Perkins, Frances (1880–1965), secretary of labor under President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, first woman cabinet member.Graduating from Mount Holyoke College in 1902, Frances Perkins received her M.S. in political science from Columbia University in 1910. She married the economist Paul Wilson in 1913 and had one child, a daughter.
Perkins began her career investigating factory conditions and later held labor posts under New York governors Alfred E.
Smith and Roosevelt. Upon his election as president in 1932, Roosevelt asked Perkins to be secretary of labor. She accepted on the condition that he support a host of reforms including
unemployment, old age, and health
insurance; a federal employment service; and the end of
child labor. She served as secretary of labor until 1945, throughout Roosevelt's entire administration. Thereafter, following six years as a member of the Civil Service Commission, Perkins turned to teaching, first briefly at the University of Illinois and then at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Perkins's accomplishments place her in the first rank of secretaries of labor. She founded the Division of Labor Standards, a precursor to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and she successfully fought for legislation to regulate wages and hours and to guarantee employees' right to organize. Most important, as chair of the 1935 Committee on Economic Security, Perkins was an engineer of the New Deal's social welfare legislation including
Social Security and unemployment insurance, which built the system of worker protection still in place.
See also
Federal Government, Executive Branch: Other Departments (Department of Labor);
New Deal Era, The.
Bibliography
Don Lawson , Frances Perkins: First Lady of the Cabinet, 1966.
Penny Coleman , A Woman Unafraid: The Achievements of Frances Perkins, 1993.
Deborah J. Anderson and and Francine D. Blau
