years later, the Roosevelts moved to Washington, DC, when Franklin joined Woodrow Wilson’s administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. While she was initially uncomfortable with the DC political scene, Roosevelt was growing in her political consciousness. When World War I broke out, she volunteered with various relief agencies, further increasing her visibility and political clout. Hurt when she discovered in 1918 that her husband had had an affair with another woman, she remained married, though her feelings changed. She began to live a more independent life and often escaped to Val-Kill, her upstate New York home, where she was also part of a women-owned furniture cooperative. Nonetheless, she remained his political ally and advisor, among those who urged him to remain in public life despite the polio he contracted in 1921.

Although initially wary of women’s suffrage, after its passage in 1920, Roosevelt promoted women’s political engagement, playing a leadership role in several organizations, including the League of Women Voters and the Women’s Trade Union League. She surrounded herself with politically astute women such as Molly Dewson and Rose Schneiderman. She was head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, recruited in 1928 to help Al Smith’s presidential bid. Her activities were widely covered in the media in the 1920s, making her more publicly recognizable than her husband when he decided to run for governor in 1928. Though unhappy about his bid for the governorship and his equally successful run for the presidency in 1932, Roosevelt became the most politically active and influential First Lady in history, using the position to advance many of her progressive and egalitarian goals.

In the White House from 1933 to 1945, First Lady Roosevelt kept a busy schedule. She wrote nearly 3,000 articles in newspapers and magazines, including a monthly column in Women’s Home Companion , where she asked the public to share their stories, hardships, and questions. In a few short months, she received several hundred thousand responses and donated what she earned from the column to charity. She also authored six books and traveled nationwide delivering countless speeches. She held weekly press conferences with women reporters who she hoped would get her message to the American people.

Roosevelt had immense influence on her husband’s decisions as president and in shaping both his cabinet and the New Deal. Working with Molly Dewson, head of the Women’s Division of the DNC, she lobbied her husband to appoint more women, successfully securing Frances Perkins as the first woman to head the Department of Labor, among many others. She also ensured that groups left out of the New Deal were included by seeking revisions to programs and legislation, including greater participation for women in the heavily male-dominated Civilian Conservation Corps. She also championed racial justice, working to help Black miners in West Virginia, advocating for the NAACP and National Urban League, and resigning, with much media fanfare, from the Daughters of the American Revolution when they refused to allow African American singer Marian Anderson to perform in their auditorium.

Roosevelt’s political activism did not end with her husband’s death in 1945. Appointed in 1946, she served for more than a decade as a delegate to the United Nations, the institution established by her husband, and embraced the cause of world peace. She not only chaired the United Nations Human Rights Commission, she also helped write the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. She spoke out against McCarthyism in the 1950s. Roosevelt’s continued commitment to racial justice was evident in her civil rights work and efforts to push Washington to take swifter action in housing desegregation and protections for Freedom Riders and other activists. In 1960, at the request of President John F. Kennedy, she chaired the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which released a ground-breaking study about gender discrimination a year after her death in 1963. She also worked on the Equal Pay Act that was passed that same year. Kennedy nominated Roosevelt for the Nobel Peace Prize and though she did not win, she remained at the top of national polls ranking the most respected women in America decades after her death.

Eleanor Roosevelt continues to be remembered as one of the most prominent humanitarians of her generation, and is one of five women honored in 2023 by the U.S. Mint's American Women Quarter's Program . Her quarter features her portrait against the scales of justice, symbolizing her work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Unedited version reprinted with permission from: Doris Weatherford. American Women's History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events , (Prentice Hall, 1994), 294-298.

Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume I, The Early Years, 1884-1933. (Penguin Random House, 1993).

Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume II, The Defining Years , 1933-1938 (Penguin Random House, 2000).

Ward, Geoffrey C. Eleanor Roosevelt. American National Biography. Accessed 25 July 2017. http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00580.html?from=../cush/e0302.html&from_nm=Civil%20Rights%20Movement

Chafe, William F. “Eleanor Roosevelt” in Sicherman, Barbara and Carol Hurd Green, et al. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. (Radcliffe, 1980) p. 595-601.

PHOTO: Library of Congress

MLA – Michals, Debra. “Eleanor Roosevelt.” National Women’s History Museum, 2017. Date accessed.

Chicago – Michals, Debra “Eleanor Roosevelt.” National Women’s History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/eleanor-roosevelt.

Classroom Posters:

• Eleanor Roosevelt Classroom Poster PDF (11x17) | Eleanor Roosevelt Classroom Poster PDF (24x36)

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University. https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/documents/ . Biographical sketch: https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/abouteleanor/erbiography.cfm

History Channel. http://www.history.com/topics/first-ladies/eleanor-roosevelt

The White House, First Ladies. https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/first-ladies/eleanorroosevelt

"Eleanor Roosevelt." Historic World Leaders , edited by Anne Commire, Gale, 1994. Biography in Context , link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/K1616000506/BIC1?u=dist214_biorc&xid=3a496f5a . Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.

Asbell, Bernard. Mother and Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt. (Coward, McCann, 1982).

Cook, Blanche Wiesen, Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume III, The War Years and After , 1939-1962 (Penguin Random House, 2016).

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (Simon & Schuster, 1994).

Hareven, Tamara K. Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience. (Quadrangle, 1968).

Lash, Joseph. Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends. (Doubleday, 1982).

Roosevelt, Eleanor. This is My Story. (Harper, 1937).

The American Experience: Eleanor Roosevelt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3uQYiOKD6c

Ken Burns. The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2016) http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-roosevelts/watch-videos/

Biography.com https://www.biography.com/people/eleanor-roosevelt-9463366

The History Channel. http://www.history.com/topics/first-ladies/eleanor-roosevelt/videos

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Eleanor Roosevelt

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, in New York City. She was the oldest child of Elliot Roosevelt and Anna Hall. She lost both parents by the age of ten. 1 Following the death of her mother, she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Mary Hall, and later attended a private London finishing school called Allenswood Academy. In 1902, Eleanor returned to the United States for her debut into New York society. She also began her long career in social work, joining the Junior League and teaching immigrant children at the Rivington Street Settlement House. 2

On March 17, 1905, she married her fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Her uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, walked her down the aisle. 3 She gave birth to six children: Anna Eleanor, James, Franklin Delano Jr., Elliott, Franklin Jr., and John; Franklin Delano Jr. died in infancy. When her husband contracted polio in 1921, Eleanor cared for him. As Franklin continued to focus on his political career, Eleanor supported his efforts and helped him advance his goals. She became more active in politics when he was elected governor of New York in 1928. 4

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, Eleanor downplayed the role of first lady, saying “there is going to be just plain, ordinary Mrs. Roosevelt and that’s all.” 5 Despite this statement, she went on to transform the role of first lady. She became the first first lady to have her own press conferences for women reporters, holding more than three hundred throughout her twelve years in the White House. 6 As her husband’s New Deal policies went into effect, providing relief and helping the nation combat the Great Depression, Eleanor traveled the country, visiting the sites of relief projects, delivering radio broadcasts, and meeting citizens. She recounted her adventures and expressed her opinions in a syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” which ran from 1935 until her death in 1962. 7

Between 1941 and 1942, Eleanor served as Assistant Director of Civilian Defense, organizing volunteer workers. 8 After the United States entered World War II, she traveled to England where she spent time with wounded servicemembers and visited military bases and distribution centers. In 1943, Eleanor became the first first lady to travel to an active war zone when she undertook a month-long journey to the warfront in the Pacific. Traveling as a representative of the Red Cross, she went to Australia, New Zealand, Guadalcanal, and numerous Pacific islands, visiting troops, hospitals, and factories. 9

She also made an impact at the White House. Serving as first lady during the Great Depression and World War II, she placed emphasis on comfort, practicality, and functionality in her management of the Executive Mansion. Eleanor instructed White House staff to prepare simple American meals, often staying within the wartime rationing guidelines. She also ordered a new State Service of White House china, renovated the White House kitchen, and redesigned the Red Room, the location of her women’s only press conferences. 10

Following President Roosevelt’s death in 1945, President Harry S. Truman appointed Eleanor as a delegate to the United Nations (UN). She served as the chair of the Human Rights Commission where she played an important role in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After resigning her post in 1953, she volunteered with the American Association for the UN. President John F. Kennedy reappointed Eleanor to the UN in 1961 and later appointed her to the National Advisory Committee of the Peace Corps and to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. 11

She spent her later years living between her home Val-Kill and an apartment in New York City. Eleanor Roosevelt passed away on November 7, 1962, at the age of seventy-eight. On November 10, 1962, she was laid to rest beside her husband at their Hyde Park estate, next to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. 12

Footnotes & Resources

• “Eleanor Roosevelt Biography,” FDR Library and Museum , Accessed April 26, 2022, https://www.fdrlibrary.org/er-... .
• Eleanor Roosevelt,” National Park Service , accessed April 27, 2022, https://home.nps.gov/people/el... .
• “President Has Great Day in New York,” Buffalo Evening News , March 18, 1905, https://newscomwc.newspapers.c... .
• “Eleanor Roosevelt Biography,” FDR Library and Museum.
• “White House Activities Take New Turn Under Roosevelt,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle , February 26, 1933, https://newscomwc.newspapers.c...
• Maurine H. Beasley, “The Press Conferences of Eleanor Roosevelt,” accessed April 28, 2022, https://files.eric.ed.gov/full... .
• “My Day,” GW Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project , Accessed April 29, 2022, https://erpapers.columbian.gwu... .
• “Mrs. Roosevelt quits her post,” The North Adams Transcript , February 20, 1942, https://newscomwc.newspapers.c... .
• “Eleanor Roosevelt and World War II,” The National Park Service , Accessed April 29, 2022, https://www.nps.gov/articles/e... ; Paul M. Sparrow, “A First Lady on the Front Lines,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum , August 25, 2016, https://fdr.blogs.archives.gov... .
• White House China , (Washington, D.C.: The White House Historical Association, 2008),171-173; William Seale, The President’s House , (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2008, 180-181; 202-205.
• “Eleanor Roosevelt Biography, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum .
• Maxine Cheshire, “Simple Service at Hyde Park For Mrs. FDR,” The Washington Post , November 10, 1962, https://www.proquest.com/hnpwa... .

