Today in History - 1884

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City. Orphaned by the time she was ten, the young niece of President Theodore Roosevelt was raised by her grandmother. After attending finishing school in England, she returned to America and began visiting needy children in poor neighborhoods initiating lifelong work on behalf of the underprivileged.

In 1905, Roosevelt married distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt. Over the next ten years she had six children one of whom died in infancy. Although her duties as mother and wife took most of her time, Eleanor Roosevelt continued to volunteer for good causes. During World War I she worked with the Red Cross and visited wounded troops in the Naval Hospital. Upon returning to New York City in 1920, Mrs. Roosevelt involved herself for the first time in the women's rights movement.

In 1921, Franklin Roosevelt contracted poliomyelitis (polio) and was permanently paralyzed from the waist down. In order to maintain her husband's political career and to further her own ambitions, Eleanor Roosevelt significantly increased her political involvement. She participated in the League of Women Voters, joined the Women's Trade Union League, and worked for the Women's Division of the New York State Democratic Committee. In addition, she help found a non-profit furniture factory in Hyde Park, New York. During this period she began to act as her husband's "eyes and ears" traveling to places and talking to people her husband now found difficult to reach.

Beginning in 1936, her daily syndicated newspaper column provided a constant means of communication with the American public.

After Franklin Roosevelt's death in 1945, President Harry Truman appointed the former first lady as a delegate to the United Nations. She chaired the Human Rights Commission during drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948.