US Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins

US Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins

This article relates to Becoming Madam Secretary

Becoming Madam Secretary by Stephanie Dray narrates the life of Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the first woman to serve in the US Cabinet. Perkins was a tireless supporter of workers' rights and is credited with drafting and lobbying support for some of the most critical parts of the New Deal.

Frances Perkins was born in Boston in 1880 and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. She attended college at Mount Holyoke where she studied economic history and was inspired by Jacob Riis's account of life in New York City's slums, How the Other Half Lives. She toured factories and interviewed workers to get a sense of the conditions and the issues that mattered to them. From Mount Holyoke, Perkins moved on to Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at University of Pennsylvania, and then Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in economics and sociology.

After acquiring her degree in 1910, Perkins worked with social reformer Florence Kelley as the Secretary of the New York Consumers' League, advocating for the abolition of child labor and a shorter work week. She also became involved in the movement for women's suffrage at this time, taking part in marches and giving speeches on street corners to drum up support. In 1911, Perkins witnessed the chaos of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a horrifying event that radicalized her on the need for worker protections and rights.

Perkins married Paul Wilson, an economist with the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, in 1913, and the couple had a daughter shortly thereafter. Perkins began working for the New York State Industrial Commission in 1918 at the behest of Governor Al Smith, and when Franklin Delano Roosevelt succeeded Smith as governor, he made Perkins Industrial Commissioner of New York. After the stock market crash in 1929, Roosevelt appointed Perkins to head up a committee on unemployment.

When Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, he asked Perkins to be his Secretary of Labor; a scene Dray writes into the prologue of her novel to capture the reader's attention. Perkins served from 1933-1945, which remains the longest term served by a Secretary of Labor. Her achievements include the Wagner Act, which protects workers' rights to form unions and engage in union activities such as collective bargaining and striking, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which created a minimum wage, established guaranteed time-and-a-half for overtime, and eliminated "oppressive child labor." Perhaps most significantly, Perkins chaired the Committee on Economic Security in 1934, which drafted the set of policies that would become the Social Security Act (SSA). The SSA established a pension fund for retirees as well as funds to assist low-income elders.

Perkins went on to travel as a delegate to the International Labor Organization Conference in Paris in 1945, and to work in the Civil Service Commission under President Truman. She died in 1965 at age 85.

Frances Perkins on the cover of Time, 1933, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to Becoming Madam Secretary. It originally ran in April 2024 and has been updated for the March 2024 edition. Go to magazine.