[This article appears in the May/June 2021 issue of Boston Spirit magazine.]
When President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan into law, FDR’s New Deal and the name Frances Perkins resounded for the many Americans grasping for an economic lifeline.
Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the first woman to serve as a cabinet secretary—and although it wasn’t widely known at the time, the first LGBT Cabinet secretary—is credited as the architect of the New Deal. During the Great Depression, the nation’s most catastrophic economic crisis, Perkins helped create the modern middle class with economic rescue programs including Social Security, unemployment benefits, the eight-hour work day, a federal minimum wage and child labor and workplace safety laws, among other reforms.
Born in Boston and raised in Worcester, Perkins also lived and vacationed at the family homestead in Newcastle, Maine. Her life and legacy are in no danger of being forgotten thanks to the Frances Perkins Center of Damariscotta, Maine, which opened to the public in 2012 and is currently open by appointment only until COVID-19 restrictions subside.
Last year, the Center purchased from Perkins’s grandson, Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, the 57-acre Perkins Homestead, designated a National Historic Landmark in 2014, in nearby Newcastle. The farmhouse and barn on the Damariscotta River are where the family operated a brickyard for most of the 19th century. After completing renovations and repairs, the homestead will open to the public as an educational and cultural center in spring 2022. Perkins, who died in 1965 at 85, is buried in a cemetery close to the home where she spent many summers and holidays throughout her life.
The Frances Perkins Center saw an uptick in interest and awareness about Perkins starting with “the economic downturn that the Obama administration dealt with and the rescue then, and continuing all the way to the pandemic and economic collapse last year,” says its executive director Michael Chaney. “If anyone asked Frances Perkins late in life what was her one true accomplishment, she always answered with two words: Social Security. For the person no longer able to work due to age, it created the ability to simply be able to feed themselves and pay their taxes so they could stay in their homes. Before [1935] when people got too old to work and there was no money coming it, they lost everything.”
Perkins’s construction of a social safety net made her the target of conservatives who derided her as a socialist and a communist and, in the sexist fashion that has hardly gone out of style, routinely criticized her looks, attire and manner. So it isn’t surprising that Perkins was discreet about her personal life. She married Paul Caldwell Wilson in 1913 and gave birth to a daughter but insisted on keeping her maiden name, which was rare for any woman, even a public figure, at the time. Wilson suffered from mental illness and was in and out of hospitals and institutions.
Perkins is now known to have had a secret lesbian relationship with Mary Harriman Rumsey, who founded the Junior League in 1901 to help the poor, from 1922 until Rumsey’s death in 1934 after she was thrown from a horse. Perkins later shared a home in Washington, DC with New York Congresswoman Caroline O’Day from 1937 to 1940. Their residence was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991. In 2015, Perkins was one of the Equality Forum’s icons for LGBT History Month.
Perkins’s personal life is documented in journalist Kirstin Downey’s acclaimed 2009 biography, “The Woman Behind the New Deal,” subtitled “The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience.” There is also the 2020 PBS film, “Summoned: Frances Perkins and the General Welfare,” available on the Frances Perkins Center website, that provides a comprehensive overview of her life and work.
Even before FDR tapped Perkins as his Labor Secretary, she had made her name advancing the Progressive movement’s labor and consumer reforms. Perkins’s labor advocacy and policy expertise began at Mount Holyoke College where she majored in physics, with minors in chemistry and biology. In a class on industrialism taught by historian Annah May Soule, students were required to visit the textile mills along the Connecticut River in neighboring Holyoke where women and children worked long hours in horrific conditions. After she got a teaching job in Chicago, Perkins volunteered alongside Jane Addams at Hull House, one of the oldest and best-known settlement houses in the country.
After earning her master’s degree from Columbia University, Perkins became executive secretary of the New York City Consumers League. It was while living in Greenwich Village in 1911 that Perkins happened to witness the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire that killed 146 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian women. That event marked the moment that Perkins became a tireless crusader for workers’ rights and workplace safety. She formed close alliances with three progressive New York governors: Theodore Roosevelt; Al Smith, who appointed her to the New York State Industrial Commission; and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who tapped Perkins as the state’s Industrial Commissioner, with oversight responsibilities for the entire labor department. When FDR was elected President, he asked Perkins to serve in his Cabinet as Secretary of Labor. She said she would do so only if she was allowed to pursue a list of policy priorities that included a 40-hour work week, a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker’s compensation, abolition of child labor, direct federal aid to the states for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized federal employment service and universal health insurance.
Roosevelt agreed, and Perkins set out to build a social system that would be her legacy and that millions of Americans rely upon to this day.
Visit francesperkinscenter.org.
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