Childhood: Born to Anna Eleanor Hall and Elliot Roosevelt, she also had two brothers; Elliot Jr and G. Hall Roosevelt. Elliot Jr died in 1893, aged just 4 years old. Eleanor's mother died in 1892, and her father (banished from the Roosevelt family for his excessive, alcoholic lifestyle) died two years later, leaving the ten-year-old Eleanor to be brought up by her maternal grandmother.
She had a difficult youth from this point on, her grandmother being a cold woman, running an autocratic household. The rest of her family, with the exception of her uncle Theodore Roosevelt, are said to have looked down on her considerably. There was also some friction between Eleanor and Theodore's eldest daughter Alice, due to Theodore's apparent favouritism of Eleanor.
At 15, she was sent to a distinguished school in England, where she began to develop her self confidence and social skills - attributes that would serve her well in later life.

Work: Throughout the early years of the twentieth century, Roosevelt did little except be a wife and mother. She married Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1903 and bore six children. She later wrote "I suppose I was fitting pretty well into the pattern of a fairly conventional, quiet, young society matron", thought she found herself and her family largely dominated by Franklin's mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt.
When Franklin began his political career serving in the state Senate for Albany in 1910, Eleanor began to become involved in politics herself through helping her husband. She gained knowledge about Washington and the government administration in this way.
At the outbreak of the First World War, she gained some independence from her husband's career (and her domineering mother-in-law) by getting involved in the war effort.
Her support of Franklin continued throughout the 1920s and 30s, and on into his term as President of the United States. As First Lady, she was able to begin running her own campaigns and voiced her opinions on issues she cared deeply about - namely Civil Rights and the plight of ethnic minorities in America. In a time where the rights of black Americans were not so strongly upheld, Eleanor became their connection to the Roosevelt administration, where her husband worked to gain the votes of the notoriously racist Southern Democrats instead.
One smaller example of the power she had to help in the cause of Civil Rights can be seen in the actions she took to ensure that the opera singer Marian Anderson was allowed to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. An organisation called the Daughters of the American Revolution prevented her from doing so at Constitution Hall, because she was black. Eleanor was a member of this organisation, but resigned her membership afterwards.
During the Second World War, Eleanor openly opposed decisions made by her husband which she viewed as being a threat to peace and democracy. One these was the signing of Executive Order 9066, to imprison 110,000 Japanese nationals in America, and Japanese-Americans in internment camps.
She and Wendell Willkie set up Freedom House during this time, a mainly American organisation dedicated to opposing authoritarianism and oppression all over the world under the banner of demo cracy.
Even after her long term as First Lady ended in 1945 (with the death of Franklin), she continued to be a strong figure in international human rights activism. She became heavily involved with the UN, and in December 1948 she and a group of others formulated the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which she dubbed "the international Magna Carta of all mankind".
Eleanor Roosevelt, surviving her husband by nearly 18 years and remaining politically active throughout, died in Manhattan of a recurring bone marrow tuberculosis infection. She was buried in Hyde Park, New York next to her husband.

Friends & Relationships: Her marriage to Franklin D. Roosevelt in March 1903 was to produce six children; Anna Eleanor, James, Franklin Delano Jr. (1909-1909), Elliott, Franklin Delano Jr. and John Aspinwall.
The marriage was put under great stress when it was discovered that Franklin had an affair with Eleanor's social secretary Lucy Mercer. They stayed together, despite this, but the relationship was permanently changed. Perhaps it was this that lead Eleanor to feel more able to be so open in her opposition to her husband's less democratic policies, and the close relationship she developed with the press reporter Lorena Hickok, which has lead to much speculation about Eleanor's sexuality.
The two met in 1928, becoming close friends in 1932 during a series of interviews between them. They maintained a written correspondence afterwards, during which Eleanor wrote: "My Pictures are nearly all up & I have you in my sitting room where I can look at you most of my waking hours! I can't kiss you [in person] so I kiss your picture good night and good morning" amongst other suggestive comments. Hickok burned the letters after Eleanor's death, and there was an effort by one of her biographers to suppress the surviving documents.

Greatest Achievements: She was the longest serving First Lady, from 1933 to 1945, and cetainly one of the best loved.
She was post-humously awarded one of the Human Rights Prizes, although a campaign to award her a Nobel Peace Prize was unsuccessful.

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