Eleanor Roosevelt

At fifteen, Eleanor Roosevelt was accustomed to making herself small. Her mother had found the child’s gravity and appearance disappointing and called her “Granny.” Roosevelt later described herself as painfully shy, without beauty, and lacking the spontaneous ease expected of youth. Private tutors provided lessons, but not the daily company of people her own age.

Her parents’ deaths and the move to her grandmother Mary Hall’s household intensified that narrow life. Bereavement was not a form of misfitting, and money protected Roosevelt from material insecurity. The developmental problem was different: years in an adult-centered world had left her lonely, self-conscious, and unsure how to speak as herself.

Two of her father’s sisters, Anna “Bye” Roosevelt and Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, kept paying attention to her education and social development. Eleanor’s parents had intended to send her to school in Europe. After their deaths, the aunts pressed Mary Hall to honor that plan. It took repeated persuasion, but in 1899 the grandmother agreed to send fifteen-year-old Eleanor to Allenswood Academy outside London.

The new setting supplied peers. Its headmistress, Marie Souvestre, supplied something harder: sustained demands. Souvestre brought Roosevelt to her dining table and evening salon, asked students to examine opposing sides of political questions, and expected them to defend what they thought. Roosevelt later wrote, “Mlle. Souvestre shocked one into thinking, and that on the whole was very beneficial.”

During school breaks, Souvestre traveled through Europe with her. She did not keep the shy student in the role of protected companion. Roosevelt was given responsibility for the travel arrangements, while Souvestre urged her to notice both beauty and industrial hardship and to explore independently. Across three years, Roosevelt formed lasting friendships and learned to state an opinion clearly. She remembered Allenswood as the happiest period of her adolescence.

Her grandmother required her to return to New York in 1902 for a society debut, though Roosevelt wanted another year at school. Souvestre’s attention did not end at the dock. The two corresponded until the headmistress died in 1905. Roosevelt kept Souvestre’s portrait on her desk and carried her letters with her.

The school did not make self-doubt disappear, and a transatlantic education was an advantage available to very few. It did, however, give Roosevelt repeated experience of friendship, argument, responsibility, and work beyond herself. Soon after returning, she joined the National Consumers League and taught at a settlement house. She later became an unusually active first lady, a writer and organizer, and chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The useful pattern began before any of that was predictable. Relatives noticed that a materially comfortable household was still too narrow for the child living in it, persisted until her setting changed, and placed her with an adult who asked more than sociability. Souvestre gave Roosevelt meaningful work in company—and enough time to discover that she could do it.