Frances Perkins (1) (–1965)

Frances Perkins was born Fannie Coralie Perkins in Boston, Massachusetts. She grew up in Worcester and attended the Classical High School there. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1902 with a bachelor's degree in physics. She earned a master's degree in sociology and economics in 1910 from Columbia University, with a thesis on malnutrition among children in public school. Between degrees, she worked as a chemistry teacher at Ferry Hall School (now Lake Forest Academy) near Chicago, among other jobs. She also volunteered at settlement houses, including Chicago Commons and Hull House. In 1910, she was appointed head of the New York Consumers League and lobbied for better working hours and conditions. A key event in her life was witnessing the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City that killed more than 100 workers. She left the NY Consumers League and become executive secretary for the newly-established Committee on Safety of the City of New York. She went on hold various other positions in state government. In 1913, she married Paul Caldwell Wilson, an economist, with whom she had a daughter, but kept her birth name, which was unusual in those days. She became the sole support of her family when her husband was hospitalized frequently for mental illness. In 1929, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the newly-elected Governor of New York, appointed her to be the first Commissioner of the New York State Department of Labor, where she was in a position to help improve labor regulations and social programs. In 1933, after FDR was elected President of the United States, he named Frances Perkins the first woman Cabinet member as U.S. Secretary of Labor, a position she held through his four terms. She was largely responsible for the New Deal programs of Social Security, unemployment insurance, regulation of child labor, and the federal minimum wage. In 1945, she was appointed by President Truman to the U.S. Civil Service Commission. She wrote a memoir of her time in the FDR Administration called The Roosevelt I Knew (1946). She taught at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University until shortly before her death.