The shy girl her mother called Granny became the First Lady of the World
As a solemn child, Eleanor Roosevelt was nicknamed Granny by a mother embarrassed by her supposed plainness. Decades later, when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the assembly rose to applaud her for steering its drafting, and Harry Truman dubbed her the First Lady of the World.
Born in Manhattan in 1884 into wealthy New York society, she was a niece of Theodore Roosevelt. At two she survived a collision between the liner Britannic and another ship, which left her afraid of the sea for life. Diphtheria killed her mother in 1892 and a younger brother soon after, and her alcoholic father died in 1894. Promising him she would mother her surviving brother Hall, she wrote to him almost daily at school. At 15 she went to Allenswood academy near London, where its head, Marie Souvestre, shaped her deeply.
In 1905 she married a distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and had six children, one of whom died in infancy. Finding his affair with her social secretary Lucy Mercer in 1918 changed the marriage; afterward each pursued an independent course. She joined the Women's Trade Union League, worked in New York Democratic politics, and helped persuade Franklin to stay in public life after paralytic illness struck him in 1921.
As first lady from 1933 to 1945, the longest anyone has held the role, she remade it. No president's wife before her had given routine press briefings, written a daily column, hosted a weekly radio programme or spoken at a national party convention, and she occasionally broke with her husband in public. Her push for civil rights for African Americans drew controversy, and she also championed working women, Asian Americans and wartime refugees. An experimental community she founded for unemployed miners at Arthurdale, West Virginia, is generally judged a failure.
Widowed in 1945, she urged the country to back the United Nations, served as a delegate until 1952 and chaired its first Commission on Human Rights. Under John F. Kennedy she led the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women until she died in 1962. Gallup polls named her most admired woman in thirteen years between 1948 and 1961, and historians surveyed by Siena College consistently rank her the greatest first lady.
Source: Eleanor Roosevelt
