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Fannie Perkins was born on April 10, 1880. Her family lived in Maine, and they were solidly middle-class New Englanders: Protestant, patriotic. They valued hard work, strict behavior, and education. Fannie went to the public high school (a rather new concept) and then on to Mount Holyoke for college.

A Gradual Awakening

One lesson Fannie learned from her upbringing was that poor people were poor because they were lazy and immoral. If they would just work hard and behave well, they wouldn’t be poor anymore. This was not an uncommon attitude at the time (and nor is it gone now), but Mount Holyoke taught Fannie differently.

Though she majored in physics and chemistry, Fannie also took a course in economic history. Her teacher assigned them to visit various places of employment and interview the workers. Fannie also read a popular book called How the Other Half Lives. The author Jacob Riis had entered the New York tenements and photographed what he found.

Among his comments are such stunners as these:

“It is a known fact that men’s wages cannot fall below a limit upon which they can exist, but woman’s wages have no limit, since the paths of shame are always open to her. It is simply impossible for any woman to live without assistance on the low salary a saleswoman earns . . . It is inevitable that they must in many instances resort to evil.” (Riis, chapter 20)

And:

“A little girl, who received two dollars a week, made cash-sales amounting to $167 in a single day; yet for some trivial mistake the girl was fined sixty cents out of her two dollars” (Riis, chapter 20)

Those fines were the personal money of the foreman, so of course, he had reason to be looking for any possible offenses.

And in reference to some girls who had taken refuge in a charity home:

“I feel so much healthier since I got three square meals a day,” said a lodger in one of the Girls’ Homes. (Riis, chapter 20)

All of that is from just one chapter of the book, and Riis wrote 25 chapters, documenting sixteen hour work days, overcrowded and unsanitary housing, suicides, abandonment of babies because the mothers couldn’t afford to feed them, lack of access to medical care, far too much access to alcohol as the only possible comfort for an impossible situation, and on and on.

I’m not sure how this affected your average well-dressed and self-satisfied Mount Holyoke girl, but Fannie was electrified. Perhaps the poor were not poor because they were immoral, as she had been taught. It might possibly be the other way around.

Social Work and Reforms

Fannie graduated in 1902 and tried to get a job doing social work but that didn’t materialize, so she took a job teaching (Downey, 14). By 1904, Fannie was teaching in Chicago, where she reinvented herself. She gave up the name Fannie for Francis. She changed her religion from Congregationalist to Episcopalian. And she volunteered as much as she could at the Hull House (Downey, 16-18).

The Hull House was a highly successful experiment in social reform. Led by middle class, college-educated women, the goal was to live in solidarity with immigrant communities and provide services. They ran kindergarten, day care, an employment bureau, libraries, English and citizenship courses, classes in the arts, public health, playgrounds, public housing, unions, and lobbying to end child labor and other abuses of capitalism (Jane Addams).

Frances loved the Hull House so much, she wanted to do the work full-time, but it wasn’t a paying gig, and she needed a job herself. Finally, in 1907, she landed the kind of job she wanted. She moved to Philadelphia where she was paid subsistence wages to figure out how to disrupt the pimps who met newly arrived immigrant girls, promised them help, and then took them to a brothel that most of them never escaped. Frances didn’t tell her parents what her job entailed. They would have been horrified (Downey, 21-22).

Entry to Politics

Frances loved this work, but she was beginning to realize that the problems were baked into the system. The obvious fixes often backfired. She needed to know more. In 1910, she graduated from Columbia with a masters in political science (Downey, 25).

The same year, the National Consumers League hired her to lead their New York office. The League was a lobbying group who tried to get consumers to buy only from manufacturers who paid their workers at least $8 a week for workdays that were no longer than 12 hours (Downey, 29). This was about as effective as you might expect. So not much progress. It took a tragedy to jolt the middle class into caring.

