MINDSET LEADER
Eleanor Roosevelt did not begin life looking like someone destined for public leadership. She was shy, self-conscious about her appearance and orphaned young. Her mother died when Eleanor was eight and her father died two years later. After being raised largely by her grandmother, she was sent at 15 to Allenswood Academy in England, where the school's headmistress, Marie Souvestre, became an important influence. Roosevelt later returned to New York with what the National Park Service describes as a new sense of confidence in herself and her abilities. She began doing social-service work, joined the Junior League and taught at a settlement house on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
The confident public figure came much later. Roosevelt eventually traveled throughout the United States on behalf of the Roosevelt administration, held press conferences, wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column, gave speeches, advocated publicly for civil and women's rights and represented the United States at the newly formed United Nations. After Franklin Roosevelt's death, she chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights and played a central role in the negotiations that produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Looking only at the later Eleanor Roosevelt makes confidence seem like a personality trait she possessed.
Looking at the whole life suggests something different. Much of her confidence appears to have developed through participation. She kept entering situations that required more of her and gradually became someone capable of handling them.
Confidence can follow action
One of Roosevelt's best-known discussions of fear appears in her 1960 book You Learn by Living. She wrote that people gain "strength, courage and confidence" through experiences in which they stop and face fear directly. Her conclusion was practical: "You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
The line is often presented as a general motivational quotation. In context, Roosevelt was describing confidence as something accumulated through experience. Each difficult experience provides evidence that fear can be tolerated and that a person may be more capable than they assumed. This reverses the order people often expect.
We tend to imagine that confidence should arrive before action. First you become confident enough to speak publicly, move somewhere unfamiliar, apply for the position, lead the meeting or walk into the room alone. Then you do it. Frequently the order is the opposite. You do something while feeling uncertain. You discover that you can function while uncertain. The next situation becomes slightly less unfamiliar.
The confidence comes from having survived the evidence-gathering process.
Roosevelt's own development followed something close to this pattern. Her political involvement expanded substantially during the 1920s. She worked with organizations including the League of Women Voters, the Women's Trade Union League and the Women's Division of the New York State Democratic Committee. These roles gave her practical experience organizing, speaking, building coalitions and understanding policy long before she entered the White House.
She did not wake up as one of the most politically influential women in the United States. She accumulated the abilities required to become one.
She developed an identity separate from her husband's
Roosevelt married Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1905 and spent the early years of their marriage raising their family while his political career developed. For a time, her public activities became secondary to family responsibilities and her husband's ambitions. That began to change significantly during and after the First World War, and the change accelerated after Franklin contracted polio in 1921. Eleanor became more politically active partly to help maintain his political connections, but the work increasingly gave her an independent public identity and set of goals.
This distinction became important when Franklin was elected president.
The conventional role of First Lady could have been largely ceremonial. Roosevelt turned it into something considerably more active. She traveled around the country visiting relief projects, mines, factories and communities affected by the Depression, then reported what she observed to the president. She became known as his "eyes and ears," particularly because his disability made extensive travel difficult. She also developed her own positions, relationships and political priorities.
In 1933, she became the first First Lady to hold her own press conference. She admitted only women reporters, which had a practical consequence: newspapers that wanted access to the First Lady had a reason to employ female journalists at a time when women were frequently excluded from political reporting.
The significance is larger than the press conferences themselves. Roosevelt used a role she had acquired through marriage to build work that was distinctly hers. That required developing a clearer answer to a difficult question: What do I believe independently of the person beside me?
Knowing yourself sometimes requires enough separation from other people's identities to discover where your own positions begin.
Her views developed rather than arriving fully formed
Roosevelt's political development was not a story of possessing the correct beliefs from the beginning. She acknowledged this herself.
Looking back at her involvement with women's suffrage, she wrote that her "first contact with the suffrage movement" came relatively late. She initially adopted the position partly because Franklin supported women's voting rights. During the 1920s, however, her involvement with women's political and labor organizations became much deeper. She developed relationships with activists, learned about workplace conditions and began establishing political positions of her own.
Her position on the Equal Rights Amendment also changed over time. Roosevelt initially opposed it because she and other labor-oriented feminists feared that eliminating sex-based legal distinctions would also remove workplace protections that women needed. As labor protections developed, her position shifted, and she publicly withdrew her opposition in 1946, although she retained concerns about protections for working women.
This is an important part of intellectual independence that receives less attention than conviction. A person with a strong point of view should still be capable of changing it.
There is no particular virtue in holding the same opinion for 40 years if the evidence, circumstances or your understanding of the problem has changed. Consistency can indicate principle, but it can also indicate that a person has stopped examining the question. Roosevelt's political life developed through exposure to people whose experiences were different from her own. The positions became more informed because she continued collecting information.
