Eleanor Roosevelt: The Struggle For Human Rights

Eleanor Roosevelt was a Humanitarian because she was an advocate for human and civil rights, she taught at inner city schools and changed the way women were treated in the government. She was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. At age 15 Eleanor enrolled at Allenswood, a girls’ boarding school outside London, where she was taught by the French headmistress, Marie Souvestre. Souvestre was an advocate of social responsibility and independence for young women. Her curiosity and desire to have greatness in everything caused Eleanor to become interested in these same fields. Eleanor later went on to describe the three years she spent at Allenswood as undoubtedly the happiest time of her life. She returned to New York in the summer of 1902 to prepare for her “coming out” into society.

At 18, following family tradition, she began to devote her time to community service by teaching at a settlement house on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Later she would join the National

During this speech she spoke about the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which she described as, liberty, equality, and fraternity. One of Roosevelt’s main points in her speech was “The basic problem confronting the world today is the preservation of human freedom for the personal and so for the society of which he is a part” (Eleanor Roosevelt). She also advocated that a Bill of Rights should contain two simple parts, A Declaration which could be approved through action of the Member States of the United Nations in the General Assembly and a covenant which would be in the form of a treaty to be presented to the nations of the world. One of the most important and well-remembered things she said during her speech was this, “The totalitarian state typically places the will of the people second to decrees promulgated by a few men at the top” (Eleanor