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Eleanor Roosevelt broke the mold of what a First Lady could be

A fierce advocate for the downtrodden during her husband’s presidency, Roosevelt spent her later years pushing for human rights—pioneering work that still resounds today.

On the evening of April 20, 1933, a plane took off from a Washington, D.C. runway. Its precious cargo included two women in evening dresses, fur coats, and elbow-length gloves they had worn to a formal White House dinner just hours before. Now, pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt were flying into the night sky.

The impulsive flight had come about when the two friends discussed Earhart’s fascination with flying at night. So they gathered a group of reporters, Earhart’s husband George Putnam, and Roosevelt’s brother, Hall Roosevelt, to take an impromptu flight to Baltimore. During the flight , Roosevelt spent time in the cockpit with Earhart and the plane’s captain, reveling in the novel view of the night sky. She even considered becoming a pilot herself, but her husband objected .

Eleanor Roosevelt had become First Lady just one month prior as her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed the presidency of the United States. But she had already been pushing boundaries for years. The daring First Lady would break the mold many more times throughout a lifetime of public service—one who redefined what a president’s wife could do for her country and who became a beloved figure for a nation fighting the Great Depression and the Second World War.

An early life of privilege and public service

Anna Elizabeth Roosevelt was born in 1884 to a prestigious family: Her father’s brother was President Theodore Roosevelt, and she grew up in a world of wealth and privilege in New York. But Eleanor’s childhood was marked by tragedy: Her mother died of diphtheria when she was seven and her father, an alcoholic, died when she was nine, shortly after a suicide attempt brought on by delirium tremens. Eleanor was raised by her maternal grandmother, who kept her relatively isolated and fed her shyness and insecurity with strict discipline and exacting standards.

But education brought a teenaged Eleanor out of her shell and pointed toward a promising future. At a finishing school in England at the turn of the century, she learned social ease and independence. The school’s beloved headmistress , Marie Souvestre, instilled Eleanor with a sense of her duties to others. After making her social debut, she began to volunteer at the Rivington Street Settlement House in New York, where she worked as a teacher.

( Learn about Eleanor Roosevelt's life with your kids .)

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In 1902, a chance encounter with her fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, led to a secret romance . The young couple married in 1905; Eleanor’s uncle, Teddy Roosevelt, gave her away at the altar. As a young wife and future mother of six children, Eleanor became half of an unconventional marriage that would last four decades.

An unorthodox marriage

The marriage was happy, but Eleanor was devastated when she discovered her husband’s affair with another woman in 1918. The couple almost divorced, but Franklin’s promising political career and his mother’s disapproval of the marriage’s dissolution prevented it. The couple’s friendly, supportive relationship continued, but the marriage was never the same. The partnership became, in the words of their son James, “an armed truce that endured until the day [Franklin] died.”

Another strain on the Roosevelts’ partnership was polio , which struck Franklin in 1921. The disease paralyzed his legs, and it took years to rehabilitate; though he eventually learned to walk short distances, he would need a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Disability was stigmatized at the time and he avoided being photographed in his wheelchair.

Eleanor encouraged her husband to pursue politics despite public stigma and remained supportive of his political career as his political star—and her profile—rose. But as a young wife whose husband had political aspirations, Eleanor was not entirely resigned to her role as her husband’s helpmate; she was ambiguous about sex and motherhood and determined to contribute to the world.

As he climbed from state senator to governor of New York and U.S. vice president, Eleanor found a sense of worth and purpose in the social causes that would propel her through the remainder of her life. She advocated for soldiers during World War I and later purchased a private girls’ school with two friends, where she served as associate principal. She also worked for the Democratic Party and the League of Women’s Voters and founded Val-Kill Industries, where local farmers supplemented their incomes by creating furniture and home goods.

A new kind of First Lady

But everything changed when Franklin won the presidency in 1932—the first of what would become a record-setting four terms. The presidency was a triumph for Franklin—and a tragedy for Eleanor, who reluctantly resigned from positions the administration felt to be a conflict of interest.

This was deeply frustrating to Eleanor, who was maddened by the traditional function of First Ladies as ornamental hostesses. “I knew what traditionally would lie before me,” she said later , “and I cannot say I was very pleased with the prospect. The turmoil in my heart and mind was rather great [the night of FDR’s election].”

And so, she decided to forge a new role all her own.

As First Lady during the Great Depression in the 1930s, Eleanor pushed for policies that would help women, children, and the poor cope with the unprecedented economic downturn, including expanded New Deal programs. She also pushed for more jobs for women in the White House and forged connections with the press corps, instituting press conferences for women reporters and offering in-depth access to Lorena Hickok .

The reporter, whom she called “Hick,” became a friend and mentor, and the pair developed a 30-year-long relationship that flew under the radar as part of the truce in her marriage to Franklin. The AP reporter became Eleanor’s constant companion in the 1930s, and when the almost inseparable couple were apart, they wrote passionate letters to one another, sometimes multiple times a day. The nature of the relationship would only be confirmed in the late 1970s, when historians discovered thousands of often romantic letters.

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Eleanor Roosevelt also felt it was her duty to befriend, represent, and communicate with ordinary Americans. She wrote a nationally syndicated column , “My Day,” commenting on the social issues of the day and revealing more about her personality and private life. It ran almost daily between 1935 and 1962. Eleanor also traveled the nation almost ceaselessly, meeting Depression-era Americans at union meetings, protests, and in their homes and workplaces. Known as her husband’s “eyes and ears,” she served as a reminder of the president’s interest in social programs and the New Deal.

Eleanor also continued to support causes close to her heart such as civil rights. She symbolically resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 when the group refused to let Black soprano Marion Anderson sing at their entertainment venue in Washington, D.C. Instead, the First Lady helped set up what would become Anderson’s historic concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

An advocate for human rights

As the Great Depression segued into World War II, the First Lady shifted her focus to boosting morale—both of Allied troops and on the home front—and helping the Europeans displaced by the conflict.

One of her most important wartime causes was that of the children displaced by the war in Europe. Eleanor advocated for a bill that would have allowed 20,000 German children into the country. When the bill failed, she formed a committee to help refugee children enter the U.S. with the help of temporary visitor visas. The U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children ultimately helped resettle 300 children, most of them Jewish, and raised funds for other efforts to help refugees.

( What does it mean to be a refugee? )

In April 1945, on the verge of victory in Europe, President Roosevelt died. But though Eleanor’s time in the White House was over, her humanitarian work was not.

In 1945, Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry S. Truman, appointed Eleanor a delegate to the United Nations, where she served as the first chairperson of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. There, Eleanor helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and mobilized the world around humanitarian relief and international cooperation. The groundbreaking declaration enshrined fundamental human rights for the first time and now serves as the foundation for international law.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s legacy

The former First Lady would continue to espouse her favorite causes—and wade into political controversy—for the rest of her life. A noted opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, she preferred the idea of legislation that protected women instead. She also engaged in a thorny public debate about federal funding for religious schools, sparring with Cardinal Spellman, who accused her of anti-Catholicism for her opposition to parochial schools obtaining federal funds.

She had long been an icon and a divisive figure—an inspiration for advocates of marginalized groups and a scapegoat for those who opposed her causes. But when Eleanor died in 1962 at age 78, tributes poured in from both sides of the aisle.

Today, she is remembered not just for breaking the restrictive First Lady mold, but for using her outsized influence to raise awareness and support for social justice causes that continue to this day. Born before women had the vote, Eleanor Roosevelt refused to be bound by convention, or her own fears. “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face,” she wrote in 1960. “ You must do the thing you think you cannot do. ”

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Women Who Shaped History

A Smithsonian magazine special report

Why Eleanor Roosevelt’s Example Matters More Than Ever

A new biography shows how decency, determination and generosity of heart can change the world

At 3 a.m. on December 10, 1948, after nearly three years of intense deliberation and maneuvering, the United Nations General Assembly voted to adopt what Eleanor Roosevelt envisioned as a Magna Carta for a new age: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a U.S. delegate to the nascent international body, she had chaired the commission that drafted the declaration and led the effort to see it ratified in the wake of the most brutally destructive conflict the world had ever seen—a war her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had not lived to see concluded. Now at last, meeting in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, representatives of the world’s nations had reached an agreement. She regarded its adoption as her greatest achievement.

“[Roosevelt] walked into the General Assembly, quietly dressed, wearing no makeup, briskly taking the podium,” author David Michaelis writes in his new biography, Eleanor . “The entire Assembly got to its feet. Her fellow delegates then accorded her something that had never been given before and would never be given again in the United Nations: an ovation for a single delegate by all nations.”

