In 1905, after a long courtship, she married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a charming, Harvard graduate in his first year of law school at Columbia University. She became involved with the settlement house movement, teaching immigrant children and families on Rivington Street. Roosevelt returned to New York for her social debut in 1902. Her teacher, Mademoiselle Marie Souvestre, with her passionate embrace of social issues, opened Roosevelt up to the world of ideas and was an early force in Roosevelt’s social and political development. In 1899, Roosevelt began her three years of study at London’s Allenswood Academy, where she became more independent and confident. She was raised by her harsh and critical maternal grandmother, who damaged Eleanor’s self-esteem. Her family was affluent and politically prominent, and while her childhood was in many ways privileged, it was also marked by hardship: her father’s alcoholism, as well as the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers before she was ten years old. Born on Octoin New York City, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the first of Elliot and Anna Hall Roosevelt’s three children.
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