Eleanor Roosevelt

The words that circulate under her name today tend to come from someone the world knew first as a president's wife and later as the person who helped push the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into existence. She led the work of designing its text and building international backing for it, and when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the declaration in 1948, the assembly rose to applaud her.

Before that, she spent twelve years as first lady of the United States, the longest anyone has held the position, through her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms from 1933 to 1945. She did not treat the role as ceremonial. Travelling, speaking publicly and campaigning on causes she cared about, she changed what the job was understood to be.

Widowed in 1945, she moved from the White House to international diplomacy, serving as a United States delegate to the UN General Assembly from 1945 to 1952. President Harry S. Truman later called her the "First Lady of the World", a nod to what she had achieved on human rights. Born in Manhattan in 1884, she died in 1962.