While she was initially uncomfortable with the DC political scene, Roosevelt was growing in her political consciousness.

Two years later, the Roosevelts moved to Washington, DC, when Franklin joined Woodrow Wilson’s administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. While Franklin advanced his career, his wife raised their daughter and four sons under the watchful eye of her often belittling mother-in-law.Īll that changed in 1911, when Franklin was elected to the New York State Senate, and the couple moved to Albany, away from Sara. The Roosevelts settled in New York, where Eleanor found herself under the thumb of her controlling mother-in-law, Sara Roosevelt, who, like her grandmother earlier, was harsh in her criticism of her daughter-in-law. Her uncle and close relative, President Theodore Roosevelt, walked her down the aisle. In 1905, after a long courtship, she married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a charming, Harvard graduate in his first year of law school at Columbia University. She became involved with the settlement house movement, teaching immigrant children and families on Rivington Street. Roosevelt returned to New York for her social debut in 1902. Her teacher, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, with her passionate embrace of social issues, opened Roosevelt up to the world of ideas and was an early force in Roosevelt’s social and political development. In 1899, Roosevelt began her three years of study at London’s Allenswood Academy, where she became more independent and confident. Timid and awkward, she believed that she compared badly with other girls. She was raised by her harsh and critical maternal grandmother, who damaged Eleanor’s self-esteem.

Her family was affluent and politically prominent, and while her childhood was in many ways blessed, it was also marked by hardship: her father’s alcoholism, as well as the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers before she was ten years old. A shy, insecure child, Eleanor Roosevelt would grow up to become one of the most important and beloved First Ladies, authors, reformers, and female leaders of the 20 th century.īorn on Octoin New York City, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the first of Elliot and Anna Hall Roosevelt’s three children.

Eleanor roosevelt volume 2