On October 11, 1884, a baby girl named Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in a fancy townhouse in New York City. Her uncle would become U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Her cousin, a boy named Franklin she would later marry, would become President too. But Eleanor's own life would turn out to be even more groundbreaking than theirs.
Eleanor was shy as a kid and lost both her parents before she was ten. She found her voice at a boarding school in England, where a teacher told her she had something important to say. When Franklin became president in 1933, Eleanor refused to be the kind of First Lady who just hosted teas. She held her own press conferences - only allowing women reporters, so newspapers would have to hire them. She wrote a daily newspaper column called 'My Day' for 27 years. She traveled the country during the Great Depression, visiting coal mines, slums, and hospitals, and reported what she saw straight back to the president.
After Franklin died in 1945, President Truman sent Eleanor to the brand-new United Nations. There she led the team that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, finished in 1948 - a list of basic rights that belong to every person on Earth, no matter where they live. When the General Assembly approved it, the room stood and gave her a long ovation. President Truman later called her the 'First Lady of the World.' She had turned a shy girl's quiet courage into a voice for billions.