After 12 years of being America’s First Lady, she had become the world’s foremost champion of human rights, revered for her wisdom, compassion and firmness of purpose. On her 70th birthday in 1954, Michaelis writes, the Washington Po st published a congratulatory cartoon by Herblock. In the drawing, a mother points out the Statue of Liberty to her very small son. “Sure, I know who that is, mom,” the boy says. “That’s Mrs. Roosevelt.”

Prizewinning bestselling author David Michaelis presents a breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world’s most widely admired and influential women.

For a generation of Americans who had endured the Great Depression and the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt was an especially beloved figure. She rewrote the rulebook for First Ladies; instead of pouring tea at the White House, she crisscrossed the country by car, often driving alone, to meet unannounced with her fellow citizens, hear their concerns and offer help. “Reporters loved to clock her mileage,” Michaelis writes: Between 1933 and 1937, she averaged 40,000 miles a year. She hosted hundreds of weekly radio shows, held regular press conferences, wrote a monthly magazine column, and filed a popular daily newspaper column, “My Day,” carried in 90 papers with a million readers, almost never missing a day until 1962, when she died at age 78.

“She was the systolic muscle in the national heart, in the soul of America, always this figure in motion across a continent,” Michaelis says in an interview from his garage that doubles as an office (“Eleanor Roosevelt world headquarters,” he calls it), where he has pinned to the wall a map of the United States. “In the obsessive-compulsive way that one does in these long projects, or at least I do, I had pinpointed every single place with a green pin where she either filed her ‘My Day’ syndicated column from, or was writing about, or was passing through and noted something. It's a forest of green covering the continent.”

Mrs. Roosevelt’s deep need to connect with the public was not for show, not calculated to score political points. When FDR served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson, she devoted herself to visiting the maimed and shell-shocked soldiers of the First World War who were festering in military hospitals and became an effective advocate for their care; no camera crews followed her on her rounds. Each day in the first spring after the armistice, she would bring flowers to the military funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. “If no mourners appeared,” Michaelis writes, “she stood as lone witness to the descending casket, ensuring that no soldier was buried alone.”

Eleanor traces her often painful evolution from lonely, orphaned society girl—a so-called ugly duckling derisively nicknamed “Granny” as a young child by her emotionally distant mother—to become the most consequential and admired woman in American civic life: a mother of six, educator, feminist and civil rights activist, canny political operative, diplomat and humanitarian. By the end, she had become not just America’s grandmother, but an international emblem of hope. “In her gray early life she had seemed old; in her sunny, smiling old age she had youth,” Michaelis writes.

Michaelis himself has a personal connection to Mrs. Roosevelt: At the age of 4, he met her backstage at WBGH studios, where his mother, Diana, produced Mrs. Roosevelt’s public television program, “Prospects of Mankind”; he remembers asking her for a piece of Juicy Fruit gum. He would later hear stories about her phenomenal ability to recharge with six-second catnaps, among other tidbits. A half-century later, Michaelis, whose previous works include acclaimed biographies of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz and artist N.C. Wyeth, plunged into the 11-year biographical project that would culminate this week with the publication of the exhaustively researched, vividly rendered biography.

We caught up with David Michaelis by phone for a conversation about the personal journey of one of American history’s most remarkable figures, and why her example matters today as much as ever.

Successive biographers have given us an evolving portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, both the public figure and the intensely private one. How does your work reframe or add to the picture?

One of the first intimations I had that ER was a powerful subject was how people struggled to categorize her. Even Adlai Stevenson, a good friend, when he eulogized her, strained a bit trying to define the quality that would truly explain her. There was this sense of not knowing really who she was, except obviously, magnificently, herself.

I believe that her posthumous biographer Joseph P. Lash—who had both the demerits and merits of someone who had known her very well personally—pegged her a bit too much as a feminist victim of this ambitious, charmingly deceptive husband in FDR, who she had to transcend to become the Mrs. Roosevelt of history and legend.

And then Blanche Wiesen Cook ’ s magnificent, Army Corps of Engineers–scale trilogy brought authentic passion, feeling and will to Eleanor Roosevelt, both as a politician and as a person. Yet the book was unfairly attacked by some of the mandarins of Roosevelt history and biography, saying that here was an outing of Mrs. Roosevelt, overemphasizing her sexuality and telling us that she was, excuse me, a lesbian? On the one hand, if you do go and examine the evidence of people who knew her, they consistently say, oh, Mrs. Roosevelt knew nothing about homosexuality. But then of course everybody would go back and read, in shocking and up-close detail, the now-legendary letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok , which offer a very forthright record of two people figuring out how to have a loving relationship that admitted of great erotic passion and great, great love.

There have been literally dozens of Eleanor Roosevelt biographies, memoirs, monographs; on top of which, FDR’s biographers increasingly find themselves devoting more and more space to his ever-increasingly acknowledged political partner. For all that, plus children and grandchildren’s and nieces’ memoirs and scrapbooks, I wanted to write a narrative biography that gets inside who she really was as a human being, so that when you finish reading this life, all in one book, you will have the “Aha!” experience of “Now, I really know her.”

ER’s childhood was marked by tragedy, loneliness, rejection and anxiety. Yet in her adulthood she flowered into this extraordinarily adaptable and effective person. You write that her uncle Theodore Roosevelt and his Oyster Bay branch of the family were characterized by, “above all other impulses, the resolve to transform private misfortune into public well-being.” How did that play out for Eleanor?

A great example to Eleanor in her life was her Aunt Bamie [née Anna Roosevelt], who was the older sister of Eleanor’s father, Elliot, and her uncle Teddy. Bamie was a highly independent woman, of whom it was said that she would have been president had women been allowed in effect to seek the office.

As a young woman, Bamie contracted Pott’s disease, an infectious spinal disorder. Her father, Theodore Sr., responded to his daughter’s suffering by creating an entire hospital and medical program so that children less fortunate and children suffering from the same illness would have a place to go and be taken care of without worrying. There were in fact many hospitals and alms houses and places where people could get care and help that were funded or run by Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. So, his children and certain of his grandchildren became fully aware of an obligation that is characterized by the phrase noblesse oblige.

But Eleanor wasn’t just a privileged young woman going to help out in a hospital or volunteer in the Rivington Street Settlement House. She was herself an outsider, someone who had been cast by fate, by the deaths over a 19-month period of, first, her mother, then a baby brother, and then her beloved father, respectively, from diphtheria, scarlet fever and alcoholism mixed with drug addiction. Eleanor was effectively orphaned at age 10, becoming somebody who didn’t fit in any more, either within her larger family, her circle of friends, or the world that she had been prepared to enter, which was the world of a privileged young woman in brownstone New York.

She experienced that sense of exile to the point that when she found people suffering from the same apartness, the same alienation, the same lostness, she understood them, and she felt close. She developed an ability to feel, to see more than was being shown, and to hear more than what was being said. It came out of all the anguish of having been cut off so dramatically from the person she might have been had she continued as the charming, cheerful daughter of Elliot and Anna Roosevelt.

That was the psychological springboard that ultimately enabled her to become a champion for people afflicted by poverty, tyranny, disease, discrimination and dislocation throughout the world.

A pivotal experience for the younger Eleanor was her time at Allenswood, a private, bilingual secondary school near London headed by the charismatic French educator Marie Souvestre. You describe the school as joyously alive, with flowers throughout the day rooms in fall and spring. For all its lovely touches, however, this was no finishing school for debutantes. Mme. Souvestre was training young women to think independently and develop a social conscience. Those years left an imprint.

Absolutely. Women’s education for some time had been seen to be actually dangerous for women's health. For a period after that, it was more about telling young women what they should think and say, how to behave properly.

Allenswood was different. Eleanor blossomed there. She already had begun to think for herself—she just didn’t know it yet. And so Madame Souvestre was the person who opened Eleanor’s own mind to herself and said if you don’t get to know yourself, you’re not going to get to know anybody else, you’re not really going to be a grownup, you’re not really going to be a person of the world.

Eleanor already spoke French fluently and was able to converse about adult subjects that were far beyond the reach of most of the girls there, and she came to be recognized as the school’s champion girl, the standout, the person who was going to carry Madame Souvestre's ideals into the 20th century. Eleanor was already worldly, but she was also, importantly, motherless and utterly willing to be devoted. And so she became the perfect second-in-command, the one who could translate between a body of international students and a complicated and touchy chief executive. She was working out how power and influence works through the job of second, through the job of a beta, through the job of a first lady. She learned to trust the way she thought, and to say it and speak it without fear and without shame.

Was shame a powerful factor in her development?

She did experience a great deal of shame in her childhood and in her young womanhood, for so many reasons. The main one—and it’s never understood clearly enough because it’s kind of lost in the story and in the archives—was about her adored father’s horrifying descent into mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction and ultimately suicide. The disintegration of Elliot Roosevelt was so profound, and so secretly kept from her by the adults, that Eleanor was a sitting duck when one of her extremely rivalrous and kooky aunts—the mean, vain and angry Aunt Pussie—turned on Eleanor one summer when she was 17 and said, I’m going to tell you the truth about your father—and then revealed a chain of horrors that would be a terrible blow for any young woman in any day or age, but in that time, just a nightmare. Knowing that she must now go through a world that pitied her as the orphaned daughter of the disgraced brother of [President] Theodore Roosevelt made her pivot immediately to realizing that the only hope for her was to represent a goodness of such sterling character that no one would ever question her father again.

The most public and well-known of all her relationships, of course, was with her fifth cousin, FDR, which evolved from youthful romance, marriage and betrayal to a mature, respectful and purposeful understanding that seemed to serve them both well. What would you say was the genius of that relationship and that marriage?

