The Heroine of the New Deal

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AP Photo Frances Perkins, FDR’s Labor secretary, was the first woman ever appointed to a Cabinet job and the chief architect of his New Deal. But an important new biography reveals that her remarkable accomplishments came with a high price.

As Frances Perkins got ready to her leave her post as secretary of Labor in 1945, she looked back to the moment she entered the Cabinet 13 years before. “I had, as you know, a program in mind,” she remarked mildly to her friend Felix Frankfurter. The understatement was typical. What she aimed for when she took over Labor in 1932 was: unemployment insurance, protection against indigence in old age, work relief for the jobless, the abolition of child labor, the 40-hour week and the minimum wage. In the next few years, those would translate into: Social Security, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Fair Labor Standards Act. “Everything except health insurance, dear Felix,” she concluded. Oh well.

Perkins was the first woman ever to be appointed to a Cabinet job, and although more followed, there would be no woman so central to policy-making for more than 40 years, until Madeline Albright became Bill Clinton’s secretary of State. Born in 1880, Perkins was a part of a generation of educated women trained by feminist causes, urban reform, and the progressive movement to make consequential public service their life’s work. No ladies’ charities for them: They wanted to push through laws, tough policies and regulations, and take a hand in the most serious affairs of their times. Perkins fulfilled these dreams, and more, but her accomplishments came with a high personal price, Kirstin Downey’s important biography, The Woman Behind the New Deal (Nan A. Talese), shows.

Like many women in public life, she aimed for an unremarkable life and remarkable achievements. Hers was a generation that spoke softly and wore little hats.

Perkins grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, in a middle-class family descended from old New England stock. There was enough money to send her to Mount Holyoke College, where she got one of the finest educations available to women. In 1902, Florence Kelley, a towering presence in progressive reform, gave a lecture on campus. Kelley, who had been with Jane Addams at Hull House, was organizing the Consumer’s League, dedicated to abolishing child labor and sweatshops. Kelley kindled in the young Perkins a passion to help the poor and after graduation, she embarked on a series of jobs that gave her a solid background in the issues: a new “scientific” charity in New York, a stay at Hull House in Chicago, an investigation of how “white slavery” in Philadelphia ensnared poor working girls. In 1909, she moved back to New York to head the Consumer’s League there, where she had enough influence to broker deals for workplace regulation between Tammany Hall Democrats, middle-class reformers, and New York legislators. Working her way up the social-services ladder to government commissions on labor, she added to her stable of female mentors powerful men like Al Smith and, eventually, Franklin Roosevelt.

The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. By Kirstin Downey. 480 pages. Nan A. Talese. $35. In 1913 she married Paul Wilson, a glamorous, wealthy comer in New York Democratic Party circles. In the feminist spirit of the times, they vowed theirs would be a modern partnership: Frances kept her own name and her job. The high hopes fizzled, but the two rallied around the baby, Susannah, born in 1915. At the same time, though, Paul was showing signs of mental instability which soon became full-blown manic depression. He could not work, and he was too ill for Frances to leave—or that’s how she saw it. Cut off by his family for his liberal politics, the husband she had nearly divorced became her dependent.

In 1928 Roosevelt, elected governor of New York, brought her to Albany to head the state industrial commission, where they developed a close working relationship and where, once the Depression hit, Frances began to institute her reform agenda. When he won the presidency, she was a natural for Labor secretary. President Roosevelt, temperamentally open to smart women and spurred by his wife, Eleanor, broke with ironclad all-male precedents to bring a number of them to Washington. In Congress, women’s numbers were pathetic, but in the executive branch, female economists, planners, and politicos got down to work. Perkins was by far the most heralded—800 people attended her sendoff dinner in New York and showered her with loving tributes. But as the most powerful woman in Washington, she was also the most isolated and exposed.