Eleanor Roosevelt as a Campaigner for Human Rights

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1. INTRODUCTION

Human rights are rights that every single one of us has just by the fact that we are humans. But it wasn't like that always. We didn't always have those rights. A lot of time, struggle and many fights had to pass for these rights to start being acknowledged and respected.

Many people in the past dedicated their lives to the fight for human rights. They weren't afraid to stand for what they believed in and they believed in a better tomorrow. They did everything that was in their power to make sure it comes true. But even now, after everything they did and all the progress they made we still hear and read about basic human rights being violated all around the world.

When the time to choose the topic for this essay came, I decided to write about something that I thought mattered and for me, a future law student, choosing a topic of human rights wasn't hard. I wanted to write about Eleanor Roosevelt, a person that not a lot of people now as a human rights activist. The reason behind this decision is that Eleanor was a strong, independent woman, fighting for the rights of others in the time when even women themselves had to fight for a better position in society.

After Franklin won a seat in New York Senate, family moved to Albany. 2 years later, in 1913, Franklin was appointed assistant secretary of the navy and they moved to Washington D.C. Next few years Eleanor spent performing social duties of the „official wife“, some of them including going to formal parties and making social calls to other government officials.

When the United States entered into the World War I Eleanor continued her volunteer work. She visited wounded soldiers, worked for Navy-Marine Corps Relief and in Red Cross canteen.

Du...

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... the war she couldn't really publicly express her honest opinion about internment because she knew what impact her comments had, but she still found a way to do what she believed in, even though it was intervening in individual cases.

Works Cited

Roosevelt, E. (1943). A Challenge to American Sportsmanship. Collier's, 112, 21,71.

Hoffman, Beasley M., Cowan Shulman, H., Beasley, H. (2001). The Eleanor Roosevelt Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group.

http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/lesson-plans/notes-er-and-womens-movement.cfm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

http://www.history4kids.info/blog/2011/12/eleanor-roosevelt-champion-for-youth.html

http://rooseveltinstitute.org/new-roosevelt/saving-lost-generation-through-national-youth-administration

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/1stladyroosevelte/a/human_rights.htm

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