Both were able to adapt to the presence of others within their relationship, that they both were able to let go—with astonishing swiftness, actually—of the parts of themselves that they had hoped would satisfy the other, but which clearly were not going to. They moved right on, step by step, even side by side, asymptotically, going on to infinity in certain ways, because they were the power couple of all time, leading separate but parallel lives, with separate loves, separate helpers, separate people they could depend on. To me, they were an utterly modern couple who formed an utterly modern blended family. They formed a community, really, more than a family.

I think Eleanor is the lead there. She found a way to move forward through every stage, including finding her own relationship with, and love for, FDR’s assistant Missy LeHand, who became his closest companion and confidante from the 1920s into the ’40s. The primary ground zero of everything for them, was Franklin’s polio. Their ability to adapt to this life-altering illness, and to have a reasonably happy ever-after, was astonishing.

We tend to forget that the beloved Mrs. Roosevelt was the object of considerable vitriol in her day, as were Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and other avatars of peace, justice and social change. How did she handle it?

She was indeed subjected to endless misogyny and hatred, much of it generated by her championing of civil rights for African Americans. The attacks were brutal, vulgar, downright disgusting, and yet she just sailed right on. That was really quite characteristic of her, and of her leadership. It was simply a consciousness on her part, a practice, a sort of Buddhist enlightenment that she was not going to ever find anything but love for her enemies. She was sharp and cagey and extremely strategic, but she did manage to bring a humanistic view to the kinds of things that are grinding up politics into panic and chaos and all the rest today.

How would you explain Eleanor Roosevelt’s significance to those for whom she's just a name in a history book?

I would say she’s the one who wanted you to know that your government belongs to you. That it was furnished to you, it was invented for you, it was designed for you so that you could have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in your way. But in return—and this is the catch—you must do the people’s duty: It's up to you as a part of “we, the people” to show up for local, state, and federal elections, and put in your vote. That's it. That’s the contract with your country.

What you fundamentally keep seeing in Eleanor Roosevelt, is that she demanded civic responsibility of the individual and also demanded that we as a country to pay attention to the individual. She was always the intermediary, going between this group and that group, between the low and the high, the East and the West, the South and North.

Action was the key to everything she did. Words mattered—and she expressed herself in plain, simple, beautiful, clean language—but they were not finally as important as doing something. The phrase that Eleanor Roosevelt brought everywhere she went was, “What can be done?” The reactions were powerful. Off to the appropriate agency in Washington would go the message about so and so needing this.

She would say to people, pay attention to local politics, learn your community. Everything that's happening in the world of international affairs and on the national, federal level is happening in your community. And it’s in the small places close to home that we find human rights. It’s in every school, it’s in courtrooms, it’s in prisons, it's in hospitals, it's in every place where human beings are reaching out and trying to find a relationship between themselves and the world.

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Jamie Katz | | READ MORE

Jamie Katz is a longtime Smithsonian contributor and has held senior editorial positions at People , Vibe , Latina and the award-winning alumni magazine Columbia College Today , which he edited for many years. He was a contributing writer to LIFE: World War II: History’s Greatest Conflict in Pictures , edited by Richard B. Stolley (Bulfinch Press, 2001).

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Eleanor Roosevelt’s Unprecedented Activism—From Inside the White House

By: Iván Román

Updated: March 8, 2023 | Original: March 10, 2023

Eleanor Roosevelt ’s tireless advocacy for social and economic justice made her one of the most admired women of the 20 th  century. In her 12 years in the White House alongside her husband  Franklin Delano Roosevelt , she engaged in activism and public service far beyond what any other first lady had ever done. And after her husband’s 1945 death, she evolved her mission further onto the international stage.

Her causes were wide-ranging, inclusive—and to some, radical. Against the calamitous backdrop of the  Great Depression , Eleanor promoted efforts to curb economic inequality. She vocally rejected racial prejudice and promoted economic empowerment and civil rights for Black Americans. She defended the civil liberties of Japanese Americans her husband ordered incarcerated during WWII. And she vigorously supported the expansion of women’s rights. When she oversaw the drafting of the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights  at the newly formed United Nations—and lobbied delegations to adopt it in 1948—President  Harry S. Truman  called her “the First Lady of the World.”

Roosevelt’s life and work were filled with paradox. Born an aristocrat, she became a fierce champion for underdogs. Shy and insecure in her youth, she cultivated a ubiquitous national presence on radio, in print and through public appearances. In her highly untraditional marital partnership, she privately helped FDR shape his progressive political agenda, but wasn’t afraid to diverge with him publicly. She wielded an influential disruptive voice while still part of the establishment.

According to her biographer, historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, Roosevelt committed herself to change, especially when it came to the need for tolerance. “We must wipe out, wherever we find it, any feeling of intolerance, of belief that one group can go ahead alone,” the first lady declared in a 1934 speech. “We will go ahead together, or we will all go down together.”

From Privilege to Progressivism

Born in 1884 into wealth and privilege, Roosevelt endured a childhood of pain and loss. Her mother, a beautiful socialite who derided her shy, plain daughter, died when Eleanor was eight. Her toddler brother Elliott died the following year. Soon after, her beloved but troubled father, brother of  Theodore Roosevelt , perished after jumping from a third-story balcony in an asylum.

At age 15, her grandmother sent her to Allenswood Academy, a private finishing school outside London. At a time when women had no vote and seldom had a voice or a career, the school fostered confident, educated and independent young women. That radical mission—and unwavering support—gave the solemn and astute Roosevelt crucial tools to blossom.

Soon after returning to New York for her social debut in 1902, Eleanor began engaging with the wider world. She volunteered with progressive women’s groups to teach poor immigrant girls in Manhattan’s Lower East Side settlement houses and to investigate working conditions for women in garment factories. That summer, she met her father’s fifth cousin Franklin, a Harvard student, on a train; after a secret engagement, the two married three years later in New York City. President Theodore Roosevelt, her uncle, walked her down the aisle.

Naturally Shy, Eleanor Grew Vocal

When FDR contracted  polio  and lost the use of his legs, Eleanor encouraged his ambition to remain in politics. He won election as governor of New York in 1928 and then as president in 1932. Traveling the country and the world as her husband’s eyes and ears, she delved deeply into public and political affairs.

She reported back to FDR on  New Deal  programs that gave jobs to millions of unemployed people. She broadcast some of her weekly radio shows from these visits, where she also met with citizens.

In a first for first ladies, she held hundreds of her own  press conferences . The catch? They were only for women reporters, forcing news outlets to hire more women. In addition to writing for women’s magazines, Roosevelt began a syndicated newspaper column, called “My Day.” It ran six days a week in 1938 for 62 newspapers. By the 1950s, readership grew to 4 million readers in 90 publications.

Her commentary, casual and chatty in tone, ranged widely. She advocated for government aid to retrain unemployed miners in West Virginia and to create more jobs for young people. She pushed for equal pay for women. She shared thoughts on the nuclear bomb and blasted xenophobic attacks on Germans, Jews and Japanese in the U.S.

She Spoke Up for Civil Rights

In a  February  1948 column, Roosevelt blasted the “hue and cry” of American segregationists as an “expression of fear” that “injures our leadership in the world.”

“It is because we do not grant civil and economic rights on an equal basis that there is any real reason to fear,” she wrote.

Fifteen years before, she lobbied for a federal  anti-lynching bill . But FDR refused to publicly support it because he feared losing southern votes needed for pre-war rearmament. Eleanor continued to push for the bill, drawing criticism to her husband. She recalls him saying, “ Well, I can always say I can’t do anything with my wife. ”

She spotlighted racial discrimination when she resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution in February 1939 for  barring  world-renowned Black singer Marian Anderson from performing at its Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.

“You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me…your organization has failed,” Roosevelt wrote to the DAR president.

Wiesen Cook, author of a three-volume biography on Roosevelt, said the hypocrisy of having a segregated U.S. military in a war against  Nazis —and their brutal racial supremacy—was not lost on the first lady as she walked miles of hospital corridors on the front lines, holding up bottles of plasma for wounded soldiers.

“Eleanor Roosevelt was reviled by the Dixiecrats [conservative southern democrats], by the conservatives, by members of Congress and by the press because she stood for justice and she stood for civil rights at a time when, even during World War II, the military is segregated, blood plasma is segregated, it’s segregated black and white,” said Wiesen Cook in a 2013 interview. “Everywhere she goes, she is demanding racial justice.”

She Opposed Japanese Internment

Just nine days after Japanese forces attacked  Pearl Harbor  on December 7, 1941, plunging the U.S. officially into WWII, Eleanor challenged Americans not to succumb to fear. Japanese Americans didn’t suddenly cease to be Americans when those bombs fell, she  wrote  in a column.

Her husband’s  Executive Order 9066 , forcing some 117,000 Japanese Americans into incarceration camps, caught Eleanor by surprise. She couldn’t contradict his  order . But she tried to mitigate the damage by meeting with and donating funds to civic groups and visiting wounded Japanese American soldiers.

In April 1943, she visited the Gila River camp in Arizona. She reported on the harsh conditions, took pictures with people incarcerated there and expressed sympathy for their plight. Using her media channels, she told the public that the vast majority of Japanese Americans should be released—and spared further discrimination.

If the United States won’t make the  Bill of Rights  a reality for all citizens, and keep its prejudices about race and religion in check, she wrote, “then we shall have removed from the world, the one real hope for the future on which all humanity must now rely.”

She Championed Human Rights

That thinking guided her crowning achievement: drafting and securing adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As more than 50 countries joined to form the  United Nations  after World War II, seeking a new international order to maintain collective security and peace, the declaration marked a bold first step.

