Eleanor Rosevelt Essay Research Paper Eleanor RoseveltGrowing

Eleanor Rosevelt Essay, Research Paper

Eleanor RoseveltGrowing up in India, as I did, one never hears about female elected officials of United States. We had our own female leaders to study that not much was taught about female leaders of other countries. But among the exception was Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of one the greatest American President. Though, she was the wife of Franklin Roosevelt, she was not known for being his wife. She, as I remember, more than any other woman, “typified… the realizaton of the dreams of the female Crusaders of the 19th century who threw off the restrictions of the Victorian age.” So when I had the opportuinity to study the life of any female American leader, I choose Eleanor Roosevelt for her achivements, her strugel and her vision of a United world. For someone who never held elective office, Eleanor Roosevelt wielded a great deal of political power. She wrote now laws and appointed no high officials, yet the self-knowledge and profound humility that invested her regard for every human being has made the story of her life a morality play that brightens the American memory. “There is no human being,” wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in one of her several columns that she frequently wrote for newspaper, from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.” This basic sense fo kinship with which she approaced the world dictated her vocation of helpfulness. The honesty with whcihc she told us of hte long path she travelded to free herself of fear and prejudice and become an independent person has placed her in that specaila pantheon reserved for shapers of the human spirit. Eleanor Roosevelt appeared on the American secent, and began being herself, out in the open wehre folks could see the process of women’s long struggle to free themselves from their husbands’s dutiful shadows. “It is said that famous mane are usually the product of an unhappy childhood,” wrote Winston Churchill. “The stern compression of circumstance, the spur of slights and taunts in early years are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without wich great actions are seldom accomplished.” His words, about an unhappy childhood shaping the reateness of later years, were applicable to Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1 make friends easily. She would have to regain her trust in the world befor she could act upon the lession her Grandfather Theodore had impressed upon his children-receive people’s love and peopld will love you. After her father’s death a fear of loneliness and abadonment become ruling emotions in her life. She concealed such fears and longing that both shaped her approach to reality and prepared the way for deep disappointments in her relationships with others, especially men. Her memory of him strengthened her efforts to live up to his expectations of her. He had been a man of tender chivalry, and she wanted her man to behave similaryly. But men did not live upto such ideals, including the wish that they remain permanently and exclusively hers. And somewhere, too, she carried the forbidden knowledge of her father’s weakness-his bouts of drunkenness, use of drugs, and philandering. Life and hte veiled memories of her father’s frailities in time make her more tolerant of weaknesses in others. Her other model in adolescence was Mlle Souvestre, da;ugher of a French philosophe and headmistress of Allenswood, a finishing shcool on hte outskirts of London for hte daughters of eininet European families. Sou, as Eleanor called her, was a women of flashing wit and wide learning whose milieu was the upper echelon of cultivated western European society. Her standards of morality, propriety, and learning were irreproachable. A year after Eleanor arrived at Allenswood, Mlle Souverstre had following words for her:All what you said when she came here of the purity of her heart, the nobleness of her thought has been veri8fied by her conduct among people who were at first perfect strangers to her. I have not found her easily influenced in anything that was not perfectly straightforward and honest but I often found she influenced others in the right direction. She is full of sympathy for all those who live with her and shows an intellighent interest in everything she comes in contact with. Eleanor blossomed in the warm, freindly environment of Allenswood-it was as if she had started life anew. Behind her were the people who pitied her because she was an orphan or who taunted her for her virtues, and for the first time in her life all fear left her and her personality began to shine forth. “As a pupil she is very satisfactory,” Mlle Souvestre’s evalution continued, “but even that is of small account when you compare it with the perfect quality of her soul.”Stuggle as wife in early 19th centuryEleanor returned in 1902 to the United States after three years with Mlle Souvestre. As New York society sought to engage her in its rituals, she peresents us, according to her own accounts of her coming-out, with an image of outer srecity and innter terror. Only occasionally did she reveal the anguished inner self. About this time young Franklin Roosevelt, handsome and debonair, an upperclassman at Harvard, the apple of his mother’s eye, entered Eleanor’s life in earnest. He seemed to Eleanor an improbable suitor. In any case, Franklin’s determined courship and Eleanors’s hunger for a home and family and desire to experiece