Frances Perkins Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Frances Perkins was born in 1880 in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester in a New England family that kept close ties to coastal Maine. Curious and self-possessed from an early age, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1902, where exposure to science courses, economics, and reformist speakers helped set the trajectory of her life. The industrial conditions she studied were not abstractions: class trips to mills and lectures by advocates such as Florence Kelley impressed on her the human costs of unfettered industrial growth.

After college she worked in teaching and then in settlement-house settings, experiences that brought her face-to-face with crowded tenements, irregular employment, and workplace hazards. She pursued graduate study in economics and sociology at Columbia University, earning a master's degree and sharpening the statistical and policy tools that later defined her public career.

Social Reform Awakening
By the late 1900s Perkins had become a leading voice in the Consumers' League of New York, pressing for shorter hours and safer conditions, particularly for women and children. Time in Chicago and Philadelphia settlement circles deepened her reform commitments; she met and learned from activists such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, who insisted that durable reform required both moral urgency and legislative craft.

In 1911 she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, an inferno that killed 146 garment workers. The catastrophe galvanized her career. She threw her energy into the subsequent Factory Investigating Commission, working closely with legislators Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner. The commission's work produced a raft of protections: fire-safety rules, limits on excessive hours, and standards for sanitation and building egress. Perkins's method, fact-finding, coalition-building, and relentless follow-through, became her hallmark.

New York State Service
Governor Al Smith appointed Perkins to the New York State Industrial Commission in 1918; she later became its chair. Under Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt she served as the state's Industrial Commissioner, running the Department of Labor. There she modernized factory inspections, expanded employment services, and helped design early unemployment relief mechanisms. She worked in tandem with allies such as Eleanor Roosevelt and with administrators like Harry Hopkins, refining policies that would later scale nationally during the New Deal.

Secretary of Labor and the New Deal
In 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt named Frances Perkins Secretary of Labor, making her the first woman to hold a U.S. Cabinet post. She accepted only after obtaining his assent to an ambitious program: minimum wages and maximum hours, unemployment insurance, old-age security, the abolition of child labor, and robust public works. Within the Department of Labor she strengthened the U.S. Employment Service and forged partnerships across the administration, collaborating with Harold L. Ickes on public works standards and with Harry Hopkins on work-relief initiatives.

Perkins's style emphasized practical administration backed by careful research. She defended the right to organize and supported passage of the National Labor Relations Act championed by Senator Robert F. Wagner, seeing collective bargaining as integral to higher wages and a more stable economy. At the same time she worked to build an institutional architecture for income security that would outlast the crisis.

Social Security and Labor Standards
Perkins chaired the Committee on Economic Security in 1934, 1935, coordinating a team that included Edwin Witte and Arthur Altmeyer to craft what became the Social Security Act of 1935. The law established old-age benefits, unemployment insurance, and grants to the states for vulnerable families, pillars of a national safety net that she envisioned as both humane and economically stabilizing. She then pressed for floor protections in the labor market, helping steer the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to enactment. That statute created a federal minimum wage, mandated overtime pay, and curbed oppressive child labor, culminating decades of work that began with the Consumers' League and the post-Triangle reforms.

Conflict and Resilience
Perkins's portfolio included immigration and naturalization, which drew her into politically charged cases. When she refused to deport West Coast labor leader Harry Bridges without sufficient legal grounds, opponents in Congress launched an impeachment attempt against her in 1939. She prevailed, and the episode underscored both the partisan headwinds she faced and her refusal to bend administrative law to political pressure. Throughout the 1930s and wartime 1940s she contended with skepticism from segments of business, some labor leaders wary of federal oversight, and persistent gender bias. Her calm presence, memorably framed by her tricorn hat and measured voice, helped her navigate hearings, press conferences, and Cabinet debates.

During World War II she worked with interagency partners to balance labor supply, training, and fair standards as millions entered defense industries, including unprecedented numbers of women. She advocated for childcare, safety, and equitable treatment, seeking to ensure that temporary wartime arrangements did not erode the core protections secured in the 1930s.

Later Career and Teaching
After Roosevelt's death in 1945, Perkins remained briefly in the Cabinet before President Harry S. Truman appointed her to the U.S. Civil Service Commission, where she served into the early 1950s and promoted merit-based federal employment. She wrote a memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew, offering an insider's account of the administration's deliberations and the personalities who shaped the era, from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt to colleagues such as Harold Ickes and Harry Hopkins.

In her final professional chapter she joined the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, teaching and mentoring students who would become labor mediators, public servants, and management professionals. She continued to lecture widely, returning often to Maine, where her family had long roots. Even in the classroom she drew on her administrative experience, connecting statutory language to on-the-ground enforcement.

Personal Life and Character
Perkins married Paul C. Wilson and they had one daughter, Susanna. She maintained the use of her birth name throughout her career, an unusual choice at the time that reflected both personal conviction and a practical recognition that her public identity preceded her. Friends and colleagues often remarked on her blend of reserve and empathy: she avoided grandstanding, listened carefully, and preferred institutional solutions to rhetorical victories. Those traits, shaped by settlement work and confirmed by years of governance, helped her convert moral commitments into workable policy.

Legacy
Frances Perkins died in 1965, leaving behind a transformed landscape of American labor and social policy. As the first woman to sit in a U.S. Cabinet and as the principal architect behind Social Security and the Fair Labor Standards Act, she altered the expectations citizens held of government in times of crisis and in ordinary times alike. Her alliances with figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert F. Wagner, Arthur Altmeyer, and Edwin Witte illustrate both her collaborative approach and her strategic vision. The U.S. Department of Labor headquarters bears her name, an institutional reminder that the protections many workers take for granted, safer workplaces, a minimum wage, overtime pay, and the foundation of Social Security, owe much to her persistence. In public memory and in the continued work of agencies she helped build, Perkins stands as a model of how patient, evidence-based administration can enlarge the sphere of human dignity.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Frances, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Leadership - Equality - Servant Leadership.