Eleanor Roosevelt

Hillary

Eleanor Roosevelt is a continuing inspiration to me. Throughout her life, she overcame personal, political, and public challenges that would have flattened most of us. When I think of women I admire, she’s at the top of my list.

My admiration starts with her resilience during her childhood. She was rejected as unattractive and too serious by her beautiful socialite mother, who called her young daughter “Granny”; neglected by the handsome and charming alcoholic father she adored; and told to care for her brothers. She was orphaned and, by the age of ten, had lost one of her brothers to illness.

Raised in the home of her maternal grandmother, Eleanor craved affection and considered herself an “ugly duckling.” She received limited private tutoring until she left for a “finishing” school outside London, where she thrived under the direction of the headmistress, Marie Souvestre, who encouraged independent thinking among her students. Souvestre mentored Eleanor, who flourished at the school until she was ordered home in 1902 at the age of eighteen to make her social debut.

Back home, Eleanor began a courting relationship with her fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and they became engaged the following year. Franklin’s formidable mother, Sara Ann Delano, opposed the marriage. But her son was determined, and on March 17, 1905, Eleanor and Franklin were married, with Eleanor’s uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt, giving the bride away.

Eleanor had six children, but one tragically died in infancy. Having lost her own mother when she was eight, Eleanor hoped Sara would be the mother she never had; instead, her marriage was complicated by her mother-in-law’s constant interference and demands. Sara paid all the bills and controlled their lives. She even gave them a home connected to hers—without any locks on the connecting doors.

Sara also fought to control the raising of Eleanor’s children, telling them: “Your mother only bore you, I am more your mother than your mother is.” It was another blow to the still-insecure Eleanor, who later wrote that she did not consider herself suited for motherhood. With no space of her own, either to relax or parent as she wished, Eleanor reached the breaking point and told her husband that Sara’s dominance made her feel like a stranger in her own home.

In 1918, Eleanor discovered her husband’s affair with her social secretary. She was devastated. Franklin rejected her offer of divorce, which in those days was very difficult to obtain for a woman. She decided to stay in the marriage (which can be, as I know well, a “gutsy” decision). She found her voice and redoubled her commitment to alleviating poverty, pursuing peace, and helping veterans.

And then, once again, adversity struck.

When Franklin was stricken with polio in 1921, Eleanor took over his care, probably saving his life. The doctor treating Franklin praised her as a “rare wife” who bore “your heavy burden most bravely,” and proclaimed her “one of my heroines.” That might have been the first recorded time anyone really spoke about the depth of Eleanor’s strength and determination. She took charge of Franklin’s recovery and stood up to her mother-in-law by championing Franklin’s potential for a future political career, even though his mother wanted him to retire from public life. Eleanor entered politics in New York on behalf of her husband and other Democrats in the 1920s, and advocated for a progressive agenda. When Franklin was elected governor in 1928 and then president in 1932, Eleanor emerged not only as an activist first lady but as an effective—and controversial—public leader for the rest of her life.

“Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.”

—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

Allida Black, the American historian and founding editor of The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, described this period of Eleanor’s life: “In the twenties, Eleanor Roosevelt found her voice, and Franklin and Eleanor found new ways to complement, support, and care for one another. They had battled betrayal and polio, loneliness and despair in ways that made them both courageous, more hopeful, more skilled, and more independent. They forged a compromise that allowed them to grow into the leaders they wanted to be and the nation needed them to be.”

Through her time as first lady, she encountered controversy, backlash, vicious personal attacks, and even assassination plots against her. After FDR’s death in 1945, Eleanor continued her activism into the next chapter of her life. President Harry Truman invited her to join the first U.S. delegation to the newly created United Nations. She accepted but was unsure of her role and aware that she was the only woman and the only member without a college degree. By the time she left the UN seven years later, she was regarded as a skilled debater, smart negotiator, and stalwart supporter. She took up the cause of the sixty million displaced persons in Europe and toured the camps where they were held, seeing and hearing firsthand the horrors of the war and the Holocaust. She used her writing and speaking to urge Americans to learn that “you cannot live for yourselves alone. You depend on the rest of the world and the rest of the world depends on you.”

Her greatest public achievement was as the chair of the UN Human Rights Committee. She oversaw thousands of hours of contentious debate and traveled thousands of miles to discuss the idea of a universal declaration of human rights (UDHR) to guide the world forward after the horrors of two world wars in fifty years. She worked relentlessly to convince the member countries to accept the UDHR, which embodied the most far-reaching and advanced definition of social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights in human history. “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” she asked. “In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.”

Eleanor continued to use her visibility throughout the 1950s and until her death in 1962 to speak out for racial justice and in favor of school desegregation and voting rights for black Americans. Her outspokenness brought death threats from the Ku Klux Klan, but she persisted, pushing politicians of both parties to live up to our nation’s founding ideals. “Do what you feel in your heart to be right—for you’ll be criticized anyway,” she once said. “You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”

There’s no easy way to describe Eleanor’s impact on our country. She was born into privilege but became a teacher, journalist, party leader, citizen activist, lecturer, writer, and diplomat. She stood up against racism, advocated for the trade union movement, worked to alleviate poverty and create jobs during the Great Depression, advised her husband on New Deal programs (whether he wanted her advice or not!), and held her own press conferences in the White House. She advised against the internment of Japanese Americans, urged women to join civil defense work and enlist in the military, and became FDR’s emissary during World War II, traveling to visit American troops on battlefields across the Pacific theater. At the same time, she published a weekly column and answered thousands of letters. She wrote 28 books, 580 articles, and 8,000 columns describing her life and views.

In her last book, Tomorrow Is Now, she stressed that America’s greatness sprang from the power of its ideas, not its economic or military power. She worried about our country, and she described her purpose for writing this last book in its introduction as what she wanted to tell her fellow Americans: “One woman’s attempt to analyze what problems there are to be met, one citizen’s approach to ways in which they may be met, and one human being’s bold affirmation that, with imagination, with courage, with faith in ourselves and our cause—the fundamental dignity of all mankind—they will be met.”

During my time as first lady, I used to kid people that I’d have imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt. In reality, however, those interior dialogues were helpful. I often asked myself: “What would Eleanor do?” Many times, I’d arrive somewhere to do something only to discover Eleanor had been there first. There was finally one thing I did as first lady that Eleanor Roosevelt had not done before me: winning a Grammy in 1997 in the spoken word category for my book It Takes a Village. I was surprised and delighted. But I quickly realized that, had Eleanor ever recorded one of her books, she probably would have beaten me to the Grammy stage as well.

I still often think of Eleanor. Her words, and her example of a courageous life well lived, are as important and relevant today as they always have been.