Home › Reform & Rights › Civil Rights & Social Reform
Eleanor Roosevelt
1884–1962 · 78 years Tier I
Orphaned at nine, remade at a school outside London
Diphtheria took her mother, Anna Hall, on December 7, 1892, and her brother Elliott Jr. the following May. Her father, an alcoholic confined to a sanitarium, went out a window during a fit of delirium tremens and died on August 14, 1894. She was nine. Her maternal grandmother, Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall, took the children in. What changed the shape of her was being sent abroad at 15 to Allenswood Academy at Wimbledon, where the headmistress Marie Souvestre singled her out, taught her to argue in French, and treated her as somebody worth persuading. She came home in 1902 for a debut at the Waldorf-Astoria she had not asked for.
The public work is enormous and it is on the record elsewhere: the press conferences, the column, the radio, the travelling, the pressure she kept on her husband over lynching and over the exclusion of Black Americans from New Deal programs. Truman named her to the United Nations delegation in December 1945. She chaired the Commission on Human Rights until 1952, and Kennedy brought her back in 1961 to chair his Commission on the Status of Women. BriefHistory carries all of that, and the Declaration with it. What is left over is the private arithmetic that produced her.
In September 1918 she unpacked her husband's suitcase and found love letters written to him by her own social secretary, Lucy Mercer. The marriage continued on new terms. Her mother-in-law, Sara Delano Roosevelt, ran the household and much of the child-rearing, and Eleanor said afterward that the children had been more her mother-in-law's than hers. So she built somewhere else to be. Val-Kill went up in 1927 with Marion Dickerman, Nancy Cook and Caroline O'Day, and Val-Kill Industries made furniture, pewter and homespun cloth there until 1938. She co-owned the Todhunter School in Manhattan and taught three days a week. She wrote and lectured for money — 75,000 dollars in her first year as First Lady, most of it given away.
A car struck her in April 1960 and doctors found aplastic anemia. Steroids given in 1962 woke a dormant tuberculosis in her bone marrow, and she died of the resulting cardiac failure on November 7, 1962, at 55 East 74th Street, aged 78, with her daughter Anna beside her. Kennedy put every American flag at half-staff the next day. She was buried next to Franklin in the rose garden at Hyde Park. Her letters to the reporter Lorena Hickok, 10 to 15 pages a day at their height, were opened after her death and have been fought over ever since — some historians read a romance in them, others do not, and the record does not close it.
Lifespan
Eleanor Roosevelt's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
Val-Kill Industries
company
Furniture, pewter and homespun cloth, made at Hyde Park until 1938 1927 -
It's Up to the Women
book
Her first book, written in her first year as First Lady 1933 -
My Day
article
The newspaper column she kept up until the year she died 1935 -
This Is My Story
book
The first volume of the autobiography 1937 -
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
other
She chaired the commission that drafted it 1948 -
Presidential Commission on the Status of Women
other
Kennedy made her its chair. She died before it reported. 1961
Life in brief
with age at each point- December 7, 1892 aged 8 Her mother dies of diphtheria Her brother Elliott Jr. died of the same disease the following May.
- August 14, 1894 aged 9 Her father dies after jumping from a window in delirium tremens She and her surviving brother went to their grandmother, Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall.
- 1899 aged ~15 Sent to Allenswood Academy at Wimbledon Marie Souvestre taught her French and, by her own account, self-confidence.
- March 17, 1905 aged 20 Marries Franklin Delano Roosevelt President Theodore Roosevelt, her uncle, gave her away in place of her father.
- September 1918 aged 33 Finds Lucy Mercer's letters in her husband's suitcase
- 1927 aged ~43 Builds Val-Kill and starts a furniture works with three friends
- December 1945 aged 61 Truman names her to the United States delegation to the United Nations
- December 10, 1948 aged 64 The General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights She had chaired the commission that wrote its 30 articles.
- November 7, 1962 aged 78 Dies at 78 in her Manhattan home Kennedy ordered American flags to half-staff worldwide the next day.
Related
Contemporaries
Reform & Rights, born within 25 years
Alice Paul 1885–1977Reform & RightsStrategist of the final campaign for women's suffrage and author of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.
Aldo Leopold 1887–1948Reform & RightsEcologist whose “land ethic” became foundational to modern environmental thought.
Helen Keller 1880–1968Reform & RightsDeafblind author and lecturer who became the leading American advocate for blind and disabled people.
A. Philip Randolph 1889–1979Reform & RightsLabor and civil-rights leader who pressured presidents to desegregate defense work and the armed forces.
Margaret Sanger 1879–1966Reform & RightsBirth-control advocate who transformed reproductive health access while leaving a deeply contested legacy involving eugenics.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas 1890–1998Reform & RightsWriter and activist whose advocacy was central to preserving the Florida Everglades as a national ecological treasure.