President Harry S. Truman, FDR’s successor, had appointed Roosevelt to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, in part to get her out of his way in Washington. And other delegation officials, including the secretary of state, saw her as a “mushy, addled symbol (of FDR days), an uneducated widow” who would unfairly draw the media attention, said Allida Black, editor emeritus of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers.

After a good first impression responding to a forceful Soviet speech, she was unanimously appointed to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights. She had no expertise in the law or parliamentary procedures, but her work tackling political and cultural obstacles to gain social justice and women’s rights prepared her for the task.

Black quoted Roosevelt telling the plethora of lawyers at the United Nations that “we cannot debate for three years on where to put a comma.”

“What the world needs now is a vision to withstand the horrors of the  Holocaust , the horrors of the  bomb , their intractable fear of a return of a worldwide depression and the likelihood that if we fail, there will be another world war,” Roosevelt said.

Her persuasiveness and perseverance advanced the negotiations that articulated that vision. Some 85 working sessions in 60 days, debates until the wee hours, more than 100 one-on-one meetings helped to convince 48 countries (eight abstained) to vote for the declaration on December 10, 1948.

She had given speeches to the U.N. General Assembly, appeared on radio shows across Europe and the Americas to pitch the need for a declaration of human rights that included all men, women and children, regardless of race, creed and individual abilities. Some of her “My Day” columns lobbying for human rights proved so notable, they were published in the Soviet government newspaper  Pravda .

“If we observe these rights for ourselves and for others, I think we will find that it is easier in the world to build peace. Because war destroys all human rights and freedoms, so in fighting for those we fight for peace,” she said in one of her speeches.

Her worries about the world and its postwar future are reflected in the last line of her nightly prayers during this time, wrote her son Elliott Roosevelt in his book  Mother R .

“Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.”

HISTORY Vault: Eleanor Roosevelt: A Restless Spirit

The first activist First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt had her own staff, held her own press conferences, and championed her own causes. Explore her extraordinary life.

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“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living:

A list of Eleanor Roosevelt resources on this website.

Eleanor Roosevelt and the United Nations

“I believed the United Nations to be the one hope for a peaceful world. I knew that my husband had placed great importance on the establishment of this world organization. So I felt a great sense of responsibility.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

Facts & Figures: Eleanor Roosevelt

Learn more about Eleanor Roosevelt. When was she born? What did she do after leaving the White House? Did she ever run for office?

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Tuskegee Airmen

Eleanor Roosevelt demonstrated crucial public and personal support for the groundbreaking African American flying unit during World War II.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson

The DAR’s refusal to grant Marian Anderson the use of Constitution Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt’s resignation from the DAR in protest, and the resulting concert at the Lincoln Memorial combined into a watershed moment in civil rights history

Eleanor Roosevelt regarded her role in drafting and securing adoption of the Declaration as her greatest achievement.

Roosevelt Family Genealogy

Facts & Figures on the partnership between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, their ancestors and descendants. Includes a detailed genealogical charting of family lineage.

Facts & Figures: Roosevelt Partnership & Family

How were Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt related? When and where did they first meet? How many children did they have and what were their children's names?

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The Library's mission is to foster research and education on the life and times of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and their continuing impact on contemporary life. Our work is carried out by four major areas: Archives, Museum, Education and Public Programs.

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The Unlikely Friendship of Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune

Bethune became a trusted advisor to both Roosevelt and her husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt , and played a key role in shaping government policies for Black Americans during the 1930s and '40s.

Bethune came from humble beginnings

Born in South Carolina in 1875, Bethune was one of 17 children, and both her parents and most of her siblings had formerly been enslaved. The family struggled to get by, and Bethune picked cotton with her family to survive. When she was offered a spot in a local school opened by missionaries when she was 10, she jumped at the chance, becoming the first in her family to learn to read. She later won scholarships to study in North Carolina and Chicago, where she developed a lifelong passion for the uplifting possibilities of education, particularly for young Black girls.

Abandoning her original plan to become a missionary, she moved to Florida and founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls. The school was an immediate success, growing from five students to more than 250 in just two years. In 1923, it merged with a nearby school to become Bethune-Cookman College, a four-year, coeducational school. Despite repeated threats from the KKK and other racist groups, Bethune became active in local, state and national civil rights organizations, opening the first hospital for Black people in the Daytona region, which also trained nurses. In 1924, she became president of the National Association of Colored Women, the nation’s largest Black woman’s political organization.

READ MORE: How Mary McLeod Bethune Became a Pioneer in Black Education

Roosevelt grew up in privileged circumstances but struggled to find her place in society

Born into one of New York’s most distinguished families, and the favorite niece of future President Theodore Roosevelt , Roosevelt was orphaned at a young age, and it was only after a stint at a British finishing school that she began to shed some of the shy, self-doubting awkwardness of her early years. Discouraged by her family from going to college, Roosevelt briefly worked as a volunteer in New York’s Lower East Side, leading classes at settlement houses for the largely poor residents of the neighborhood.

In 1905, she married a distant cousin, Franklin. The couple had several children, but Roosevelt struggled with her new role as wife and mother. After learning of Franklin’s affair with her own social secretary, she increasingly turned her attention away from the private world of her family and toward public life. After FDR was stricken with polio in 1921, she became key to his continued political ascent, overcoming her shyness to forge relationships with top New York state power brokers. She also became active in organizations pushing for liberal reform, including women’s trade unions. While she still harbored some of the racial and social prejudices of others in her social class, her political beliefs were becoming increasingly progressive.

The two women quickly became close friends

Bethune and Roosevelt first met in 1927, when Roosevelt invited Bethune to a meeting of the leaders of the nation’s most prominent women’s groups. Roosevelt was appalled when the all-white attendees refused to sit with Bethune, the sole Black guest. They forged a fast bond, informed in part by their mutual belief in the power of education (that same year, Roosevelt had co-founded a college prep school for girls where she remained a teacher until her husband became president). Bethune soon became a trusted advisor to Roosevelt, opening her eyes to the continued struggles of Black Americans.

Bethune, like many African Americans, was a vocal supporter of the Republican Party at the time, due in large part to the dominance of white, segregationist southerners within the Democratic Party and their support for Jim Crow policies . Bethune had been appointed the head of a commission on child welfare under Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover , and, despite her friendship with Roosevelt, supported Hoover’s unsuccessful re-election bid in 1932 against FDR.

Bethune became part of FDR’s 'Black Cabinet'

At the outset, few African American leaders held out much hope that Roosevelt could, or would, do much to alleviate the deep suffering of Black Americans during the depths of the Great Depression . But as FDR’s New Deal policies came into effect, they began to push to ensure that the progressive legislation would help all Americans, Black or white. The success of these new programs would play a large part in a political realignment that saw large numbers of Black Americans shift their support to the Democrats during the 1930s and 40s.

While Roosevelt did not appoint any Blacks to high-ranking positions within his administration, a number of Black people filled the ranks in lower posts, determined to champion the cause of political and economic equality, forming an unofficial “Black Cabinet” to influence Roosevelt on issues of importance to Black Americans. After serving as an advisor to FDR on minority issues, Bethune was formally brought into the administration to serve as the director of the Negro Division of the newly-created National Youth Administration, making Bethune the first African American to head a federal agency.

The NYA, which was tasked with developing employment and educational opportunities for young Americans, was a personal favorite of Roosevelt’s, who realized that Bethune was uniquely qualified to make the program a success. And Bethune did, creating jobs for hundreds of thousands of young Black Americans, and providing increased funding for Black higher education programs.

Bethune’s friendship with the Roosevelts was controversial for many white Americans

Both Bethune and Roosevelt continued to champion the cause of civil rights throughout FDR’s presidency. In 1939, when singer Marian Anderson was barred from performing at Washington’s Constitution Hall by the all-white Daughters of the American Revolution, Roosevelt resigned from the organization and helped arrange Anderson’s historic performance at the Lincoln Memorial. Despite criticisms, and even hate mail, especially from Southern white people, Roosevelt was determined that her friendship with Bethune be as public as possible, staying at Bethune’s home , raising funds for Bethune’s college and personally greeting her at the entrance to the White House during her visits, where the two women conspicuously walked arm-in-arm through the building.

When the United States entered World War II , Bethune successfully pushed Roosevelt to ensure that the newly-created Women’s Army Corps admitted Black women and helped select officer candidates for the group, and she and labor leader A. Philip Randolph lobbied Roosevelt to desegregate the defense industry and establish a federal fair employment commission designed to eliminate discriminatory hiring practices. Not all of her efforts were a success, however. When Congress was debating an anti-lynching law in 1940, Bethune personally appealed to FDR to throw his support behind the measure. Still fearful of the power Southern Democrats had on the party, FDR refused, and the bill went down to defeat.

Bethune and Roosevelt remained friends after her husband's presidency ended

After the NYA was disbanded in 1944, Bethune left government work, but continued her activism, remaining the head of the National Council of Negro Women until 1949 and serving as vice president of the NAACP from 1940 to 1955. When FDR died in 1945, Roosevelt gave Bethune, who had a fondness for stylish walking canes, one of his canes.

Later that year, the two were among the U.S. delegates (and Bethune, representing the NAACP, the only Black woman) to the San Francisco conference that gave birth to the United Nations, where both successfully lobbied for the creation of the landmark charter dedicated to human rights. When Bethune died in 1955, Roosevelt, who would champion the cause of civil rights until her own death in 1962, dedicated an issue of her popular syndicated column, “My Day,” to the remarkable life of her old friend, vowing to “cherish the spirit she lived by and try to promote the causes she believed in, in loving memory of a very wonderful life.”

