Frances
Perkins, an economist and social worker, served in Roosevelt's
gubernatorial administration as Industrial Commissioner
and became the first female cabinet member when FDR appointed
her Secretary of Labor, a position she held throughout Roosevelt's
presidency.
Perkins was born in Boston April 10, 1880 and christened
Fannie Coralie Perkins. (She later legally changed her name
to Frances Perkins and in 1913 when she married Paul Caldwell
Wilson, she refused to take his name, subsequently defending
her right to her own name in court.) She spent her childhood
in Worcester, Massachusetts and with the strong support
of her father enrolled in the overwhelmingly male Worcester
Classical High School. While attending Mount Holyoke College,
Perkins read Jacob Riis's How The Other Half Lives,
studied economics, and met National
Consumers League secretary Florence Kelley. After graduation,
Perkins divided her time between a series of part-time teaching
positions and volunteer work with a variety of Worcester
social service organizations. In 1904 she accepted a teaching
position in Lake Forest, Illinois and quickly began spending
her free time at Hull House and other Chicago settlement
communities. Three years later, she moved east to study
economics and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
After receiving a Russell Sage Foundation fellowship, she
moved to New York in the summer of 1909 to survey living
and work conditions in Hell's Kitchen. The following year
she was elected secretary of the National Consumers League.
Perkins witnessed the March 25, 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory Fire and watched the trapped young women pray before
they leapt off the window ledges into the streets below.
Her incessant work for minimum hours legislation encouraged
Al Smith to appoint her to the
Committee on Safety of the City of New York under whose
authority she visited workplaces, exposed hazardous practices,
and championed legislative reforms. Smith rewarded her work
by appointing her to the State Industrial Commission in
1918 and naming her its chair in 1926. Two years later,
FDR would promote her to Industrial Commissioner of New
York.
Molly Dewson, Jane Addams
and others campaigned for Perkins to be Secretary of Labor
and urged ER to help secure the position for her. Perkins,
convinced that a person from organized labor should hold
the post, initially refused and suggested a woman trade
unionist instead. The pressure on her to accept the position
increased, and after telling FDR that she expected the administration
to side with liberal labor practices and that she wanted
to spend weekends in New York with her family, she accepted
the position. Labor objected, arguing that she had no experience
with unions and little ties with the labor movement, but
she defused their opposition by downplaying her position
and praising the role of AFL president William Green.
As a key labor advisor to FDR, she helped shape the Civilian
Conservation Corps, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration,
the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act
and the Fair Labor Standards Act. She also shepherded the
United States' entry into the International Labor Organization,
and remained its active supporter throughout her life. She
resigned July 1, 1945 so that Truman could appoint Lew Schwellenbach.
Later that fall, Truman denied her request for an appointment
to the Social Security Board, naming her instead to the
Civil Service Commission, a position she held until 1953.
Devoted to Roosevelt, she defended his record in her 1946
memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew, and in public lectures.
In 1957, the seventy-seven year old Perkins joined the faculty
of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations,
a position she held until her death on May 14, 1965.
Sources:
Green, Carol Hurd, ed. Notable American Women: The Modern Period.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 19--, 535-539.
Martin, George. Madam Secretary. New York: Putnam,
1976, passim.