NGO Committee on the Status of Women (NGO CSW/NY) /American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA) /Hawa Taylor-Kamara Diallo /Felipe Queipo Rego /Judith Abebe Long /Roberta Gebhard, DO
Amb. Denis G. Antoine /Gloria Bachmann /Yvonne O’Neal/Sherry Lai /Gopal Sankaran /Jozef Suvada
Benjamin Mason Meier /Charlotte Tomic, MBA /Saralyn Mark, MD, FAMWA /Pamela Morgan /Ravi K. /Denise S.
April 12, 1945.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt died, his wife, Eleanor, was expected to fade quietly into history.
She’d already spent 12 years reshaping what it meant to be First Lady—fighting for civil rights, for workers, for the poor. Surely, she’d earned her rest.
But Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t retire. She restarted.
At 60, she walked into the brand-new United Nations and took on the most impossible task in history — getting the world to agree on what “human rights” meant.
She chaired the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, working through 81 sessions, two years, and countless political battles.
Soviet delegates tried to stop her, calling her “the most dangerous woman in the world.”
She smiled — and kept going.
On December 10, 1948, nations voted.
48 in favor. None against.
And Article 1 of that declaration still reads:
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
That line exists because Eleanor Roosevelt refused to give up — not to age, not to grief, not to power.
She didn’t stop there.
She fought for racial justice in America, stood against segregation, and defended freedom wherever it was threatened.
Even at 76, she was still at work at the UN — still proving that one person’s moral courage can change the course of history.
When she died in 1962, President Kennedy, Truman, and Eisenhower all attended her funeral.
Adlai Stevenson said:
“She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.”
And she did.
Eleanor Roosevelt lit a candle that still burns — in every movement for freedom, in every fight for dignity, in every place where someone dares to say:
“All human beings are born free and equal.”
