Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (/ˈɛlɨnɔr ˈroʊzəvɛlt/; October 11, 1884 – November 7, 1962) was the longest-serving First Lady of the United States, holding the post from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of her husband, distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and became an advocate for civil rights. After her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt continued to be an international author, speaker, politician, and activist for the New Deal coalition. She worked to enhance the status of working women, although she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because she believed it would adversely affect women.
In the 1940s, Roosevelt was one of the co-founders of Freedom House and supported the formation of the United Nations. Roosevelt founded the UN Association of the United States in 1943 to advance support for the formation of the UN. She was a delegate to the UN General Assembly from 1945 and 1952, a job for which she was appointed by President Harry S. Truman and confirmed by the United States Senate. During her time at the United Nations she chaired the committee that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. President Truman called her the "First Lady of the World" in tribute to her human rights achievements.
Active in politics for the rest of her life, Roosevelt chaired the John F. Kennedy administration's ground-breaking committee which helped start second-wave feminism, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. In 1999, she was ranked in the top ten of Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century.
Read more about Eleanor Roosevelt: Public Life Before The White House, First Lady of The United States (1933–1945), Years After The White House, Honors and Awards, Later Private Life, Death
Famous quotes by eleanor roosevelt:
“On the whole our armed services have been doing pretty well in the way of keeping us defended, but I hope our State Department will remember that it is really the department of achieving peace ...”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread economic insecurity can turn freedom into a barren and vapid right for the millions of people.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“... the trouble is that most people in this country think that we can stay out of wars in other parts of the world. Even if we stay out of it and save our own skins, we cannot escape the conditions which will undoubtedly exist in other parts of the world and which will react against us.... We are all of us selfish ... and if we can save our own skins, the rest of the world can go. The best we can do is to realize nobody can save his own skin alone. We must all hang together.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“A trait no other nation seems to possess in quite the same degree that we do—namely, a feeling of almost childish injury and resentment unless the world as a whole recognizes how innocent we are of anything but the most generous and harmless intentions.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)