She deliberately put herself in contact with lives unlike hers
Roosevelt was born into an extremely privileged New York family. Her uncle was President Theodore Roosevelt and she moved within social and political circles inaccessible to most Americans. Yet a striking feature of her public career was the amount of time she spent leaving those environments.
During the Depression, she traveled widely to inspect living and working conditions and New Deal relief projects. She visited poor communities and spoke with workers, miners, farmers and people receiving government assistance. The information she collected was relayed to Franklin Roosevelt and sometimes influenced administration priorities.
Her relationship with educator and civil-rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune also became important to Roosevelt's understanding of racial inequality. The two women developed a close friendship and political alliance. Roosevelt supported Bethune's work and helped create access between Black leaders and the Roosevelt administration. She also publicly supported civil-rights causes at a time when doing so created significant political resistance, including campaigning against the poll tax and supporting anti-lynching efforts.
Roosevelt's record on race was not without limitations or compromises, particularly given the Roosevelt administration's own failures on civil rights. But her development illustrates an important mechanism through which people's thinking can change: proximity. It is much easier to maintain simplistic assumptions about people whose lives you never encounter.
Exposure does not automatically produce understanding. But it creates information that abstraction cannot.
She was willing to create discomfort publicly
In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the acclaimed Black contralto Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Roosevelt was a member of the organization.
She resigned.
Her decision became national news. Anderson subsequently performed an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial before an audience of tens of thousands of people.
Roosevelt's resignation did not end racial segregation and it did not eliminate the political compromises surrounding civil rights during her husband's administration. Its importance was narrower: she had membership in a respected institution and decided that continuing the association was inconsistent with a position she believed she should publicly take.
Principles are relatively easy to maintain when they cost nothing. The more revealing moments occur when a principle creates inconvenience, criticism, lost status or conflict with people whose approval matters. This does not mean every disagreement requires a dramatic public gesture. It means values become more informative when they begin affecting decisions.
A value that never changes what you do is difficult to distinguish from a preference.
She accepted work before she felt qualified for it
After Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt could reasonably have withdrawn from public life. She had spent 12 years as First Lady and was already 60. Instead, another career began.
President Harry Truman asked Roosevelt to join the first United States delegation to the United Nations General Assembly. According to historian Allida Black's account for the United Nations, Roosevelt initially declined. She told Truman that she did not believe she was qualified. By the end of the day, she had reconsidered and accepted.
She subsequently became the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights.
The assignment was formidable. Representatives from countries with radically different political, religious and philosophical traditions were attempting to establish a common statement of fundamental human rights in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Roosevelt had to navigate disagreements between the United States and Soviet Union as Cold War tensions developed while also managing disputes about political, economic, social and cultural rights. The United Nations credits her with playing an instrumental role in steering the drafting process towards completion.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948. Roosevelt had begun the assignment believing she might not be qualified to do it. There is a useful difference between I have never done this before and I cannot do this.
Experience can only answer the second question if a person is willing to move through the first.
Her most important work did not end at the expected ending
Franklin Roosevelt's death could easily have provided a natural conclusion to Eleanor Roosevelt's public biography. Instead, some of the work for which she is most internationally significant happened afterward.
She served at the United Nations, promoted the Universal Declaration around the world, continued writing and lecturing and remained involved in public affairs. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed her chair of the President's Commission on the Status of Women. She continued working until shortly before her death in 1962.
This makes her life useful for thinking about the artificial boundaries people place around periods of development. There is a tendency to imagine that the person we become is largely established early. Education happens first. A career follows. Expertise accumulates. Eventually the direction becomes relatively fixed.
Roosevelt's life was less orderly.
Her early adulthood was dominated substantially by marriage and family. Her independent political identity became much stronger in her thirties and forties. She transformed the role of First Lady in her late forties and fifties. At 61, she entered international diplomacy and took on work she initially believed exceeded her qualifications.
The later stages were not simply maintenance of what she had already become. She was still becoming more capable.
What Eleanor Roosevelt's life suggests about confidence
Confidence is useful, but waiting for it can become a remarkably effective way to avoid doing anything that might expose your limitations. Roosevelt's life offers a more practical sequence.
Enter the room. Learn how it works. Speak even when speaking is uncomfortable. Discover what you do not know. Meet people who know things you do not. Take responsibility. Make mistakes. Revise your position when the evidence requires it. Accept a larger responsibility before you are completely certain that you can handle it.
Then repeat the process.
Over time, something changes. Situations that once required enormous courage become familiar. Your understanding becomes more sophisticated. You have evidence that you can survive discomfort and learn what you need to learn. That does not make fear disappear. It makes fear less informative.
Eleanor Roosevelt's confidence was not particularly interesting because she eventually possessed it. What is more useful is that much of it appears to have been built while she was already doing the work. You do not always become confident and then participate.
Sometimes participation is how you become confident.