Table Of ContentEleanor Roosevelt
Recent Titles in
Women Making History
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life in American History
Nancy Hendricks
Gloria Steinem: A Life in American History
William H. Pruden III
Hillary Clinton: A Life in American History
Kathleen Gronnerud
Helen Keller: A Life in American History
Meredith Eliassen
Eleanor Roosevelt
A LIFE IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Keri F. Dearborn
Women Making History
Rosanne Welch and Peg A. Lamphier, Series Editors
Copyright © 2022 by ABC-CLIO, LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a
review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this
book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The editors and publishers will be
glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent
printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dearborn, Keri F., author.
Title: Eleanor Roosevelt : a life in American history / Keri F. Dearborn.
Description: Santa Barbara, California : ABC-CLIO, [2022] | Series: Women
making history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021059590 (print) | LCCN 2021059591 (ebook) | ISBN
9781440873928 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781440873935 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Roosevelt, Eleanor, 1884–1962. | Presidents'
spouses—United States—Biography. | Women social reformers—United
States—Biography. | United States—Politics and government—1933–1945.
Classification: LCC E807.1.R48 D44 2022 (print) | LCC E807.1.R48 (ebook)
| DDC 973.917092 [B]—dc22
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059590
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021059591
ISBN: 978-1-4408-7392-8 (print)
978-1-4408-7393-5 (ebook)
26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5
This book is also available as an eBook.
ABC-CLIO
An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC
ABC-CLIO, LLC
147 Castilian Drive
Santa Barbara, California 93117
www.abc-clio.com
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Series Foreword vii
Preface ix
Introduction: Why Eleanor Roosevelt Matters xiii
Chapter 1
Surviving a Tragic Childhood (1884–1894) 1
Chapter 2
A Teenager Finds Her Voice (1895–1903) 23
Chapter 3
Marriage, Motherhood, and Politics (1904–1911) 47
Chapter 4
Becoming a Political Partner (1912–1918) 65
Chapter 5
New Friends, New Activism, and New Purpose (1919–1921) 87
Chapter 6
Developing a Political Voice (1922–1928) 107
Chapter 7
Transforming the Role of First Lady (1929–1933) 131
v
vi Contents
Chapter 8
People’s Advocate in the White House (1933–1936) 155
Chapter 9
Battles Large and Small: World War II (1937–1943) 181
Chapter 10
The United Nations and a Foundation for the Future
(1943–1962) 209
Timeline: Events in the Life of Eleanor Roosevelt 237
Primary Source Documents 243
Bibliography 259
Index 263
Series Foreword
We created this series because women today stand on the shoulders of
those who came before them. They need to know the true power their fore-
mothers had in shaping the world today and the obstacles those women
overcame to achieve all that they have achieved and continue to achieve.
It is true that Gerda Lerner offered the first regular college course in
women’s history in 1963 and that, since then, women’s history has become
an academic discipline taught in nearly every American college and uni-
versity. It is also true that women’s history books number in the millions
and cover a wealth of topics, time periods, and issues. Nonetheless, open
any standard high school or college history textbook and you will find very
few mentions of women’s achievements or importance, and the few that do
exist will be of the “exceptional woman” model, ghettoized to sidebars and
footnotes.
With women missing from textbooks, students and citizens are allowed
to believe that no woman ever meaningfully contributed to American his-
tory and that nothing women have ever done has had more than private,
familial importance. In such books we do not learn that it was womens’
petitioning efforts that brought the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing
slavery to Abraham Lincoln’s attention or that Social Security and child
labor laws were the brainchild of Frances Perkins, the progressive female
secretary of labor who was also the first woman appointed to a presidential
cabinet.
Without this knowledge both female and male students are encouraged
to think only men—primarily rich, white men—have ever done anything
meaningful. This vision impedes our democracy in a nation that has finally
become more aware of our beautiful diversity.
The National Bureau of Economic Research said women comprise the
majority of college graduates in undergraduate institutions, law schools,
vii
viii Series Foreword
and medical schools (56 percent in 2017). Still, women’s high college atten-
dance and graduation rates do not translate to equal pay or equal eco-
nomic, political, or cultural power. There can be little argument that
American women have made significant inroads toward equality in the
last few decades, in spite of the ongoing dearth of women in normative
approaches to American history teaching and writing. Hence, this series.
We want readers to know that we took the task of choosing the women
to present seriously, adding new names to the list while looking to high-
light new information about women we think we know. Many of these
women have been written about in the past, but their lives were filtered
through male or societal expectations. Here we hope the inclusion of the
women’s own words in the collection of primary documents we curated
will finally allow them to speak for themselves about the issues that most
mattered. The timeline will visually place them in history against events
that hampered their efforts and alongside the events they created. Sidebars
will give more detail on such events as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
Fire. Finally, the chapter on Why She Matters will cement the reason such
a woman deserves a new volume dedicated to her life.
Have we yet achieved parity? We’ll let one of our subjects—the Honor-
able Ruth Bader Ginsburg—remind us that “when I’m sometimes asked
when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? And I say when
there are nine, people are shocked. But there’d been nine men [for over 200
years], and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”
Preface
On December 7, 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt typed changes to her radio script.
The Imperial Japanese Navy had bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Har-
bor, Hawaii. By 2:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, newscasts were breaking
into scheduled radio programming to report an act of war. Americans
gathered around their radios hungry for information. There was no televi-
sion, no immediate visual images. Radio was the latest technology trans-
mitting up-to-the-minute details to a country in shock. That evening a
voice came over the radio speaking to the nation. It wasn’t the president. It
wasn’t a military leader. It was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
With her calm, familiar voice, she was the first national figure to reas-
sure the country. “The cabinet is convening and the leaders in Congress are
meeting with the president,” Eleanor Roosevelt said in her radio address of
December 7, 1941. “The State Department and the Army and Navy officials
have been with the president all afternoon . . . By tomorrow morning, the
members of Congress will have a full report and be ready for action.”
Then she spoke directly to the nation’s women, reminding them she was
also a mother with a son currently on a Naval destroyer. Two of her other
children were in cities along the Pacific coast, which now were considered
to be in the “danger zone.” She empathized with the “clutch of fear at your
heart,” but encouraged an anxious public to “rise above these fears.”
It was supposed to be her Sunday evening interview program, Over Our
Coffee Cups, but this was not a normal Sunday—a foreign government had
attacked Americans on home soil. A formal declaration of war and crafted
statements from the president would come in the following days.
Eleanor Roosevelt was making history as a First Lady, as a woman, and
as a public figure. She was rallying the nation over the radio airwaves to
meet a war greater than the world had ever seen. She had written the words
herself and she delivered them with cool courage. “We know what we have
to face and we know that we are ready to face it,” she said. “Whatever is
ix
