Eleanor Roosevelt Educational Posters, Books, Video, Links
for the social studies classroom, home schoolers and theme decor for office or studio.

“Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry is own weight, this is a frightening prospect.”

“Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.”

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

“I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Poster Text: Born in 1884, Eleanor Roosevelt was to become the most active First Lady in the nation's history. Even as a teenager, she felt a deep concern for the less forunate. “I am always questioning, questioning,” she wrote in her diary. “I can feel it in me ... that I can do much more than I am doing.” Life was soon to give her the chance to do “much more.” In 1905, Eleanor married Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When he was stricken with polio in 1921, she began to help him with his work. And after he became President in 1933, she became hes “eyes and ears,” traveling everywhere he could not go.

The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression, a time when millions were out of work. When Mrs. Roosevelt was not visiting coal mines or city slums, she was working hard to get help for poor farmers or speaking boldly against racial prejudice. In the early 1940s, during World War Two, she worked tirelessly for world peace. And for the six years after her husband's death in 1945, whe served as a delegate to the United Nations. President Truman once called her “The First lady of the World.” She herself summed up her views this way: “You have to do the best you can in this world, and when you have done that, that is all you can do.” She remained active in public life until her death in 1962.

• more Great American Women posters

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

• more motivational posters

View of Eleanor Roosevelt's desk with a misspelled name plate give to her by a student. Giclee Print, Nat'l Geographic

Migrant Mother

Poster Text: Photographer Dorothea Lange took this picture in March 1936 when the United States as in the depths of the Great Depression. This was a time when millions of Americans had no jobs and many businessess failed. The photo, of a poor woman and some of her children, came to be called “Migrant Mother.” The woman had picked peas in California, but the crop had frozen in the fields, leaving her unemployed. She is called a “migrant” because she went from place to place looking for work. She and her seven children were living on the frozen vegetables they gathered from the fields and on birds the children managed to kill. When the picture was taken, the woman had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. The photo shows the misery and degree of the depression. The photo appeared in a California newspaper, and it was then in a book that Dorothea Lange wrote with her husband.
Dorothea Lange was working for a government agency called the Farm Security Administration, FSA, when she photographed “Migrant Mother.” President Franklin Roosevelt had set up the FSA to provide loans and other help to poor farmers. The FSA hired photographers to take pictures that showed the suffering in the rural areas – the rural slums, ruined farms, and migrant camps. The FSA then sent these photos to news publications. The pictures helped convince Congress to support the programs President Roosevelt proposed to assist poor people.

• famous women posters
• Oklahoma posters
• Story of “The Picture” as told by Florence Owen's grandson.
• more History Through a Lens posters

America in the 20th Century -
The Great Depression, 1929-1939

Stock Market Crash, FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, The New Deal, Gone with the Wind, Mary McLeod Bethune

Poster Text: The stock market crash of 1929 turned the prosperty of the 1920s into economic disaster. A decade of hard times set in ...

Marian Anderson
b. 2-27-1897; Philadelphia, PA
d. 4-8-1993; Oregon

In 1939 African-American contralto Marian Anderson performed an Easter Sunday concert to 70,000 at the Lincoln Memorial and a nationwide radio audience, at the suggestion of Eleanor Roosevelt, when the Daughters of the American Revolution denied Anderson performing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall.

• Women Who Dared I composite poster
• women in music posters
• Marian Anderson African American Women Bio