[Eleanor Roosevelt at the] Senate Ladies Luncheon Club, photograph by Harris & Ewing, Washington, D.C., January 1938. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
[Eleanor Roosevelt at the] Senate Ladies Luncheon Club, photograph by Harris & Ewing, Washington, D.C., January 1938. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Before Eleanor Roosevelt married, she advocated for improvements in living and working conditions for impoverished laborers in New York City. She also worked with the National Consumers League as a volunteer investigator of “sweatshops,” unregulated garment factories notorious for poor working conditions. The National Consumers League, a reform organization led by middle and upper class men and women, brought the plight of child labor and dangerous working conditions to the American public and worked to make changes.
After her marriage to Franklin D. Roosevelt, she remained involved in wide-ranging reform movements. While Roosevelt was governor of New York, Eleanor advocated the promotion Frances Perkins from board member to chair of the state’s Industrial Relations Commission, and then to New York’s Secretary of Labor.