Eleanor Roosevelt
“What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?”
Biography
Eleanor Roosevelt was a writer, activist, and wife of 32nd United States President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Eleanor expanded the role of women in society. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born October 11, 1884, to Elliot Roosevelt, brother of future president Theodore Roosevelt, and Anna Rebecca Hall, a debutant. Eleanor began her education at the age of 7 by being privately tutored in her New York home. She was placed in a convent school in Italy briefly during a family trip to Europe in 1890. Eleanor turned to books for solace and escape from these staggering personal losses and the stifled upbringing in her Grandmother Hall’s house. In November 1904 Eleanor and Franklin announced their engagement. On March 17, 1905. they were married in New York City. President Theodore Roosevelt, inaugurated on March 4, 1905, walked Eleanor down the aisle and gave her away.
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
“Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart”
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
Accomplishments of Eleanor Roosevelt
She cultivated a public persona and life all her own, including writing articles for magazines and taking part in radio shows. She became the Democratic Women’s Committee vice-president and finance chairman and, in 1924, joined the board of the bi-partisan Women’s City Club. In 1927, she became part owner of and began teaching at the Todhunter School, a finishing and college preparatory school in New York City for upper-class girls.Eleanor joined organizations in which she felt she could make a real difference, rather than just lend her name to a cause: the Women’s City Club, the National Consumers League, the Women’s Division of the Democratic State Committee, and the New York chapters of the League of Women Voters and the Women’s Trade Union League.