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Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt

A shy, insecure child, Eleanor Roosevelt would grow up to become one of the most important and beloved First Ladies, authors, reformers, and female leaders of the 20 th century.

Born on October 11, 1884 in New York City, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the first of Elliot and Anna Hall Roosevelt’s three children. Her family was affluent and politically prominent, and while her childhood was in many ways blessed, it was also marked by hardship: her father’s alcoholism, as well as the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers before she was ten years old. She was raised by her harsh and critical maternal grandmother, who damaged Eleanor’s self-esteem. Timid and awkward, she believed that she compared badly with other girls.

In 1899, Roosevelt began her three years of study at London’s Allenswood Academy, where she became more independent and confident. Her teacher, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, with her passionate embrace of social issues, opened Roosevelt up to the world of ideas and was an early force in Roosevelt’s social and political development.

Roosevelt returned to New York for her social debut in 1902. She became involved with the settlement house movement, teaching immigrant children and families on Rivington Street. In 1905, after a long courtship, she married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a charming, Harvard graduate in his first year of law school at Columbia University. Her uncle and close relative, President Theodore Roosevelt, walked her down the aisle.

The Roosevelts settled in New York, where Eleanor found herself under the thumb of her controlling mother-in-law, Sara Roosevelt, who, like her grandmother earlier, was harsh in her criticism of her daughter-in-law. While Franklin advanced his career, his wife raised their daughter and four sons under the watchful eye of her often belittling mother-in-law.

All that changed in 1911, when Franklin was elected to the New York State Senate, and the couple moved to Albany, away from Sara. Two years later, the Roosevelts moved to Washington, DC, when Franklin joined Woodrow Wilson’s administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. While she was initially uncomfortable with the DC political scene, Roosevelt was growing in her political consciousness. When World War I broke out, she volunteered with various relief agencies, further increasing her visibility and political clout. Hurt when she discovered in 1918 that her husband had had an affair with another woman, she remained married, though her feelings changed. She began to live a more independent life and often escaped to Val-Kill, her upstate New York home, where she was also part of a women-owned furniture cooperative. Nonetheless, she remained his political ally and advisor, among those who urged him to remain in public life despite the polio he contracted in 1921.

Although initially wary of women’s suffrage, after its passage in 1920, Roosevelt promoted women’s political engagement, playing a leadership role in several organizations, including the League of Women Voters and the Women’s Trade Union League. She surrounded herself with politically astute women such as Molly Dewson and Rose Schneiderman. She was head of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee, recruited in 1928 to help Al Smith’s presidential bid. Her activities were widely covered in the media in the 1920s, making her more publically recognizable than her husband when he decided to run for governor in 1928. Though unhappy about his bid for the governorship and his equally successful run for the presidency in 1932, Roosevelt became the most politically active and influential First Lady in history, using the position to advance many of her progressive and egalitarian goals.

In the White House from 1933 to 1945, First Lady Roosevelt kept a dizzying schedule. She wrote nearly 3,000 articles in newspapers and magazines, including a monthly column in Women’s Home Companion , where she asked the public to share their stories, hardships, and questions. In a few short months, she received several hundred thousand responses and donated what she earned from the column to charity. She also authored six books and traveled nationwide delivering countless speeches. She held weekly press conferences with women reporters who she hoped would get her message to the American people.

Roosevelt had immense influence on her husband’s decisions as president and in shaping both his cabinet and the New Deal. Working with Molly Dewson, head of the Women’s Division of the DNC, she lobbied her husband to appoint more women, successfully securing Frances Perkins as the first woman to head the Department of Labor, among many others. She also ensured that groups left out of the New Deal were included by seeking revisions to programs and legislation, including greater participation for women in the heavily male-dominated Civilian Conservation Corps. She also championed racial justice, working to help black miners in West Virginia, advocating for the NAACP and National Urban League, and resigning, with much media fanfare, from the Daughters of the American Revolution when they refused to allow African American singer Marion Anderson to perform in their auditorium.

Roosevelt’s political activism did not end with her husband’s death in 1945. Appointed in 1946, she served for more than a decade as a delegate to the United Nations, the institution established by her husband, and embraced the cause of world peace. She not only chaired the United Nations Human Rights Commission, she also helped write the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. She spoke out against McCarthyism in the 1950s. In 1960, at the request of President John F. Kennedy, she chaired the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which released a ground-breaking study about gender discrimination a year after her death in 1963. She also worked on the Equal Pay Act that was passed that same year. Roosevelt’s commitment to racial justice was evident in her civil rights work and efforts to push Washington to take swifter action in housing desegregation and protections for Freedom Riders and other activists. Kennedy nominated Roosevelt for the Nobel Peace Prize and though she did not win, she remained at the top of national polls ranking the most respected women in America decades after her death.

By Debra Michals, Ph.D.

Unedited version reprinted with permission from: Doris Weatherford. American Women's History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events , (Prentice Hall, 1994), 294-298.

Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume I, The Early Years, 1884-1933. (Penguin Random House, 1993).

Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume II, The Defining Years , 1933-1938 (Penguin Random House, 2000).

Ward, Geoffrey C. Eleanor Roosevelt. American National Biography. Accessed 25 July 2017. http://www.anb.org/articles/15/15-00580.html?from=../cush/e0302.html&from_nm=Civil%20Rights%20Movement

Chafe, William F. “Eleanor Roosevelt” in Sicherman, Barbara and Carol Hurd Green, et al. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. (Radcliffe, 1980) p. 595-601.

PHOTO: Library of Congress

MLA – Michals, Debra. “Eleanor Roosevelt.” National Women’s History Museum, 2017. Date accessed.

Chicago – Michals, Debra “Eleanor Roosevelt.” National Women’s History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/eleanor-roosevelt.

The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project at George Washington University. https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/documents/ . Biographical sketch: https://www2.gwu.edu/~erpapers/abouteleanor/erbiography.cfm

History Channel. http://www.history.com/topics/first-ladies/eleanor-roosevelt

The White House, First Ladies. https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/first-ladies/eleanorroosevelt

"Eleanor Roosevelt." Historic World Leaders , edited by Anne Commire, Gale, 1994. Biography in Context , link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/K1616000506/BIC1?u=dist214_biorc&xid=3a496f5a . Accessed 12 Aug. 2017.

Asbell, Bernard. Mother and Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt. (Coward, McCann, 1982).

Cook, Blanche Wiesen, Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume III, The War Years and After , 1939-1962 (Penguin Random House, 2016).

Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (Simon & Schuster, 1994).

Hareven, Tamara K. Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience. (Quadrangle, 1968).

Lash, Joseph. Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends. (Doubleday, 1982).

Roosevelt, Eleanor. This is My Story. (Harper, 1937).

The American Experience: Eleanor Roosevelt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3uQYiOKD6c

Ken Burns. The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2016) http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-roosevelts/watch-videos/

Biography.com https://www.biography.com/people/eleanor-roosevelt-9463366

The History Channel. http://www.history.com/topics/first-ladies/eleanor-roosevelt/videos

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The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt Paperback – October 21, 2014

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A candid and insightful look at an era and a life through the eyes of one of the most remarkable Americans of the twentieth century, First Lady and humanitarian Eleanor Roosevelt.

The daughter of one of New York’s most influential families, niece of Theodore Roosevelt, and wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt witnessed some of the most remarkable decades in modern history, as America transitioned from the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and the Depression to World War II and the Cold War.

A champion of the downtrodden, Eleanor drew on her experience and used her role as First Lady to help those in need. Intimately involved in her husband’s political life, from the governorship of New York to the White House, Eleanor would become a powerful force of her own, heading women’s organizations and youth movements, and battling for consumer rights, civil rights, and improved housing. In the years after FDR’s death, this inspiring, controversial, and outspoken leader would become a U.N. Delegate, chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, a newspaper columnist, Democratic Party activist, world-traveler, and diplomat devoted to the ideas of liberty and human rights.

This single volume biography brings her into focus through her own words, illuminating the vanished world she grew up, her life with her political husband, and the post-war years when she worked to broaden cooperation and understanding at home and abroad.

• Print length 480 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper Perennial Modern Classics
• Publication date October 21, 2014
• Dimensions 0.9 x 6 x 8.9 inches
• ISBN-10 0062355910
• ISBN-13 978-0062355911
• Lexile measure 1230L
• See all details

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"Brava", October 2011 "A lively and honest look at her life, her politics, and so much more."

From the Back Cover

A candid and insightful look at an era and a life through the eyes of one of the most remarkable Americans of the twentieth century

The long and eventful life of Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) was full of rich experiences and courageous actions. The niece of Theodore Roosevelt, she married a Columbia University law student named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gradually ascended in the world of New York politics to reach the presidency in 1932. Throughout his three terms, Eleanor Roosevelt was not only intimately involved in FDR's personal and political life but also led women's organizations and youth movements, and fought for consumer welfare, civil rights, and better housing standards. During World War II she traveled with her husband to meet leaders of many powerful nations; after his death in 1945 she worked as a UN delegate, chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, newspaper columnist, Democratic Party activist, and diplomat, and was a world traveler. By the end of her life, Eleanor Roosevelt was recognized around the world for her fortitude and commitment to the ideals of liberty and human rights. Her autobiography constitutes a self-portrait no biography can match for its candor and liveliness, wisdom, tolerance, and breadth of view—a self-portrait of one of the greatest American humanitarians of our time.

