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Essay on Eleanor Roosevelt
Introduction
Roosevelt, Eleanor was a social activist, United States representative to the United Nations (1945-1953; 1961), and wife of 32nd U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt had an active public career before and during her marriage and continued to maintain a high profile after her husband’s death. Unlike any previous first lady, she held regular news conferences, wrote a daily newspaper column, represented the president and nation on foreign and domestic trips, and spoke out on a wide range of social issues. She was also the nation’s most prominent white opponent of racial discrimination in her time (Eleanor, 2000). A lifelong champion of poor and marginalized people, her impact was so broad, both during and after her husband’s presidency, that President Harry S. Truman.
Early Life
Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, in New York City, the first child of Anna Hall and Elliott Roosevelt. Her father, a businessman, came from a distinguished, wealthy, and politically active New York family with roots in the city’s earliest colonial settlements (Eleanor, 2000). Her mother was a descendant of the Livingstons, a family that was equally rooted in the political history of colonial New York and Revolutionary America. Eleanor’s mother, Anna, was one of the most beautiful women in New York high society, and this made young Eleanor feel insecure about her plainer appearance. Anna died of diphtheria when Eleanor was eight years old (Russell, 1997). Eleanor’s father, a handsome man-about-town, died of alcoholism less than two years later. The orphaned Eleanor, insecure and self-conscious, was subsequently placed in the care of her maternal grandmother, Mary Hall (Don, 2000).
When Eleanor was 15 years old her grandmother sent her to the Allenswood Academy in London, England. For three years, under the tutelage of Marie Souvestre, Eleanor developed lifelong interests in politics, social causes, history, and literature (Eleanor, 2000)....