On March 25, 1911, Frances was having tea with a friend when they heard a commotion outside. Across the square was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where immigrant girls on the 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th floors worked 14-hr days for $2 a day, and they had to pay for their own needles, thread, and electricity. There were no bathroom breaks or water breaks, and the foreman kept the doors locked so he could inspect their hand bags for stolen goods before they left. These girls had already staged a strike and won very slight concessions, but they were still locked in when the place went up in flames.

Thousands of onlookers, Frances included, watched in horror as the fire brigade showed up with ladders that weren’t tall enough. Panicked girls jumped out the windows and fell to their deaths. The one and only fire escape collapsed under their weight. 146 people died, most of them teenage girls. The fire brigade had to lower their charred remains by block and tackle, so desperate families could try to identify their daughters (American Experience).

Frances, age 31, took this as a personal call to action. The capitalist barons had already had their chance to fix things before the fire. They blew it. The solution had to be political. She began cultivating political allies wherever she could find them. Even in the utterly corrupt political machine of Tammany Hall. She accepted compromises that idealists urged her to reject because it didn’t do enough. She said progress for some was better than progress for none, and she got a 54-hour work week bill passed (Downey, 40-43). Still too many hours, but better than nothing.

People were impressed. Frances was appointed head of a committee on fire safety. Within two years, New York had laws on no smoking on the factory floors, regular fire drills, automatic sprinklers, fire escapes, occupancy limits, multiple exits, washing facilities, clean drinking water. Manufacturers grumbled, but public opinion was against them now. No one wanted to watch girls jump out of a tenth story window ever again (Downey, 50-52).

A Wife and Mother

In her spare time, Frances got married. She was considered an old maid, so it was something of a surprise, even to her. She married Paul Wilson, a financial statistician, with inherited money. She moved into a nice home with servants. According to the norms of the time, this should have meant changing her name and quitting her job. Frances kept both.

Though she believed in her job, Frances still hoped for a brood of children. She was getting started a little late by the standards of the day (age 35), and sadly, she had miscarriage and then a stillbirth. So it was a joy and a delight when Susanna Perkins Wilson was born on December 30, 1916 (Downey, 68).

With a child to care for, Frances did intend to make motherhood her full-time job and do charity work on the side, just the way society expected. But charity work just could not be kept on the side. She was very quickly deeply involved in an organization that provided support to new mothers and babies.

In 1918, Frances helped a friend named Al Smith in his campaign for governor of New York state. After he won, Smith asked her to take a job on the State Industrial Commission. It was unheard of for a woman to get such a job, but he ran over everyone’s objections, including hers. Frances took the job and spent years mediating strikes. Both Labor leaders and business owners initially viewed her with suspicion, but gradually came around because she listened. She was fair. She made things better.

What most of these people never knew was that Frances had trouble at home. Paul’s behavior had become frightening and erratic. He could no longer work himself, and he had spent all of his inheritance. He had what we would call bipolar disorder. Frances struggled to get him to accept treatment and also to pay for it (Downey, 71-73). Frances was the breadwinner of the family for the rest of her life.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

In 1928, Al Smith ran for president of the United States. He lost. But the new governor of New York was named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he gave Frances a promotion. She was now head of the State Industrial Commission. Hundreds of employees reported to her (Downey, 96).

Frances had first met FDR in 1910. She said “there was nothing particularly interesting” about him (Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, 9). She knew him later as a state Senator who had “little, if any, concern about specific social reforms” (Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, 10)

In fact, FDR was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and “he really didn’t like people very much… he had a youthful lack of humility, a streak of self-righteousness, and a deafness to the hopes, fears, and aspirations which are the common lot” (Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, 12).

In 1921, at the age of 39, FDR got polio, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. He never walked again, though he had some ingenious methods of appearing to walk (Berish).

The experience left him changed, and a whole lot nicer. At his lowest moment, he had assumed his career was over because who would vote for a cripple? His wife Eleanor and Al Smith convinced him to try anyway, but he now knew what it was to have your hopes and dreams crushed because of one stroke of bad luck. He was a lot more sympathetic to people who were on the down and out.

