Eleanor Roosevelt: The Courage to Lead

Social Activist, Party Leader, First Lady, Journalist, Diplomat

By Dr. Allida Black

Eleanor Roosevelt (1894-1962) transformed the role of first lady, challenged the Democratic Party to practice what it preached, and jump-started the international conversation on human rights.

As teacher, party activist, first lady, journalist, social reformer and diplomat – ER lent her considerable energy to issues of grave concern to women: education, health care, equal employment, and child care. She also insisted that "women learn to the play the game" as well as "men do," that it was "up to the women" to craft policies that address their concerns, and that women have seats at every table the Democratic Party assembled.

As she aged, ER abandoned traditional progressive era tenets to embrace a broader human rights-based commitment to social, political and economic equality. She used her position as first lady, nationally syndicated daily columnist, radio and television host, and party leader to hold the administrations accountable for the promises they made to the nation. This meant that she often challenged the lip-service Presidents Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy gave to women, people of color, immigrants and the working poor.

ER began her political life as a young girl. Her father, Elliott, and Allenswood Academy headmistress Marie Souvestre gave ER her strong sense of duty and social responsibility. In her late teens, she volunteered at New York's Rivington Street Settlement where she experienced the hardships extreme poverty and unsafe working conditions imposed on families. In 1903, the year before she married FDR, she joined the National Consumers League where she began her life-long advocacy for the living wage, child labor regulation, the 10 hour day, safe affordable housing, the right to join a trade union, and protective labor legislation for women.

As a young mother, she spent the 1920s working closely with Rose Schneiderman and Maud Schwartz to help the Women's Trade Union League secure safe, non-exploitative working and living conditions for women, monitored social legislation for the League of Women Voters, and helped direct the women's division of the Democratic National Committee. She also found time to teach history and civics to the young women attending New York City's Todhunter School for Girls.

By 1932, as FDR prepared to seek the presidency, ER had developed a solid political reputation in her own right. She traveled New York state inspecting prisons, juvenile facilities, hospitals, and programs FDR's administration funded and reported in detail on the social conditions and political alliances she observed. She continued to edit major party publications (carefully concealing her name from the masthead lest she be seen as steering the party in FDR's direction) and organize Democratic women across the nation campaigned for candidates, lobbied for women's equal inclusion in all party organizations, and launched what would become a thirty-one year career crisscrossing the nation as a public speaker. She had become what the New York Times called "A Woman of Influence Who Speaks Her Mind."

ER quickly applied these skills when she moved into the White House. As the New Deal began, ER challenged FDR's administration to include working women n Works Progress Administration, Federal Emergency Relief Administration and Social Security Administration programs. She helped establish regional directors for women's relief programs and the National Youth Administration, secured Mary McLeod Bethune's appointment as Director of Minority Affairs for the National Youth Administration, and worked to establish the "she-she-she" camps for working women. Committed to relief and reform, ER criticized the Economy Act for penalizing married federally employed women and lobbied the Civil Works Administration to hire unemployed women. She held White Conferences on the emergency needs of unemployed women (1933), conditions women encountered in the "she-she" she" camps (1934), and the specific challenges the Depression presented to African American women and children (1938). She gave consistent, spirited support to the Southern Conference on Human Welfare and the Southern Conference Education Fund's campaigns to challenge conventional segregation.

World War II reinforced ER's determination to speak out for women. She resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when it refused to lease its auditorium for a concert by Marian Anderson, a African American contralto, and used My Day, her nationally syndicated newspaper column, to ask "why curse Hitler and support Jim Crow?" She served as ombudswoman-in-chief for women in military service and the defense industry. She prodded Congress to provide on-site daycare for women working in defense plants and urged FDR to establish the Fair Employment Practices Commission. She also lobbied for to extend Social Security benefits and health insurance to servicemen's wives and children as well as women working in professions the Social Security Administration excluded from coverage.

After leaving the White House, ER refused to seek elected office, arguing that she could be more effective working with reform organizations, writing and speaking on social justice issues, and that any other position would require her to temper her language in ways she no longer wanted to do. She did accept appointment to the first American delegation to the United Nations, where as chair of the Human Rights Commission, she steered the subcommittee charged with drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This was landmark work. Not only did ER convince the State Department that human rights include social and economic rights and political and civil rights. Not only did she helped craft Article I, which declared "all human beings are born free and equal" and thus insured that UDHR would recognize women's rights as human rights. But she also pushed eighteen nations who had profound differences over religion, politics, economy, family, property, citizenship and government to find the courage to look forward to a future defined by visions of peace rather than fears of war. Without her leadership, the modern human rights movement would never have found its voice.

She displayed the same tenacity outside the UN. ER worked with the NAACP, the ALF-CIO, and the UAW to advance good jobs with good wages for all Americans. She spoke out against the Senator Joseph McCarthy, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the "the politics of fear." She urged the Democratic Party to reject segregation and embrace racial justice. She pushed John Kennedy so hard to appoint more women to his administration that he created the first Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and appointed her chair, a position she held until her death in 1962.

Eleanor Roosevelt demanded that we all remember that "we are all on trial to show what democracy means." She practiced what she preached. She faced assassination attempts, ridicule, and loss of income-but she kept faith. She travelled the world as an honest broker for human rights. She crisscrossed that nation urging us to hold our government accountable and have the courage of our convictions. Her 8,000 columns, 27 books, 600 articles and countless public appearances all serve as a tutorial on citizen engagement and the power democracy gives its citizens.

Congresswoman Barbara Jordan once wrote that "Eleanor Roosevelt represents all that is good about democracy." No one can say more than that.