Eleanor Roosevelt: From Political Wife to Autonomous Voice

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Eleanor Roosevelt: From Political Wife to Autonomous Voice

Eleanor Roosevelt, often remembered as the “First Lady of the World” or “Madam Chairman”, claimed her place in history not through grand speeches alone, but in columns typed for everyday Americans, oozing with personal conviction and care. Her radio and television programs reached into living rooms around the country. These efforts were in many ways unprecedented as they addressed complex socio-political topics with accessibility and clarity. Through the RIAS archival collections, it is possible to trace the rhetorical transformation of Eleanor Roosevelt from a political wife to an autonomous actor on the world stage. She emerged as a woman who dedicated her life to informing others despite the conventions of her time, and who, after the death of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, chose to lean further into politics rather than retreat from them. She leveraged language and media to strengthen her ethos and reimagine what diplomacy could be in a new world. These are the ideals she lived by until her very last breath.

Several primary sources available at the RIAS reflected Roosevelt’s rhetorical strategies in the post-World War II landscape and help to understand her roles and tactics: her My Day columns (especially from 1948, 1953, and 1962), her pivotal speech The Struggle for Human Rights (1948), her broadcasts on The Eleanor Roosevelt Program (1950–51), her speech Teachers and the United Nations (1953), televised reflections on Prospects of Mankind (1961), and her memoirs. Secondary sources, such as Transformative First Lady”and Eleanor Roosevelt in the Media by Maurin Bisley, A New Deal for the World by Elizabeth Borgwardt, and essays curated by Dario Fazzi and Anya Luscombe, provide further useful historical context. Together, these sources shed light on how Roosevelt worked to shape public opinion and international consensus at a time when Cold War polarities threatened both.

The My Day columns, written almost daily from 1935 to 1962, provided the most intimate access to her rhetorical craft. These columns (at times diary-like, other times fiercely political) offered a window into how Roosevelt brought the abstract workings of the United Nations into the homes of ordinary Americans. While attending the UN General Assembly in Paris in 1948, she used My Day to explain the stakes and struggles of the Human Rights Commission in clear, digestible prose. She addressed linguistic debates among European delegates and the sheer exhaustion of drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She did so with a tone that was never lofty nor distant; instead, she employed gentle pathos and a motherly ethos to disarm her readers, turning international politics into dinner-type conversations.

That rhetorical dexterity reached its peak in her Sorbonne speech, The Struggle for Human Rights (1948), where Roosevelt confronted Soviet authoritarianism and defended democratic ideals with an urgent and unwavering voice. Delivered just months before the UDHR’s adoption, the speech was a masterclass in Kairos—it was the opportune moment. Set in Paris, the birthplace of liberty, her words recalled Enlightenment values to support a modernised vision of universal dignity. But what set her apart was the humanism in her delivery. She quoted the UN Charter with conviction, made use of analogies to bridge ideologies, and framed human rights as a shared necessity rather than a Western export. She confronted “the single political party” and “the control of schools, press, radio,” as antithetical to human progress by going further than mere opposition and creating deeply optimistic ideals for the future.

What unfolded over the next decade was a Roosevelt unbound. After being dismissed from the UN by Eisenhower in 1953, she further leaned into public life. Her speech Teachers and the United Nations, delivered that same year, shifted the weight of responsibility from governments to individuals. She called on educators and parents to be active agents in sustaining democracy, using analogies, anecdotes, and moral reasoning to reinforce her claim: “peace is a people’s project.” She wielded logos and pathos in tandem, converting abstractions into imperatives.

By the early 1960s, in columns like My Day (Sept. 14, 1962), Roosevelt was increasingly direct. She criticized American exceptionalism and Cold War paternalism, adopting a more nuanced stance by proposing alternatives grounded in respect, education, and mutual benefit. Even when her health declined, her wit seemed to sharpen. She was no longer positioning herself beside power, but against complacency. She appealed to the American youth as the bearers of new initiative, urging them to redefine what kind of standing the nation should promote on the global stage.

Through the secondary sources, one gains an understanding of how Roosevelt’s rhetorical identity was entangled with media transformations and Cold War anxieties. However, the primary sources told the fuller story. Her letters, her broadcasts, her public columns—all showed how she managed the demands of kairos: adjusting her sophistication depending on the political moment, the audience’s expectations, and the evolving threats to freedom. In gathering these materials, one can find not just the rhetorical artefacts of a public figure, but an evolution in how Eleanor Roosevelt used language as a political instrument. Through her voice, democracy was never static but was spoken into being; not only defended, but reimagined.

To study Roosevelt in this way is to see the 20th century refracted through the eyes of someone who was not afraid to feel its contradictions and still push forward. Her ethos, built on both situated authority and moral imagination, remains a model of rhetorical leadership: one rooted in prioritizing dialogue. Through the archives, what becomes clear is not just what Eleanor Roosevelt said, but how and why it continues to matter.

Resources at the RIAS:

Additional sources consulted:

Secondary sources:

  • Beasley, Maurine H. Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-Fulfillment, University of Illinois Press, 1987.
  • –. Eleanor Roosevelt: Transformative First Lady, University Press Of Kansas, 2010.
  • Fazzi, Dario, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Anti-Nuclear Movement, 2018.
  • Roosevelt, Eleanor, It Seemed to Me, New York, 1954.
  • Roosevelt, Eleanor, My Day, New York, 1989
  • Roosevelt, Eleanor, If You Ask Me, New York, 1946.

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