Also, Frances commented drily, he was forced to listen to these people. As a state Senator, he had walked away from anyone he found boring. “Now he could not walk away when he was bored” (Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, 44). People found him a captive audience, and he found that they had grievances that were genuine, even if they didn’t express themselves well. Also, they were perfectly willing to vote for someone with a disability.

The Stock Market Crash

In 1929, less than a year after the election, the stock market crashed. People lost their jobs and their savings. They couldn’t pay their mortgages, so they lost their homes. In some cases, they couldn’t afford food or health care.

Frances had been fighting on behalf of people in those situations for two decades, but the middle class had always had the luxury of ignoring her because they were doing just fine, thank you very much. Now they were not. She pushed FDR to set up a state employment office to help people find jobs. She organized work-sharing arrangements where two people could both get something out of one position. She called for unemployment insurance, so people could have a little income even if they lost their jobs (Downey, 109).

She was also fierce about honesty. When President Herbert Hoover announced a 4% increase in hiring, he was misusing statistics to deceive people. She called the news services to tell them so. Afterwards it occurred to her that she should probably have asked her boss before publicly sparring with the president of the United States on the national media. FDR just said “Bully for you!” After that reporters called her for comment every time Hoover made a statement on the subject (Downey, 111-112; Perkins, Roosevelt I Knew, 96).

The Depression was getting worse, not better. Hoover was either unwilling or unable to do anything, and unsurprisingly, he didn’t win reelection in 1932. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did.

A Call to the Cabinet

None of the 31 presidents before FDR had ever appointed a woman to a cabinet position. But he needed a Secretary of Labor, and clearly the best man for the job was a woman. It was Frances who wasn’t so sure about all this. She liked living in New York, and so did Susanna, now a teenager. Paul was back in the hospital (Downey, 118), and the last thing any of them needed was publicity or scrutiny on a national level.

Anyway, Frances doubted whether she could get anything done as Secretary of Labor. The Supreme Court had a track record of saying it was illegal for the federal government to prohibit child labor, or set a minimum wage, or limit work hours to a mere 10 hours a day. To those of you who find this unfathomable, please remember that the traditional role of government was defense, and maybe to deliver the mail. Beyond that, Americans had (and have) a long and dubious history of telling elected leaders that you can’t tell me what to do, even when government has a really good idea, and posterity is grateful they pushed it through.

So when FDR asked Frances to take the job, she was prepared with an agenda. Because if he wasn’t going to back her up, there was no point. She might as well stay in New York and take her chances with the next governor. Frances told FDR the entire Labor Department needed an overhaul. It was corrupt and ineffective and 73% of its budget was taken by Immigration, which shouldn’t be part of Labor at all. She said unemployment was crushing the people. They needed general relief, and they also needed public works to employ them. Child labor was unacceptable for more than one reason. The workday for adults should be eight hours. A minimum wage was a must. Workers needed compensation if they were injured on the job, and by the way, workplaces ought to be safe in the first place. Unemployment insurance should be mandatory, and it should pay benefits to those who were too old to work, but also to those who had a disability that prevented them from working. Health insurance should also be universal, also for more than one reason.

FDR had multiple concerns about all this, but Frances did not back off. She said, “You won’t want me for Secretary of Labor if you don’t want these things done” (Downey, 123).

So he agreed. The people had elected him to improve their lives. This was how he planned to do it. Frances cried all night when she realized she had the job and the responsibility. But she was there on inauguration day to hear FDR tell the American people that they had nothing to fear but fear itself (Roosevelt).

Madam Secretary

Frances’s first order of business was to chase out cockroaches. First, the literal ones that infested the Labor building. Cockroaches came because there were food crumbs. Food crumbs were there because African-American employees ate lunch at their desks. African-American employees did that because they weren’t allowed in the cafeteria. It was segregated. Frances listened to this and took the obvious step: she desegregated the cafeteria. Multiple problems solved.

