II.

Early Life

Eleanor Roosevelt was born on October 11, 1884, in New York City, the first child of Anna Hall and Elliott Roosevelt. Her father, a businessman, came from a distinguished, wealthy, and politically active New York family with roots in the city’s earliest colonial settlements. Her mother was a descendant of the Livingstons, a family that was equally rooted in the political history of colonial New York and Revolutionary America. Eleanor’s mother, Anna, was one of the most beautiful women in New York high society, and this made young Eleanor feel insecure about her plainer appearance. Anna died of diphtheria when Eleanor was eight years old. Eleanor’s father, a handsome man-about-town, died of alcoholism less than two years later. The orphaned Eleanor, insecure and self-conscious, was subsequently placed in the care of her maternal grandmother, Mary Hall.

When Eleanor was 15 years old her grandmother sent her to the Allenswood Academy in London, England. For three years, under the tutelage of Marie Souvestre, Eleanor developed lifelong interests in politics, social causes, history, and literature. Eleanor later asserted that Souvestre was one of the most important influences in her life. A confident, well educated, and socially conscious Eleanor returned to the United States in 1902 to make her debut in New York society. She joined various social reform organizations, including the National Consumers’ League, which sought to improve working conditions for women, and volunteered as a teacher in settlement houses (charitable establishments that offered social services to the urban poor).

In the summer of 1902, while riding on a train, she met Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her fifth cousin once removed. This chance encounter soon blossomed into a romance, and they were engaged in November 1903. At their wedding on March 17, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor’s uncle, gave the bride away. The wedding was front-page news in the New York Times.