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Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City in 1884. She lost both parents as a child and was raised by her grandmother. She married her distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt in 1905.
First lady
She was first lady from 1933 to 1945, longer than anyone else. She held press conferences only for women reporters, wrote a daily newspaper column called “My Day,” and traveled widely as her husband’s eyes and ears.
In 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall, she resigned from the group. Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial instead.
The United Nations
After Franklin’s death, President Harry Truman named her a delegate to the new United Nations. She chaired the Commission on Human Rights, which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The General Assembly adopted it in 1948.
Later, President Kennedy asked her to chair his Commission on the Status of Women. She died in 1962. Her Val-Kill cottage in Hyde Park, New York, is a National Historic Site.