The cockroaches in human guise were harder to deal with. Labor was in charge of immigration on the shaky theory that immigrants should be here to work, so all of their concerns were Labor’s business. Some department employees had a racket: find an immigrant, threaten him with deportation, let him off if he pays a fine, which the employee pockets for himself. Repeat at will. Frances told these people to clear out their desks immediately (Downey 141-142).

Within days of the inauguration, Frances had the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) up and running. In the nine years of its existence, the CCC employed over 2.5 million young men to build roads, fight fires, plant trees, control erosion, and many other types of manual labor. In return the men were given three meals a day and $30 per month, but—here was the genius—the majority of the pay went to their families back home (Speakman).

By six months into office, Frances had several other agencies up and running to create jobs for folks who couldn’t leave home to go out where the CCC was working. These agencies employed people for manual labor, but also as teachers, historians, artists, photographers, dancers, musicians, and actors. Frances also had an agency that refinanced home loans and another that gave loans for home improvement.

As you might imagine, organizing all this was no trivial matter. Frances worked from 9 am to midnight most days. Her chauffeur quit from over work (Downey, 162).

Where to live was also a problem. Being an effective Cabinet member required entertaining. But most Cabinet members had a wife to manage a beautiful home, the guest list, and the dinner menu. Paul Wilson certainly wasn’t going to fill that role. Working women everywhere will tell you that in fact running the home is a full-time job, and we can’t be expected to do everything all at once. Eventually, Frances was saved by a sequence of wealthy women, who were happy to open their homes to support the first female Cabinet member.

Meanwhile, Frances, FDR, and Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act, which gave workers the right to unionize, authorized industry codes for working standards, eliminated child labor, and authorized public works. It was huge, sweeping, and ultimately ruled unconstitutional. It was a defeat, but in the brief moment that it was the law of the land, it proved a very important point: yes, businesses can survive with a minimum wage and without child labor.

And Frances wasn’t done. The US had 6.5 million people over the age of 65 and most of them were desperate. Many had never earned enough money to save for retirement, and those who had saved had lost their savings in the crash. If they had family members to help, that was good, but when those working-age adults were also unemployed, the outlook was grim.

Frances said we should have unemployment insurance. If you’re working, you pay into the system, and then when you can’t work, either for age or health reasons, the system will help you. Many of you are saying yes, obviously, but at the time this was dangerous, radical, socialist, communist, outright theft, and I’m just giving you the nice words here.

However, it was also a time when everyone could look around their own community, even their own family, and see that unchecked capitalism was failing the elderly. Abysmally failing them. Something had to change.

So the Social Security Act passed in 1935, and it felt like a compromise because it had radical ideas like caring for the elderly and the disabled, but it did not have health insurance. Frances’s plan had called for that, but the American Medical Association was against it, so it got cut. It’s called compromise. Frances now had years of experience saying that it was better to get part of her program implemented than hold out for all of it and end up with none of it.

The bitter twist was that health insurance was the part that would have helped her personally. Paul still required a lot of expensive medical care. And it would soon turn out that Susanna did too. Frances was perpetually strapped for cash (Downey, 243).

As for labor laws, the NIRA was gone, but there’s more than one way to get things done. First, Frances pushed through a law that said the government would buy no goods made by workers without a minimum wage. There’s nothing unconstitutional about that. Next she nudged states to set minimum wage on a state level, which is more acceptable in the American system. Then certain Supreme Court Justices retired. She pushed again for federal law, and in 1938 the Fair Labor Standards Act passed Congress. It set a minimum wage, a 44-hour work week, and no child labor (Downey, 261-268). Like any great compromise, it left a lot to be desired, but those girls in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory would never have dreamed so high.

These were the issues Frances had come to Washington to fix. She did not want to be in charge of immigration, but she was. The 1930s was a time of comparatively low immigration because who wants to come to a place with no jobs? But increasingly, the answer to that was people fleeing the Nazis. Jobs weren’t top of mind for them.

