Preparing to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt made her way to the organization’s imposing new headquarters on Manhattan’s East Side. The occasion on March 27, 1958, was a small, scarcely noticed ceremony to release a guide for community-based action on human rights. There, in the hope of rekindling interest in the landmark document that had been forged under her skillful leadership, she uttered several sentences that have become among her most famous:

Mrs. Roosevelt’s remarks tacitly acknowledged that the once bold vision she and others had put forth for a postwar world governed by collective security arrangements and grounded in a doctrine of universal human rights transcending the sovereignty of nation states was in trouble, a casualty of Cold War politics. If she quietly despaired of state recognition and enforcement of international human rights, however, her conviction that progress could be made instead among families and local communities, where habits of tolerance and of democratic citizenship are first imbued, was not just born of idealism. Even as the mainstream human rights agenda appeared to founder in the years following World War II, incremental steps were taken by the United Nations to broaden accepted definitions of how rights are constituted and codified in communities around the world—especially with respect to the rights of women, a matter in which Mrs. Roosevelt had long taken special interest. In this still formative but potentially significant dimension of the human rights revolution, Mrs. Roosevelt had good reason to feel some encouragement.