(It’s Women’s History Month, and I offer you this essay I wrote for Michigan Conference newsletter. Meet Frances Perkins...)
In a book review in Flint’s East Village Magazine, Frances Perkins was quoted having a fight with the head of General Motors, which made me a fan even before I knew anything else. “You are a scoundrel and a skunk,” she told Alfred Sloan in 1937. “You’ll go to hell when you die if you do things like that.”
I don’t even know what “things like that” she meant, but we live in capitalist, corporate America, so I can imagine, and I can also imagine she would as easily say the same to Manny “I own the bridge to Canada” Moroun or Dan Gilbert, both homegrown Michigan billionaire opportunists.
So, I learned some things about Ms. Perkins and the contributions she made to the common good, our good.
Born in 1880 in Massachusetts, Perkins was the non-pretty daughter, taught by her mother to dress for something other than allure and to wear tri-corner hats to balance the face her mother said was poorly proportioned. She wore those hats all her life, as she broke barriers one after another. She studied economics at The Wharton School (making better grades than someone else we know). She worked with Jane Addams at Hull-House in Chicago, before making her way to New York for a master’s degree at Columbia.
Perkins was accidental witness to the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City in 1911, which killed 146 people, mostly young women and girls locked into the building to prevent them from taking unauthorized breaks. She was 30 years old; the sight of the inferno and its victims changed her, became an impetus for her life’s work.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, Perkins pushed N.Y. Gov. Franklin Roosevelt to do something. He created a committee on employment, and appointed Perkins to be lead it. Later, when FDR was elected president, Perkins joined his administration as Secretary of Labor.
Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, worker safety, unemployment insurance, the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, a restrictions on child labor. The Civilian Conservation Corps. The Works Progress Administration. The Bureau of Labor Standards. The National Labor Relations Act. Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation. The International Labor Organization. The right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. These are things we owe to her. The Immigration Service was within the DOL then, so Perkins was in charge of that, too. She maneuvered around existing quota regulations to aid refugees and restricted deportations to Hitler’s Germany. When the Nazis began their “cleansing” campaign, she stepped up, though the U.S. officially stayed out. By 1937, her efforts “admitted 50,255 immigrants for permanent residency, two-thirds of whom were Jews and 231,884 foreign ‘visitors’” (Downey 194).
But she was disliked by labor leaders — men who didn’t think women should have cabinet posts. She was disparaged as a communist sympathizer, as a radical leftist, and as a lesbian. Worth noting that Roosevelt did not defend her and kept other cabinet members quiet, too.
Nevertheless, she persisted. She cleaned up the labor department — corrupt, inefficient and unaccomplished. Many workers were terminated and some eventually went to jail. She cleaned literally, too. Cockroaches in the office were found to be the result of Black employees not allowed to use the department cafeteria. She ordered the cafeteria to be integrated.
Frances’ lifelong partner was Mary Harriman Rumsey, founder of The Junior League. They lived together in Washington D.C. as “roommates” known for their dinner parties (whose attendees included Eleanor Roosevelt). When Mary died suddenly in 1934, Frances lost her home — not uncommon for gay couples prior to, but even since, the Obergefell marriage decision. (Just because marriage is now legal doesn’t mean gay people are automatically free of social, political, economic or physical danger.) Francis had to relocate and could not grieve publicly the life and love she’d known. She channeled her grief into an all-night meeting with the Council on Economic Security, and presented Roosevelt a final Social Security proposal, adopted a month later.
Perkins died in 1965. In 1980, on her 100th birthday, the Department of Labor Building in DC (c 1934) was named the Frances Perkins Building.
Trivia: Michigan Senator Carl Levin was principal sponsor of the legislation to accomplish that.
So, to recap: a woman, a necessarily closeted lesbian who lost her home when her partner died, worked indefatigably for worker protections, but rarely gets mentioned, while men get credit.
The Equality Act has been passed by the House and is heading to the Senate where the GOP will surely block it. Almost 90 years later, we LGBTQ folks still lack the protections that nearly ruined Frances when Mary died. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttegieg may be the first “out” gay cabinet member, but that is only because previous LGBTQ cabinet members have had to serve in terrified silence.
(Note: the Equality Act is not the only thing: minimum wage, unemployment insurance, worker protections and organizing rights all seem perennially up for grabs, and are in the Senate’s hands right now).
First woman in the US Cabinet. Longest serving Secretary of Labor ever. The 4th longest serving cabinet secretary in US history. This is Women’s History Month. If we want to honor Frances Perkins, let’s pass the Equality Act, raise wages, protect labor and give immigrants and refugees some peace of mind.
The Baltimore Sun said in an editorial about Perkins, “A woman smarter than a man is something to get on guard about. But a woman smarter than a man and also not afraid of a man, well, good-night.”
Good night, indeed.
Sources
https://www.fdrlibrary.org/perkins
https://francesperkinscenter.org/
t.ly/1vCW
Kirstin Downey’s The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience (Random House, 2009).
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/great-depression/perkins-frances-the-roosevelt-years/
https://www.eriegaynews.com/news/article.php?recordid=201510francesperkins
https://365daysoflesbians.tumblr.com/post/158001468071/march-4-frances-perkins-becomes-the-us
https://carolyngage.weebly.com/blog/the-woman-behind-the-woman-behind-social-security
https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/frances-perkins