Frances
Perkins was born in Boston on 10th April,
1882. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College, she worked as a
social worker in Worcester and a teacher in Chicago. Perkins was deeply
influenced by the writings of investigative journalists such as Lincoln
Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Jacob
A. Riis and Upton Sinclair. While in
Chicago she became involved in Hull
House, a settlement house founded by Jane
Addams. Later she moved to Philadelphia,
where she worked with immigrant girls.
Perkins took a master's degree at Columbia University in 1910 before
becoming the executive secretary of the National
Consumer's League (NCL). This work also brought her into contact
with progressive politicians in New York such as Robert
Wagner and Alfred Smith. In 1919,
Smith, the new governor of New York, appointed Perkins to the Industrial
Board. She became chairman of the board in 1924 and while in this
post she managed to obtain a reduction in the working week for women
to 54 hours.
When Franklin D.
Roosevelt became governor of New York in 1929, he appointed Perkins
as his Industrial Commissioner. The former governor, Alfred
Smith, warned against this as he argued that "men will take
advice from a woman, but it is hard for them to take orders from a
woman."
In 1933 President Roosevelt selected Perkins as his Secretary of Labor.
She therefore became the first woman in American history to hold a
Cabinet post. As she revealed later, her first proposals included:
"immediate federal aid to the states for direct unemployment
relief, an extensive program of public works, a study and an approach
to the establishment by federal law of minimum wages, maximum hours,
true unemployment and old-age insurance, abolition of child
labour, and the creation of a federal employment service."
Although it was a very radical programme, Roosevelt accepted it with
enthusiasm.
Perkins was a strong advocate of government involvement in the economy
and played an important role in many aspects of the New
Deal including the Civilian Conservation
Corps, the National Labour Relations Act
and the Social Security Act.
In June, 1938 Perkins managed to persuade Congress to pass the Fair
Labor Standards Act. The main objective of the act was to eliminate
"labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum
standards of living necessary for health, efficiency and well-being
of workers".
The act established maximum working hours of 44 a week for the first
year, 42 for the second, and 40 thereafter. Minimum wages of 25 cents
an hour were established for the first year, 30 cents for the second,
and 40 cents over a period of the next six years. The Fair
Labor Standards Act also prohibited child
labour in all industries engaged in producing goods in inter-state
commerce and placed a limitation of the labor of boys and girls between
16 and 18 years of age in hazardous occupations.
Perkins remained as Secretary of Labor until the death of Franklin
D. Roosevelt in 1945. Her book, The
Roosevelt I Knew,
was published in 1946.
President Harry Truman,
appointed her to the United
States Civil Service Commission. After leaving office in 1953 she
taught at Cornell University. Frances Perkins died in New
York on 14th May 1965.
Rollin Kirby, Woman's
Journal (April, 1915)
(1)
Frances Perkins and Franklin Roosevelt,
like many people in the early 1900s in the United States, were greatly
influenced by the writings of investigative
journalists and social realist authors.
Roosevelt
derived not only from intellectual convictions, but also from a new
idealism and humanitarianism in which the economic and cultural aspirations
of the common man were beginning to play a part in the political program.
These concepts began to come alive in this country in the late nineties
and early 1900s and found expression in literature, poetry, drama,
and the graphic arts. The pity and terror of the slums, mills, and
work shops, with their low wages and long hours, were used for artistic
effect as in Greek tragedy.
The feelings and minds of people responded to the exposure of degraded
living and working conditions in The Jungle by Upton Sinclair,
Experiences as a Factory Girl by Mary Van Vorst, How the
Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis and Ernest Poole's novel of the
working class, The Harbor.
The muckraking magazine writers, like Will Irwin, Sam Merwin, Lincoln
Steffens, Ray Baker, startled the American people with documents of
American life that showed deep suffering, social injustice and indifference
to it in large areas of our population.
(2)
After leaving university Frances Perkins became a social worker and
political activist.
Proposals began to be made for laws to overcome social disadvantages.
Societies and voluntary agencies, aiming to prevent abuses and promote
remedies, sprang up. There was a sincere effort on the part of the
American people to find the way of social justice. Shorter hours and
better wages, removal of slums, new tenement house laws for sanitation,
fire safety, and decency; reforms to prevent child labour, prevention
of the use of hazardous chemicals in industry began to be mentioned
in political speeches and legislation in some states.
Foremost was the idea that poverty is preventable, that poverty is
destructive, wasteful, demoralizing, and that poverty in the midst
of potential plenty is morally unacceptable in a Christian and democratic
society. One began to see the "poor" as people, with hopes,
fears, virtues, and vices, as fellow citizens who were part of the
fabric of American life instead of as a depressed class who would
be always with us.
(3)
Alfred Smith warned Franklin
Roosevelt
about appointing Frances Perkins as Industrial Commissioner in 1929.
When
she is Commissioner she will have charge of administering the whole
Department of Labor - all the men who work as factory inspectors and
on the compensation boards. I have always thought
that, as a rule, men will take advice from a woman, but it is hard
for them to take orders from a woman.
(4)
In 1933 Franklin
Roosevelt
appointed Frances Perkins as his Secretary of Labour. Her first proposals
were extremely radical but were accepted by Roosevelt.
I proposed immediate federal aid to the states for direct unemployment
relief, an extensive program of public works, a study and an approach
to the establishment by federal law of minimum wages, maximum hours,
true unemployment and old-age insurance, abolition of child labour,
and the creation of a federal employment service.
(5)
Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (1946)
In
one of my conversations with the President in March 1933, he brought
up the idea that became the Civilian Conservation Corps. Roosevelt
loved trees and hated to see them cut and not replaced. It was natural
for him to wish to put large numbers of the unemployed to repairing
such devastation. His enthusiasm for this project, which was really
all his own, led him to some exaggeration of what could be accomplished.
He saw it big. He thought any man or boy would rejoice to leave the
city and work in the woods.
It was characteristic of him that he conceived the project, boldly
rushed it through, and happily left it to others to worry about the
details. And there were some difficult details. The attitude of the
trade unions had to be considered. They were disturbed about this
program, which they feared would put all workers under a "dollar
a day" regimentation merely because they were unemployed.
(6)
Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (1946)
It ought to be on the record that the President did not take part
in developing the National Labor Relations Act and, in fact, was hardly
consulted about it. It was not a part of the President's program.
It did not particularly appeal to him when it was described to him.
All the credit for it belongs to Wagner.
The proposed bill, it must be remembered, was remedial. Certain unfair
practices which employers had used against workers to prevent unionization
and to cripple their economic strength had been uncovered by Wagner.
The bill sought to correct these specific, known abuses, and did not
attempt to draw up a comprehensive code of ethical behaviour in labor
relations. Such a comprehensive code, however, was needed. Roosevelt
supported my suggestion that labor leaders who wanted to distinguish
themselves should draw up such a code and let us take a look at it.
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