March 10 at 4 am et/pt.

In 1948, on a walk from her Washington Square apartment to New York City's 8th Street, Eleanor Roosevelt saw something that stopped her dead in her tracks. "Suddenly," she remembered, "I saw on the sidewalk a figure of a man." He was homeless, "very thin and very poor-looking." Watching him there, Roosevelt wondered "how many human rights that poor man had."

If she felt a sensitivity to that frail and hungry man, it was because she herself could easily identify with the plight of the abandoned and unwanted. Born Anna Eleanor in New York City on October 11, 1884, her childhood was anything but ideal. Roosevelt's critical mother called her ugly and warned her to have manners since she had no looks, leaving her wanting "to sink through the floor in shame." Then, when Roosevelt was nine years old, her mother died of diphtheria and she and her brother went to live with her grandmother. Just two years later, Roosevelt's father, an alcoholic who had been disowned by the family, died.

Roosevelt finally got the chance to develop some much-needed self-confidence when she was 15 and was sent to London's distinguished Allenswood School. There, she gained an early appreciation for feminist and progressive philosophy, once remarking, "Whatever I have become since had its seeds in those three years of contact with a liberal mind and strong personality."

When she was 18, she returned to New York. At a debutante dance she ran into a distant cousin, the young and handsome Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They became engaged in 1903 and were married two years later, with the bride given away by her favorite uncle, President Theodore Roosevelt. They settled into her husband's Hyde Park residence, where F.D.R.'s mother, Sarah Delano, soon took on the role of lady of the house, ordering furniture, taking a seat of honor at the dinner table and generally usurping her daughter-in-law's role. Delano's disapproving remarks, like those once uttered by own mother, encouraged a deep sense of inadequacy and failure in Roosevelt.

When her husband came home from an inspection tour in Europe, Roosevelt discovered his infidelity while unpacking his suitcase. There, resting among the dirty clothes, was a bundle of Mercer's love letters. "The bottom dropped out of my own particular world," she wrote a friend, "and I faced myself, my surrounding, my world, honestly for the first time." The affair proved to be the turning point in Roosevelt's life, and she set about defining herself in her own terms. She voiced her opinion on a wide range of social issues, including youth employment, civil liberties, as well as civil rights for blacks and women. She also began what would become a lifelong dedication to the Democratic Party.

But Roosevelt and her newfound freedom would be tested in 1928. F.D.R. had recovered enough from the polio he contracted seven years earlier to enter New York politics again. First he won the governorship, and four years later, the presidency of the United States. Although the thought of being the first lady filled Roosevelt with anxiety, she thrived.

While in the White House, Roosevelt kept her independent spirit going by giving regular "women only" press conferences, writing her own daily newspaper column ("My Day") and opening up the White House to the public, much to the horror of Washington society. And during her frequent tours across the nation, she served as her husband's eyes and ears and was a major voice for his administration's policies on poverty and minority relations.

After her husband's death in 1945, Harry Truman asked Roosevelt to be a U.S. delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, and she quickly accepted the challenge. Although she left the U.N. in 1952, she never stopped her political activity. She spoke out against the political witch-hunts of Joseph McCarthy and continued to condemn racial bigotry, giving active support to the protests of the Civil Rights Movement.

Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962, at the age of 78, having risen to so many challenges. "A woman is like a teabag," she once remarked. "You never know how strong it is until it's in hot water."