On October 25, 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt was appointed by President Truman as a delegate to the newly formed United Nations. She was sixty-one years old. She had no formal diplomatic training and had never held an elected or appointed government position.

Roosevelt was born in 1884 in New York City into a prominent family and had a childhood defined by loss — both parents and a brother died before she was ten. She married Franklin Roosevelt in 1905 and spent the next decades managing his political career from a position of social and domestic subordination that she navigated with increasing autonomy over time.

By the time Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, she had spent fifteen years conducting her own public life: writing a daily syndicated newspaper column, maintaining correspondence with hundreds of Americans who wrote to her about their problems, and using her access to the White House to push civil rights, labor rights, and anti-poverty policy. She had defied the Secret Service to visit Black soldiers in the Pacific. She had publicly resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when they refused to allow Marian Anderson to perform in their hall.

At the United Nations, she chaired the commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948. The negotiations required her to manage Soviet bloc opposition, navigate the positions of newly independent nations, and produce a document broad enough to achieve consensus. She managed all three.

She is remembered as a first lady. The work she did afterward is in a smaller font.