Eleanor Roosevelt: One Of America's Greatest President

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Eleanor Roosevelt Eleanor Roosevelt was a very influential woman in her life time. One of the reasons she became famous was because she was the niece of one of the greatest presidents of the United States of America. She was niece to Theodore Roosevelt. Another reason was she married the man Franklin D. Roosevelt who, interestingly enough, was he distant cousin. Her and Franklin Roosevelt had 5 children whom they raised and she became very active in politics along with her husband who had become the president of the United States of America, but she had not become active in politics until after her husbands Polio attack in 1921. Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States of America from 1933 to 1945. She would also journey…show more content…
No First Lady served through two nationally traumatic events such as did Eleanor Roosevelt, presiding at the White House during the Great Depression and World War II. Unique to her tenure was the fact that the President was physically limited by his then-hidden condition of polio. Thus apart from finding a way to integrate her own professional interests and experiences into the public role of First Lady and assume the traditional management of the mansion’s functioning as a political-social arena, Eleanor Roosevelt worked closely with the President and his staff as an unofficial Administration representative and on policy-related issues. Despite this being an outgrowth of her own progressive reform work, it was now conducted within a public realm, making both her, personally, and the Administration, generally, vulnerable to political attack and criticism, the charge being that she was neither elected nor appointed to carry out such tasks as it related to the American people. Generally, Eleanor Roosevelt ignored the frequent criticism to help achieve her goals or those Administration objectives with which she concurred. Unlike her three immediate predecessors (Florence Harding, Grace Coolidge, Lou Hoover), Eleanor Roosevelt did not enter into the role of First Lady with specific plans to continue previous support for a constituency (Harding and animal rights and WWI veterans, Coolidge and the hearing-impaired, Hoover and the Girl Scouts). All she knew for certain was that she would be active in word and deed, especially in light of the devastation the Great Depression was continuing to have on the lives of millions of Americans.. Her extraordinary history of experience and work in progressive advocacy policy, the media, education, and women’s issues, however, greatly informed her as she found her direction, established

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