Frances Perkins was born in Boston in 1880. After graduating from Mount Holyoke College, she worked as a social worker in Worcester and a teacher in Chicago. Perkins was deeply influenced by the writings of investigative journalists such as Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Jacob A. Riis and Upton Sinclair. While in Chicago she became involved in Hull House, a settlement house founded by Jane Addams. Later she moved to Philadelphia where she worked with immigrant girls.
Perkins earned a master's degree at Columbia University in 1910 before becoming the executive secretary of the National Consumer's League. This work brought her into contact with progressive politicians in New York such as Robert Wagner and Alfred Smith. In 1919, Smith, the new governor of New York, appointed Perkins to the Industrial Board. She became chairman of the board in 1924 and while in this post she managed to obtain a reduction in the working week for women to 54 hours. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became governor of New York in 1929, he appointed Perkins as his Industrial Commissioner. The former governor, Alfred Smith, warned against this as he argued that "men will take advice from a woman, but it is hard for them to take orders from a woman." In 1933 President Roosevelt selected Perkins as his Secretary of Labor. She therefore became the first woman in American history to hold a Cabinet post. As she revealed later, her first proposals included: "immediate federal aid to the states for direct unemployment relief, an extensive program of public works, a study and an approach to the establishment by federal law of minimum wages, maximum hours, true unemployment and old-age insurance, abolition of child labor, and the creation of a federal employment service." Although it was a very radical program, Roosevelt accepted it with enthusiasm. Perkins was a strong advocate of government involvement in the economy and played an important role in many aspects of the New Deal including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Social Security Act. In June 1938, Perkins managed to persuade Congress to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act. The main objective of the act was to eliminate "labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, efficiency and well-being of workers". The act established maximum working hours of 44 a week for the first year, 42 for the second, and 40 thereafter. Minimum wages of 25 cents an hour were established for the first year, 30 cents for the second, and 40 cents over a period of the next six years. The Fair Labor Standards Act also prohibited child labor in all industries engaged in producing goods in interstate commerce and placed a limitation of the labor of boys and girls between 16 and 18 years of age in hazardous occupations.
Perkins remained as Secretary of Labor until the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 when President Harry Truman appointed her to the United States Civil Service Commission. After leaving office in 1953 she taught at Cornell University. Frances Perkins died in New York on May 14, 1965.
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