Rare Letters from Eleanor Roosevelt Show Her Warmth for Community, Friends and Family
Tickets are available for Eleanor Roosevelt’s 140th birthday fundraising luncheon featuring a panel of guest speakers and a peek at her letters.
In mid-February of 1949, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a letter to her namesake niece, Ellie, about travel plans to Canada where the former first lady was stepping off on a three-week lecture tour. She confessed in the letter that it “is a rather strenuous trip” and would be glad when it was over.
She went on to explain to her niece, the daughter of Eleanor Roosevelt’s brother, that she had vowed to herself not to make any more “one-night-stand” trips, but that the people in north west Canada had made such “an urgent plea,” that she accepted.
“They are all interested in the work of the [United Nations], and I feel an obligation to foster the interest if I can,” she wrote.
This passage is just a glimpse of Eleanor Roosevelt “letting her hair down” says Anna Eleanor Fierst, the former first lady’s great-granddaughter and Board Chair of the Eleanor Roosevelt Center in Hyde Park, New York. It was writt…
