Perkins, Frances, 1880-1965

Frances Perkins (born Fannie Coralie Perkins; April 10, 1880 – May 14, 1965) was an American sociologist and workers-rights advocate who served as the U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest serving in that position, and the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet. As a loyal supporter of her friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), she helped pull the labor movement into the New Deal coalition. She and Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes were the only original members of the Roosevelt cabinet to remain in office for his entire presidency.

Perkins graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1902 and for some years taught school and served as a social worker. She worked briefly with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago and then resumed her studies, first at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania and then at Columbia University, where she took an M.A. in social economics in 1910. From that year until 1912 she was executive secretary of the Consumers’ League of New York. In that position she lobbied successfully for improved wages and working conditions, especially for women and children. From 1912 to 1917 she was executive secretary of the New York Committee on Safety and from 1917 to 1919 executive director of the New York Council of Organization for War Service. She was appointed in 1919 to New York’s State Industrial Commission by Governor Alfred E. Smith, and in 1923 she was named to the State Industrial Board, of which she became chairman in 1926. Smith’s successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed Perkins state industrial commissioner in 1929. She was, both before and after the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a strong advocate of unemployment insurance and close government supervision of fiscal policy.

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