Eleanor Roosevelt - What Are We For?: The Words and Ideals of Eleanor Roosevelt

ELEANOR ROOSEVELTS LIFE (18841962) IS LIKE A DIAMOND: multifaceted and brilliant. Over the course of seventy-eight years she managed to marry, raise a family, and pursue careers in politics, journalism, education, and diplomacy. Along the way she transformed the role of First Lady, played a vital part in the creation and passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and became an icon of female empowerment.

Much of what Eleanor did and said was based on two profound convictions: first, that every individual mattered, and second, that every individual had a contribution to make. In her case, she dedicated her life to building a countryand a worldwhere diversity and inclusion were part of the fabric of everyday life. She began that effort by using her natural curiosity to learn all she could about how her fellow Americans were faring and by sharing that knowledge as widely as possible. As a debutante, she worked with immigrant children in a settlement house. Later, as a teacher in a New York City private school, she routinely took her students to visit places where they could see the impact of poverty and neglect on those who suffered from it. Once she became First Lady, she traveled the country to learn firsthand about and address peoples needs during the Great Depression, with particular emphasis on the problems of minorities, workers, women, and youth. During World War II she visited military installations at home and abroad to evaluate the living situation and treatment of military personnel and to advocate for better conditions. Equally concerned with civilian home front issues, she traveled to defense factories and plants to monitor the working environment to learn how work-life issues impacted an overwhelmingly female workforce so she could propose practical solutions to any problems. Despite the fear and paranoia surrounding them, she also learned about and championed the cause of those whom the war had marginalized, especially Jewish refugees and Japanese Americans interned by government order after Pearl Harbor.

After she left the White House, her scope broadened to include the needs and desires of people around the world. As the first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, she persuaded its members to set aside their political and cultural differences as well as their personal rivalries to come together to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the cornerstone of the modern human rights movement.

What Are We For? The Words and Ideals of Eleanor Roosevelt distills the most important ideas from her life and voluminous written, oral, and audiovisual recordtwenty-seven books, more than eight thousand newspaper columns, two hundredplus magazine columns, almost six hundred magazine articles, nine radio programs, three television programs, and an extensive, varied multiyear correspondenceinto a convenient guide to some of her most relevant works. Each chapter is organized around a theme, cause, or idea that she championed.

Besides the sheer breadth of her interests, one of the most striking things about Eleanors life and thought is her conviction that many of lifes problems, whether personal or political, had their roots in fear. Fear robbed individuals and societies of their ability to speak out and act. It was the reason nations stockpiled armaments and closed their borders. Above all fear destroyed the possibility of change and growth. People who view with alarm, she wrote pointedly, never build anything.

Eleanor spoke from experience. She started life as a shy, self-conscious child afraid of the dark, of displeasing people, of being unloved. Step-by-step she emancipated herself from her fears and insecurities so that by the time she reached the end of her life, nothing frightened her. Her prescription for dismantling fear (confront it, deconstruct it, and then diligently eradicate it) provides a road map for navigating our own anxious age.

Her unflinching willingness to grapple with pressing questions that still bedevil us also strikes a modern chord. She was not afraid to take a stand on controversial political and social issues such as civil rights, war and peace, birth control, and the role of government in a democracy. Her solutions were invariably grounded in the conviction that individuals in a democracy had to take responsibility for their actions and the actions of their government. Apathy and denial were not options, and staying aloof was a cowardly evasion. To those who railed against the isms of her time, she asked, What are we for?a question that is as timely as todays tweets.

Lastly, Eleanors life is a master class in how to combine vision with action. The woman who emerges from these pages is a practical idealist: a woman who knew how to compromise without abandoning her principles, how to disagree without being disagreeablea skill she honed as a political activist and First Lady and further refined while dueling with the Soviet delegates at the United Nations. She knew, too, how to push for a better future while acknowledging the realities of her time. When she failed, she did not give up. Failure was simply an opportunity to try again. Her persistence was a powerful antidote to the cynicism and apathy of her time and an inspiration to our own.