FREE ESSAY ON ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

The Contributions of Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11, 1884. She was one of
America's great reforming leaders who had a sustained impact on national policy toward
youth, blacks, women, the poor, and the United Nations. As the wife of President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, she was one of the most active First Ladies as well as an important public
personality in her own right.
When Eleanor Roosevelt traveled to New York City a week after her husband's funeral in
April 1945, a host of reporters were waiting at the door of her Washington Square
apartment. The story is over, she said simply, assuming that her words and opinions would
no longer be of interest once her husband was dead and she was no longer First Lady. She
could not have been more mistaken. As the years passed, Eleanor Roosevelt's influence and
stature continued to grow. Today, she remains a powerful inspiration to leaders in both
the civil rights and women's movements. 
Eleanor shattered the ceremonial mold in which the role of the First Lady had
traditionally been fashioned, and reshaped it around her own skills and her deep
commitment to social reform. She gave a voice to people who did not have access to power.
She was the first woman to speak in front of a national convention, to write a syndicated
column, to earn money as a lecturer, to be a radio commentator and to hold regular press
conferences. 
The path to this unique position of power had not been easy. The only daughter of an
alcoholic father and a beautiful but aloof mother who was openly disappointed by
Eleanor's lack of a pretty face, Eleanor was plagued by insecurity and shyness. An early
marriage to her handsome fifth cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, increased her insecurity and
took away her one source of confidence: her work in a New York City settlement house. For
10 years, I was always just getting over having a baby or about to have another one, she
later lamented, so my occupations were considerably restricted. 
But 13 years after her marriage, and after bearing six children, Eleanor resumed the
search for her identity. The voyage began with a shock: the discovery in 1918 of love
letters revealing that Franklin was involved with Lucy Mercer. The bottom dropped out of
my own particular world, she later said. I faced myself, my surroundings, my world,
honestly for the first time. There was talk of divorce, but when Franklin promised never
to see Lucy again, the marriage continued. For Eleanor a new path had opened, a
possibility of standing apart from Franklin. No longer would she define herself solely in
terms of his wants and needs. A new relationship was forged, but on terms wholly
different from the old. 
She turned her energies to a variety of reformist organizations, joining a circle of post
suffrage feminists dedicated to the abolition of child labor, the establishment of a
minimum wage and the passage of legislation to protect workers. In the process she
discovered that she had talents-for public speaking, for organizing, for articulating
social problems. She formed an extraordinary constellation of lifelong female friends,
who helped to ease the worry of an enduring sense of loneliness. When Franklin was
paralyzed by polio in 1921, her political activism became an even more vital force. She
became Franklin's eyes and ears, traveling the country gathering the grass-roots
knowledge he needed to understand the people he governed. 
They made an exceptional team. She was more earnest, less devious, less patient, less
fun, more compromisingly moral; he possessed the more trustworthy political talent, the
more finely tuned sense of timing, the better feel for the citizenry, the smarter
understanding of how to get things done. But they were linked by indissoluble bonds.
Together they mobilized the American people to effect enduring changes in the political
and social landscape of the nation. 
Dealing with programs in the South, she was stunned to find that blacks were being
systematically discriminated against at every turn. Citing statistics to back up her
story, she would interrupt her husband at any time, barging into his cocktail hour when
he wanted only to relax, cross-examining him at dinner, handing him memos to read late at
night. But her confrontational style compelled him to sign a series of Executive Orders
barring discrimination in the administration of various New Deal projects. From that
point on, African Americans' share in the New Deal work projects expanded, and Eleanor's
independent legacy began to grow.
She understood, for instance, the importance of symbolism in fighting discrimination. In
1938, while attending the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Ala., she
refused to abide by a segregation ordinance that required her to sit in the white section
of the auditorium, apart from her black friends. The following year, she publicly
resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution after it barred the black singer
Marian Anderson from its auditorium. 
During World War II, Eleanor remained an uncompromising voice on civil rights, insisting
that America could not fight racism abroad while tolerating it at home. Progress was
slow, but her continuing intervention led to broadened opportunities for blacks in the
factories and shipyards at home and in the armed forces overseas. Eleanor's positions on
civil rights were far in advance of her time: 10 years before the Supreme Court rejected
the separate but equal doctrine, Eleanor argued that equal facilities were not enough:
The basic fact of segregation, which warps and twists the lives of our Negro population,
is itself discriminatory. 
There were other warps and twists that caught her eye. Long before the contemporary
women's movement provided ideological arguments for women's rights; Eleanor instinctively
challenged institutions that failed to provide equal opportunity for women. As First
Lady, she held more than 300 press conferences that she cleverly restricted to women
journalists, knowing that news organizations all over the country would be forced to hire
their first female reporter in order to have access to the First Lady. 
Through her speeches and her columns, she provided a powerful voice in the campaign to
recruit women workers to the factories during the war. If I were of debutante age, I
would go into a factory, where I could learn a skill and be useful, Eleanor told young
women, cautioning them against marrying too hastily before they had a chance to expand
their horizons. She was instrumental in securing the first government funds ever allotted
for the building of child-care centers. And when women workers were unceremoniously fired
as the war came to an end, she fought to stem the tide. She argued on principle that
everyone who wanted to work had a right to be productive, and she railed against the
closing of the child-care centers as a shortsighted response to a fundamental social
need. What the women workers needed, she said, was the courage to ask for their rights
with a loud voice. 
For her own part, she never let the intense criticism that she encountered silence her.
If I worried about mudslinging, I would have been dead long ago. Yet she insisted that
she was not a feminist. She did not believe, she maintained, women should be judged, when
it comes to appointing them or electing them, purely because they are women. She wanted
to see the country get away from considering a man or woman from the point of view of
religion, color or sex. 
But the story of her life-her insistence on her right to an identity of her own apart
from her husband and her family, her constant struggle against depression and insecurity,
her ability to turn her vulnerabilities into strengths provides an enduring example of a
feminist who transcended the dictates of her times to become one of the century's most
powerful and effective advocates for social justice. 
Truly, Eleanor Roosevelt was a great woman ahead of her time in the fight for human
justice. Even today, with doors opened and presumed equal rights supposedly exist, some
leaders are afraid or refuse to speak out against injustice. Yet, during a time when
one's life could have possibly been on the line, Eleanor, in a god-like spirit spurred
on, battling for human rights. 
Bibliography
Bibliography
Cook, B. W. Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 1, 1884-1933 (1992)
Hoff-Wilson, J.and Lightman, M., eds., Without Precedent (1984)
Lash, J. P. Eleanor and Franklin (1971) and Eleanor (1972 repr. 1985)
Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. NewYork: HarperCollins 
1980.