Eleanor Roosevelt Was a Guiding Light for Working Women

Pioneering journalist Ann Cottrell Free launched her career in the first lady’s all-women press conferences and went on to cover the world.

This is the second story in a two-part series about Ann Cottrell Free and her experience as a journalist in Eleanor Roosevelt’s all-women press conferences.

Ann Cottrell Free interviews former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1947. (Photo courtesy of Elissa Free/Library of Congress)

From the back porch of their farmhouse in rural Lantz Mills, Virginia, in 1997, Elissa Free listens closely to her mother retell the story she’s heard in bits and pieces over the course of her entire life. In fact, you could say that the tidbits of her mother’s legacy sent Elissa Free on a path to journalism herself. It was her destiny, perhaps, since both her mother and father were career journalists.

Here, she continues recording the oral history of her mother’s extraordinary career that began in newspapers on the brink of the United States entering World War II.  

Elissa is the daughter of Ann Cottrell Free and James S. Free, who met in Virginia while working at the Richmond Times Dis…