With 8 pages of black-and-white photographs and an afterword by Eleanor Roosevelt's granddaughter

About the Author

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11, 1884. She married Franklin Delano Roosevelt on March 17, 1905, and was the mother of six children. She became First Lady on March 4, 1933, and went on to serve as Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly and Representative to the Commission on Human Rights under Harry S. Truman, and chairwoman of the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women under John F. Kennedy. She died on November 7, 1962, at the age of seventy-eight.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (October 21, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062355910
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062355911
• Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1230L
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.9 x 6 x 8.9 inches
• #563 in Political Leader Biographies
• #1,253 in Women's Biographies
• #3,772 in Memoirs (Books)

About the author

Eleanor roosevelt.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (/ˈɛlᵻnɔːr ˈroʊzəvɛlt/; October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962) was an American politician, diplomat, and activist. She was the longest-serving First Lady of the United States, holding the post from March 1933 to April 1945 during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms in office, and served as United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952. President Harry S. Truman later called her the "First Lady of the World" in tribute to her human rights achievements.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Douglas Chandor (public domain image from http://www.whitehouse.gov) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

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The Best Books About Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt books - list of books about Eleanor Roosevelt includes jacket cover images when applicable. All books on Eleanor Roosevelt are cataloged here by their prominence. This well-researched Eleanor Roosevelt bibliography includes out of print titles and generally contains the most popular, famous, or otherwise notable books. This collection of Eleanor Roosevelt books includes both fiction and non-fiction books about this topic. If you're looking for a list of popular books on Eleanor Roosevelt then you're in the right place.

You should be able to answer the questions "What are the best books about Eleanor Roosevelt?" and "What are the most famous Eleanor Roosevelt books?" with books on this reading list.

Note that this Eleanor Roosevelt book list can be sorted by various information, and most Eleanor Roosevelt books can be bought on Amazon with one easy click. If you want to know more about Eleanor Roosevelt then this list is the perfect resource for finding more books on the subject.

Doris Kearns Goodwin and Barbara Cooney are among the authors who have written books about Eleanor Roosevelt in their lifetime.

A world of love

Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933

• Eleanor Roosevelt

Love, Eleanor

Eleanor and Franklin

No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt - The Home Front in World War II

The Roosevelt Women

Casting Her Own Shadow

Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2: The Defining Years, 1933-1938

The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia

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The 15 Best Books on President Theodore Roosevelt

Essential books on theodore roosevelt.

There are countless books on Theodore Roosevelt, and it comes with good reason, aside from serving as America’s twenty-sixth President (1901-1909) after the assassination of President William McKinley, he brought new excitement and power to the office, vigorously leading Congress and the American public toward progressive reforms and a strong foreign policy.

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat,” he wrote in The Strenuous Life .

In order to get to the bottom of what inspired one of history’s most consequential figures to the heights of societal contribution, we’ve compiled a list of the 15 best books on Theodore Roosevelt.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

This classic biography is the story of seven men – a naturalist, a writer, a lover, a hunter, a ranchman, a soldier, and a politician – who merged at age forty-two to become the youngest President in history.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt begins at the apex of his international prestige. That was on New Year’s Day, 1907, when Roosevelt, who had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, threw open the doors of the White House to the American people and shook 8,150 hands. One visitor remarked afterward, “You go to the White House, you shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk – and then you go home to wring the personality out of your clothes.”

The rest of this book tells the story of Roosevelt’s irresistible rise to power. During the years 1858-1901, he transformed himself from a frail, asthmatic boy into a full-blooded man. Fresh out of Harvard, he simultaneously published a distinguished work of naval history and became the fist-swinging leader of a Republican insurgency in the New York State Assembly. He chased thieves across the Badlands of North Dakota with a copy of Anna Karenina   in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other.

Married to his childhood sweetheart in 1886, he became the country squire of Sagamore Hill on Long Island, a flamboyant civil service reformer in Washington, D.C., and a night-stalking police commissioner in New York City. As assistant secretary of the navy, he almost single-handedly brought about the Spanish-American War. After leading “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” in the famous charge up San Juan Hill, Cuba, he returned home a military hero, and was rewarded with the governorship of New York.

In what he called his “spare hours” he fathered six children and wrote fourteen books. By 1901, the man Senator Mark Hanna called “that damned cowboy” was vice president. Seven months later, an assassin’s bullet gave Roosevelt the national leadership he had always craved.

The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The story is told through the intense friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft – a close relationship that strengthens both men before it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination that divides their wives, their children, and their closest friends, while crippling the progressive wing of the Republican Party, causing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to be elected, and changing the country’s history.

The Bully Pulpit is also the story of the muckraking press, which arouses the spirit of reform that helps Roosevelt push the government to shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. The muckrakers are portrayed through the greatest group of journalists ever assembled at one magazine – Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White – teamed under the mercurial genius of publisher S. S. McClure.

Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

Written by David McCullough, the author of  Truman,  this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised.

The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR’s first love. All are brought to life to make “a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail” ( The New York Times Book Review ).

Theodore Roosevelt: A Life by Nathan Miller

Nathan Miller’s critically acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt was the first complete one-volume life of the Rough Rider to be published in more than thirty years. From his sickly childhood to charging up San Juan Hill to waving his fist under J.P. Morgan’s rubicund nose, Theodore Roosevelt  offers the intimate history of a man who continues to cast a magic spell over the American imagination.

As the twenty-sixth president of the United States, Roosevelt embodied the overwhelming confidence of the nation as it entered the American Century. With fierce joy, he brandished a “Big Stick” abroad and promised a “Square Deal” at home. He was the nation’s first environmental president, challenged the trusts, and, as the first American leader to play an important role in world affairs, began construction of a long-dreamed canal across Panama and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for almost singlehandedly bringing about a peaceful end to the Russo-Japanese War.

Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris

Theodore Rex is the story – never fully told before – of Theodore Roosevelt’s two world-changing terms as President of the United States. A hundred years before the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, Roosevelt succeeded to power in the aftermath of an act of terrorism. Youngest of all our chief executives, he rallied a stricken nation with his superhuman energy, charm, and political skills. He proceeded to combat the problems of race and labor relations and trust control while making the Panama Canal possible and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

But his most historic achievement remains his creation of a national conservation policy, and his monument millions of acres of protected parks and forests. The book ends with Roosevelt leaving office, still only fifty years old, his future reputation secure as one of our greatest presidents.

The River of Doubt by Candice Millard

The River of Doubt – it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.

After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.

Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide.  The River of Doubt  brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.

When Trumpets Call by Patricia O’Toole

Drawn from a wealth of new materials, this gem among books on Theodore Roosevelt is an analysis of the final ten years of the President’s life and describes how he went on safari after leaving the White House, unsuccessfully strived for another presidential term, worked to support Liberty bonds when the U.S. entered World War I, and lost his son on Bastille Day.

The Naturalist by Darrin Lunde

Perhaps no American president is more associated with nature and wildlife than Theodore Roosevelt, a prodigious hunter and adventurer, and an ardent conservationist. We think of Roosevelt as an original, yet in The Naturalist , Darrin Lunde shows how from his earliest days he actively modeled himself in the proud tradition of museum naturalists – the men who pioneered a key branch of American biology through their desire to collect animal specimens and develop a taxonomy of the natural world.

The influence these men would have on Roosevelt would shape not just his personality but his career, informing his work as a politician and statesman and ultimately affecting generations of Americans’ relationships to this country’s wilderness.

Theodore Roosevelt by Henry F. Pringle

Pringle’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography not only chronicles the incidents that shaped Roosevelt’s career but also offers insight into the character and mind of this colorful American president.

The Courage and Character of Theodore Roosevelt by George Grant

Before his fiftieth birthday, Teddy Roosevelt had served as a state legislator in New York, undersecretary of the navy, police commissioner of New York City, governor of New York, and two terms as vice president and then president of the United States. He also had run a cattle ranch in the Dakota Territories, had worked as a journalist and editor, conducted scientific expeditions to four continents, raised five children, and enjoyed a fulfilling marriage with his wife. No wonder he continues to capture our imaginations as he did the loyalty and respect of his own time.

In  The Courage and Character of Theodore Roosevelt ,  George Grant explores the life and character of one of the most remarkable men of the twentieth century. In doing so, he defines the qualities that made Roosevelt such an extraordinary leader, the exploits that made him so famous, and the spiritual values and faith that he affirmed with such vigor as he walked the world stage with an impact generated by few men in his time.

T.R.: The Last Romantic by H. W. Brands

Lauded as “a rip-roaring life” ( Wall Street Journal ),  TR  is a magisterial biography of Theodore Roosevelt by bestselling author H. W. Brands. In his time, there was no more popular national figure than Roosevelt. It was not just the energy he brought to every political office he held or his unshakable moral convictions that made him so popular, or even his status as a bonafide war hero. Most important, Theodore Roosevelt was loved by the people because this scion of a privileged New York family loved America and Americans.

And yet, according to Brands, if we look at the private Roosevelt without blinders, we see a man whose great public strengths hid enormous personal deficiencies; he was uncompromising, self-involved, and a highly imperfect brother, husband, and father.

Colonel Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine?

Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, this favorite among books on Theodore Roosevelt recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history.

The Boys of ’98 by Dale L. Walker

Spur Award-winning author Dale Walker tells the colorful story of America’s most memorable fighting force, the volunteer cavalry known as the Rough Riders. From its members, and their slapdash training in Texas and Florida, to its battles at Las Gusimas and San Juan Hill under the command of Theodore Roosevelt, who kept riding, some say, into the White House.

