Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady, Humanitarian, and World Citizen

There are plenty of history books that document the ways Franklin D. Roosevelt changed both the Presidency and the American government, so it is not really surprising that his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was just as successful in transforming the role of the First Lady. In this volume for the Our People series, Pam Rosenberg shows young readers why Eleanor Roosevelt was considered both a humanitarian and a world citizen, who managed to make significant accomplishments even after her husband died and she left the White House.Of course, young readers are going to be interested in how this child of privilege married her distant cousin. But they will also learn about how Roosevelt was educated at Allenswood, a private school for young women, founded by the feminist Marie Souvestre (there is a short side bar on this). The strength of this juvenile biography is that while Rosenberg keeps tabs on FDR's rise in politics, the focus is on what Eleanor was up to, and the main thing I took away from this book was that she was accomplishing a lot before she became First Lady. I knew that she was FDR's eyes and legs during the White House, and I was familiar with the fine work she did with the United Nations in her later years. But Rosenberg makes the case for an entire lifetime of public service and the last paragraph in the books simply states, "It would be impossible to list all of the things that Eleanor Roosevelt did during her lifetime." The book is filled with photographs from Eleanor Roosevelt's family and public life, including one from her funeral where we see President John F. Kennedy, former presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, and future president Lyndon M. Johnson in attendance. The margins are crammed with Interesting Facts, such as Eleanor Roosevelt having one ancestor sign the Declaration of Independence and another administer the oath of office to President George Washington, and J. Edgar Hoover keeping a file on her because he did not like her opinions (she had one of the biggest files in F.B.I. history). These are always one of the best parts of these volumes, but Rosenberg really comes up with a lot of good ones. Eleanor Roosevelt is one of two first ladies who appears in the first set of Our People volumes, the other being Dolley Madison, who was certainly as popular and as respected in her own day as Roosevelt (there are photographs of Dolley Madison which show that even in old age she had a really great smile). These Our People volumes are a nice complementary series to go alogn with the Spirit of America's Our Presidents series.