Eleanor Roosevelt Role Model

Audrey Szabo
CWV-101 Christian Worldview
1/11/15
Andre Mooney

Role Model Review Essay – Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt (born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt) was born on October 11, 1884. She was born into a very wealthy New York City family. Despite her parents’ marriage problems and her father’s alcoholism, Eleanor was raised in a very strict Protestant home (God and Mrs. Roosevelt, 2010). Her parents died before she was ten and her Grandmother raised her. It was not until her marriage to Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor’s fifth cousin, that her religious views became divergent (Glendon, 2010). Eleanor Roosevelt was an admired American woman who left behind a distinguished record of public service (Giddings, 2010). Eleanor Roosevelt’s family relationships,
Her mother, Anna Hall, was a noted beauty. Although she was always kind to Eleanor, it was a cool and distant sort of kindness. Eleanor tried very hard to earn more warmth, but to no avail. Anna called Eleanor “Granny” because she felt that Eleanor was so serious and old-fashioned (Freedman, 1999). This made Eleanor feel inadequate. Eleanor’s father, Elliot Roosevelt, was the brother of President Theodore Roosevelt. Elliot was an alcoholic. Anna begged Elliot to break is dependence on alcohol. After Eleanor’s brother was born, Elliot would disappear for days at a time moaning that he was losing his mind and openly talking about suicide. Eleanor’s mother eventually left her father, but soon became ill. As a child, Eleanor took care of her ailing mother. She wrote in one of her journals “The feeling that I was useful was perhaps the greatest joy I experienced.” (Freedman, 1999) A few months later, Anna entered the hospital to have surgery for this unknown illness she suffered from. After her surgery, she contacted diphtheria and died at age twenty-nine. After her mother died, Eleanor went to live with her Grandmother. She and her father wrote often and he visited irregularly at best. The visits rarely went well so Eleanor’s grandmother discouraged even brief visits from her father. In the summer of 1894, Elliot Roosevelt slipped into a coma from a drunken fall and
When her husband became ill with polio, her help and encouragement gave him the will to go on, first to become governor of New York and then president of the United States. As first lady, she was an energetic and outspoken representative of the needs of people suffering from the Great Depression. Many of her ideas were incorporated into the New Deal’s social welfare programs. During World War II Eleanor expanded her activities working at the United Nations on the founding of UNICEF and the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Rights (Roosevelt, 1999). In both her private life and her public life, Eleanor manifested an unqualified concern for others. She taught at a school she had set up for poor children, ran a factory for jobless men, and was an advocate for equal rights. She found that caring for others helped her overcome her feelings of inadequacy and low