Frances was working within quotas she didn’t set and couldn’t change, though she did ask the State department to change them. They said no, which is why the US is absolutely culpable for not admitting more refugees. For example, one family that couldn’t get an American visa was Anne Frank’s family (Helmore). But Frances did bend as many rules as she could. For example, she let people in on tourist visas, knowing full well they would overstay them. She also slashed the fee foreign students had to pay to qualify to come (Downey, 191-194). One set of visas she took a personal hand in were for “that nice Von Trapp family” (Downey, 287).

These efforts look pathetically small in retrospect, but they were more than any other US government official was doing at the time. Frances also refused to deport an immigrant accused of being a Communist spy. Her investigation said he was innocent, so she didn’t deport him, even though it made her enemies so angry they threatened to impeach her. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

Frances’s Legacy

By the election of 1940, Frances’s program was such a success that even the opposing party platform sounded like a continuation of her policies. No one wanted to scrap Social Security. Even today, it’s political suicide to suggest doing that. Of her initial agenda, the only item she had not achieved was health insurance. And I may add that no subsequent politician has succeeded in doing that in America either, but I’m not going to go into that. Frances was feeling like her work was done, which was fine because FDR had now completed the traditional two terms. No president in US history had ever served more than that. He was expected, though not legally required, to step down.

He didn’t. It was clear to many, including to FDR, that the next great crisis was on the horizon. FDR chose to run again, and he won, but Labor was not the biggest issue on his mind anymore. War was far more important, and that wasn’t Frances’s department. She asked to resign, thinking that her work in Washington was done. FDR wouldn’t accept her resignation. She continued to serve all the way until his death in 1945. His successor Truman did accept her resignation.

Frances spent her last years writing a book, working at the Civil Service Commission, and teaching at colleges. Ironically for someone who gave Americans Social Security, she still needed to work right through her seventies. She was supporting both Susanna and Paul for a very long while. She died on May 14, 1965.

Frances Perkins’s name is not very well known, even among Americans. She had a troubled relationship with the press, and she was very private, even when writing her own books. That’s primarily why she never became as big a name as, say, Eleanor Roosevelt, who was also the woman behind FDR. The programs Frances created have their issues in the present day, but for the most part, people are arguing about how to update them for a changing world, which is perfectly valid. They generally aren’t arguing for a return to the world of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. I for one am glad that I didn’t spend my childhood on a factory floor, glad that I sign off from my day job after eight hours of work, and glad that my relatives who collect Social Security are able to get that support. All of that credit goes to Frances.

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Selected Sources

American Experience. “Triangle Fire | American Experience | PBS.” http://www.pbs.org, January 30, 2018. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/triangle/#transcript.

Berish, Amy. “FDR and Polio – FDR Presidential Library & Museum.” Fdrlibrary.org. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, 2016. https://www.fdrlibrary.org/polio.

Downey, Kirstin. The Woman behind the New Deal : The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage. New York: Anchor Books, 2010.

Fdrlibrary.org. “Art of the New Deal – FDR Presidential Library & Museum,” 2016. https://www.fdrlibrary.org/art-detail.

Helmore, Edward. “Anne Frank’s Family Tried Escaping to US but Thwarted by ‘Bureaucracy’ – Report.” the Guardian. The Guardian, July 8, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/08/anne-frank-family-escape-us-visa-thwarted.

History.com Editors. “Artists of the New Deal.” HISTORY, September 13, 2017. https://www.history.com/articles/artists-of-the-new-deal.

Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. “History, Mission, and Values.” Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, 2014. https://www.hullhousemuseum.org/history-mission-and-values.

Perkins, Frances. The Roosevelt I Knew. Viking Press, 1946. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.185577/page/n55/mode/2up?view=theater&q=1928.

Riis, Jacob A. How the Other Half Lives : Studies among the Tenements. 1890. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Accessed May 13, 2025. https://www.historyonthenet.com/authentichistory/1898-1913/2-progressivism/2-riis/index.html.

Roosevelt, Franklin D. “First Inaugural Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Yale.edu, March 4, 1933. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp.

Speakman, Joseph. “Into the Woods: The First Year of the Civilian Conservation Corps.” National Archives, August 15, 2016. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/fall/ccc.html.