Columnist Eleanor Roosevelt

The first first lady to become a major media figure was Eleanor Roosevelt, whose syndicated column, “My Day” began in 1936 and continued, in one form or another, for more than two decades, at its peak reaching hundreds of newspapers and making news with Mrs. Roosevelt’s stands on major issues like civil rights and labor relations.

Mrs. Roosevelt filed the column six days a week from all over the world, lugging a typewriter on her tour of South Pacific bases in 1943 and even composing aboard a destroyer. When Franklin D. Roosevelt once complained about Washington columnists, a reporter reminded him that his wife was one, but he replied, “She simply writes a daily diary.”

In fact, Mrs. Roosevelt often used her column to float her own ideas or to take more pointed stands than her husband chose to.

Mrs. Roosevelt also wrote a monthly question-and-answer column for the Ladies Home Journal and McCall’s, and had a weekly radio show sponsored by a mattress company, among others. That led Cole Porter to write: “So Missus R., with all her trimmin’s, can broadcast a bed from Simmons ‘cause Franklin knows anything goes.”