The Lion’s Pride by Edward J. Renehan

Drawing upon a wealth of previously unavailable materials, including letters and unpublished memoirs,  The Lion’s Pride takes us inside what is surely the most extraordinary family ever to occupy the White House. Theodore Roosevelt believed deeply that those who had been blessed with wealth, influence, and education were duty bound to lead, even – perhaps especially – if it meant risking their lives to preserve the ideals of democratic civilization. Teddy put his principles, and his life, to the test in the Spanish-American War, and raised his children to believe they could do no less.

When America finally entered the “European conflict” in 1917, all four of his sons eagerly enlisted and used their influence not to avoid the front lines but to get there as quickly as possible. Their heroism in France and the Middle East matched their father’s at San Juan Hill. All performed with selfless – some said heedless – courage: Two of the boys, Archie and Ted, Jr., were seriously wounded, and Quentin, the youngest, was killed in a dogfight with seven German planes.

Thus, the war that Teddy had lobbied for so furiously brought home a grief that broke his heart. He was buried a few months after his youngest child. Filled with the voices of the entire Roosevelt family,  The Lion’s Pride  gives us the most intimate and moving portrait ever published of the fierce bond between Teddy Roosevelt and his remarkable children.

The Wilderness Warrior by Douglas Brinkley

In this groundbreaking gem among books on Theodore Roosevelt, Douglas Brinkley draws on never-before-published materials to examine the life and achievements of our “naturalist president.” By setting aside more than 230 million acres of wild America for posterity between 1901 and 1909, Roosevelt made conservation a universal endeavor.

This crusade for the American wilderness was perhaps the greatest U.S. presidential initiative between the Civil War and World War I. Roosevelt’s most important legacies led to the creation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906. His executive orders saved such treasures as Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Petrified Forest.

Books by Theodore Roosevelt

Through the brazilian wilderness.

In 1914, with the well-wishes of the Brazilian government, Theodore Roosevelt, ex-president of the United States; his son, Kermit; and Colonel Rondon travel to South America on a quest to course the River of Doubt. While in Brazil, Theodore is also tasked with a “zoogeographic reconnaissance” of the local wilderness for the archives of the Natural History Museum of New York.

The expedition, officially named Expedicão Scientific Roosevelt-Rondon, was not without incident; men were lost, a cannibalistic tribe tracked the group, and at one point Roosevelt contracted flesh-eating bacteria. In the end though, the Roosevelt-Rondon expedition was a success, and the River of Doubt was renamed the Rio Roosevelt in his honor.

Written by a city-born boy who grew up to be a true explorer and leader, Roosevelt’s  Through the Brazilian Wilderness is a unique and important part of history, and it is indicative of the ex-president’s true wanderlust and bravery. Candid black-and-white photos from the expedition fill the pages, adding further dimensions to this remarkable journey.

The Rough Riders

The Rough Riders was the name bestowed on the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry. Roosevelt had resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to fight in the war, and his forceful personality and notoriety among the popular press of the period were probably the main driving factors resulting in the fame of this regiment. Here is the exciting story of the Rough Riders in one of the most-cherished books by Theodore Roosevelt.

The Strenuous Life

Roosevelt wrote 35 books and delivered numerous lectures on topics ranging from citizenship and success to duty and sportsmanship. His 1899 address to a Chicago audience, “The Strenuous Life,” articulates his belief in the transformative powers that individuals can achieve by overcoming hardship. Along with the other speeches and essays in this collection, Roosevelt’s work offers an inspiring vision of moral rectitude and stalwart leadership.

The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt

The life and times of President Theodore Roosevelt, in his own words.

The Wilderness Hunter

“For a number of years much of my life was spent either in the wilderness or on the borders of the settled country if, indeed, ‘settled’ is a term that can rightly be applied to the vast, scantily peopled regions where cattle-ranching is the only regular industry. During this time I hunted much, among the mountains and on the plains, both as a pastime and to procure hides, meat, and robes for use on the ranch; and it was my good luck to kill all the various kinds of large game that can properly be considered to belong to temperate North America,” Roosevelt writes.

Adding, “in hunting, the finding and killing of the game is after all but a part of the whole. The free, self-reliant, adventurous life, with its rugged and stalwart democracy; the wild surroundings, the grand beauty of the scenery, the chance to study the ways and habits of the woodland creatures all these unite to give to the career of the wilderness hunter its peculiar charm.”

If you enjoyed this guide to essential books on Theodore Roosevelt, be sure to check out our list of The 15 Best Books on President Abraham Lincoln !

Doris Kearns Goodwin and husband Dick Goodwin lived, observed, created and chronicled the 1960s

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Book Review

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

By Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon & Schuster: 480 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

“An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s” isn’t precisely the book that presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin set out to write.

Dominating this often fascinating volume is both the colossal presence and the sudden absence of Richard “Dick” Goodwin, Doris’ late husband, whose speechwriting talents defined some of the most memorable moments of the 1960s. The couple’s aim was to co-write a book based on his extraordinary archive — 300 boxes! — of personal papers and curios, from voluminous speech drafts to a shattered police club from the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Husband and wife spent years perusing and discussing those treasures, an effort short-circuited by his death in 2018, at 86, of cancer. Amid her grief and a move from their rambling home in Concord, Mass., to a Boston condo, Goodwin took up the project on her own.

She describes the result as a hybrid of history, biography and memoir. At its most poignant, “An Unfinished Love Story” is, as the title indicates, an account of personal loss. It also turns out to be a reflection on the process of constructing history, suggesting how time, perspective and stories left unwritten can shape our view of the past.

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Goodwin, the author of award-winning biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and others, has a nice touch as a storyteller. Here she successfully navigates the awkward feat of weaving together the couple’s gently probing conversations, her husband’s archival documentation, other historical sources and her own reporting.

“An Unfinished Love Story” offers a bird’s-eye view of familiar events, and of a decade marked by both idealism and political violence. “Too often,” Goodwin writes, with her characteristic optimism, “memories of assassination, violence, and social turmoil have obscured the greatest illumination of the Sixties, the spark of communal idealism and belief that kindled social justice and love for a more inclusive vision of America.”

While arguing for this rosier perspective, the book provides nuance and detail on matters such as the origins of the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, Robert F. Kennedy’s private agonies over whether to challenge LBJ for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, and Jackie Kennedy’s emotional struggles after her husband’s 1963 assassination. In a 1966 letter from Hawaii, Jackie addresses Dick Goodwin, her close friend, as a fellow “lost soul” and complains of “memories that drag you down into a life that can never be the same.” That is a sentiment that Doris Kearns Goodwin understands.

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She and the then-married Goodwin — with his “curly, disheveled black hair,” “thick, unruly eyebrows” and “pockmarked face” — met at Harvard in 1972, where she taught a popular course on the American presidency. He had left the Johnson administration in 1965, three years before she joined it, and had become disillusioned with the Vietnam War. Despite having penned her own antiwar piece for the New Republic, she would become an LBJ confidante, an aide on his presidential memoirs and a lifelong admirer.

Not just a speechwriter but a policy advisor and political strategist, Dick Goodwin enjoyed a Zelig-like march through 20th century American history. President of the Harvard Law Review and law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Goodwin worked for two presidents, John F. Kennedy and Johnson, and several would-be presidents, including Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. He later wrote the concession speech that Al Gore delivered after the Supreme Court stopped the recount of the 2000 presidential election vote in Florida.

According to his widow, Goodwin idolized the coolly self-possessed JFK, fused with LBJ, regarded McCarthy as “the most original mind” he’d encountered in politics and adored RFK, his best friend of the bunch. (No mention is made here of the seamier side of these politicians’ lives, or how their sexual indiscretions bear on their legacies.)

Nearly every Democratic leader seems to have sought the services of the brilliant, cigar-smoking, workaholic Goodwin. But, as “An Unfinished Love Story” makes clear, he was more than a pen for hire. Goodwin had passionately held views about civil rights, the alleviation of poverty and other issues. As Johnson’s principal speechwriter, he helped fashion both the title and the programs of the Great Society. He was responsible for LBJ’s single most powerful speech, on behalf of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which coopted the anthem of the civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.”

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Goodwin left the Johnson administration, against the president’s wishes, to pursue a solo writing career. Over time, his public stance against American involvement in Vietnam pitted him against his former boss. “It’s like being bitten by your own dog,” Johnson said of Goodwin’s defection.

Goodwin was, at heart, deeply loyal, his widow suggests, even if he sometimes chose loyalty to principles over personal attachments. On the other hand, when a previously hesitant Bobby Kennedy entered the 1968 Democratic primary race against McCarthy, friendship prevailed, and Goodwin switched sides, as he had earlier warned McCarthy he would. The RFK assassination, following victory in the California Democratic primary (and Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder earlier that year), was shattering for Goodwin, as for so many others.

“An Unfinished Love Story” is at its most moving when it touches on the Goodwins’ long, happy, occasionally contentious marriage; its bumpy origins (after becoming a widower, he wasn’t as ready to commit as she was); and his emotional farewell. Always attuned to relationships, Goodwin is an astute chronicler of her own.

Beyond underlining the brighter side of the 1960s, the archive and the conversations it prompted changed the couple’s views of the two presidents they served. She gained a deeper appreciation of the impact of Kennedy’s idealism, she writes, while her husband moderated his long-standing bitterness toward Johnson. Embedded in that rapprochement is an unstated hope: that more knowledge and informed debate might somehow ease our country’s current political polarization as well.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.

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