Summary
Frances Perkins is no longer a household name, yet she was one of the most influential women of the twentieth century. Based on eight years of research, extensive archival materials, new documents, and exclusive access to Perkins's family members and friends, this biography is the first complete portrait of a devoted public servant with a passionate personal life, a mother who changed the landscape of American business and society.
Frances Perkins was named Secretary of Labor by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. As the first female cabinet secretary, she spearheaded the fight to improve the lives of America's working people while juggling her own complex family responsibilities. Perkins's ideas became the cornerstones of the most important social welfare and legislation in the nation's history, including unemployment compensation, child labor laws, and the forty-hour work week.
Arriving in Washington at the height of the Great Depression, Perkins pushed for massive public works projects that created millions of jobs for unemployed workers. She breathed life back into the nation's labor movement, boosting living standards across the country. As head of the Immigration Service, she fought to bring European refugees to safety in the United States. Her greatest triumph was creating Social Security.
Written with a wit that echoes Frances Perkins's own, award-winning journalist Kirstin Downey gives us a riveting exploration of how and why Perkins slipped into historical oblivion, and restores Perkins to her proper place in history.
Author Notes
KIRSTIN DOWNEY is a frequent contributor to The Washington Post , where she was a staff writer from 1988 to 2008, winning press association awards for her business and economic reporting. She shared in the 2008 Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Post staff for its coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. In 2000, she was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Publisher's Weekly Review
No individual--not even Eleanor Roosevelt--exerted more influence over the formulation of FDR's New Deal or did more to implement the programs than Frances Perkins (1880-1965). As former Washington Post staff writer Downey makes plain in this deeply researched biography, the first female Cabinet member was the primary shaper of such new concepts as unemployment insurance, the 40-hour work week and--last but not least--Social Security. At a time when the United States stands at the brink of another economic meltdown calling for sweeping federal interventions, Downey provides not only a superb rendering of history but also a large dose of inspiration drawn from Perkins's clearheaded, decisive work with FDR to solve urgent problems diligently and to succeed in the face of what seemed insurmountable odds. Confronting family issues--a frequently institutionalized husband with severe psychiatric problems; a deeply secret lesbian relationship with Mary Harriman Rumsey (sister of Averell Harriman); a daughter from whom she was often estranged--Perkins nevertheless exhibited tireless grace under pressure again and again, always rising to the occasion in the name of every and any progressive cause. (Mar. 3) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Much of the social reform that has made President Franklin D. Roosevelt so beloved Social Security, fair labor practices, minimum wage were actually ideas conceived and pushed by his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet member and a woman constrained by the sexism of the era as well as her personal circumstances. Drawing on extensive archival research, Downey offers a riveting portrait of a determined social reformer who pushed a shrewd politician to make substantive changes in the American workplace. Early in her career as a social worker, Perkins witnessed the Triangle shirt factory fire that killed 146 workers. It was a pivotal point for her as she went on to lobby in Albany on behalf of workers, very consciously adopting a plain and dour look to remind the male legislators of their mothers and win more sympathy for her cause. Perkins was a politically savvy woman, able to adapt to Tammany Hall, New York Governor Al Smith, and, later, Governor Roosevelt, all along managing the boss's wife as well as the boss himself. As part of FDR's cabinet, she championed workers' rights through the Great Depression and World War II, helping to keep alive the International Labor Organization. As the nation struggles through its current economic crisis, this compelling biography is particularly timely.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2009 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Pultizer Prizewinning journalist Downey deconstructs the life of a passionate labor advocate who became the nation's first female Cabinet member. Frances Perkins (18801965) had clearly delineated goals: reasonable working hours and wages, fire safety, improved working conditions and the end of child labor. Displaying the fortitude and prescience that carried her through three decades of public service, she outlined these during her first meeting with FDR. After being named his Secretary of Labor, she went on to accomplish reform of unprecedented scope. The 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance and Social Security are but a few of her legacies; her storied relationship with FDR is another. Making excellent use of personal papers and of archival materials that include a 5,000-page oral history, Downey allows Perkins to narrate much of the text, giving new life to this often overlooked historical figure. FDR saw something special in Perkins, and his confidence and support helped her endure years of sexism from fellow Cabinet members and unwarranted criticism from the press. She developed keen insight into the process of successful lawmaking and established a deliberately staid work persona as a "plain, sturdy, dependable woman" that allowed her to exert authority and demand respect on her own terms. Married to a man institutionalized with mental illness, she kept her unhappy personal life out of the papers and away from Washington, stifling her emotions and dedicating herself fully to the country's problems. At times it seemed that FDR involved her in every major policy decision. Perkins essentially authored the New Deal; she handled immigration during the onset of World War II, bending rules to harbor German Jews; she worked to establish fair hearings against suspected communists. Her entire career was devoted to the principals she espoused in 1913: "It is human life and happiness which we are trying to savethis is the most important thing." As a progressive president again takes office in a time of economic crisis, Perkins offers a vital role model. Fascinating, if academic portrayal of an inspiring legislator and reformer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The public recognition of historical figures ebbs and flows, not least for women who succeeded during times of rampant sexism; often, their popularity dwindles once interest has died down. With issues of sexism rising again, women who broke glass ceilings are now being reconsidered. Take Frances Perkins, one of FDR's confidants and the first female secretary of labor in U.S. history. In the late 1970s, a handful of Perkins biographies appeared, most notably George Martin's Madam Secretary, and now we have Downey's adept psychobiography. Like many biographers, Downey (Washington Post) is enamored of her subject. But her fascination serves her well, allowing her to construct an intriguing catalog of Perkins's achievements and explore the influences that held sway in her life, a psychological approach lacking in previous Perkins biographies. Here Perkins's triumphs and tragedies are compiled into a compelling narrative that never loses its scholarly touch. Recommended for larger public libraries and academic libraries.-Suzan Alteri, Wayne State Univ. Lib., Detroit (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Childhood and Youth Fannie Coralie Perkins knew by the age of ten that she would never be a conventional beauty, that unlike many women of her day she could not rely on physical attractiveness to open doors to her future. Her mother, Susan Bean Perkins, delivered the message when she took her daughter shopping for a hat. It was 1890, and the day's fashionable hats were slim and narrow, festooned with colorful ribbons and topped with flowers and feathers that added inches to a woman's height. Susan Perkins passed by the pretty hats and pointed instead to a simple three-cornered tricorn style, similar to the ones worn by Revolutionary War soldiers. "There, my dear, that is your hat," she told the girl in a matter-of-fact way. "You should always wear a hat something like this. You have a very broad face. It's broader between the two cheekbones than it is up at the top. Your head is narrower above the temples than it is at the cheek bones. Also, it lops off very suddenly into your chin. The result is you always need to have as much width in your hat as you have width in your cheek bones. Never let yourself get a hat that is narrower than your cheekbones, because it makes you look ridiculous."1 The hat would come to symbolize the plain, sturdy, and dependable woman who became Frances Perkins, and the mother's blunt advice to an awkward young girl left a lasting impression. From her earliest days, Fannie felt strangely out of step with the women of her time, her mother and sister included. She realized that rather than beauty, she must find other qualities and skills to set her apart, to help her achieve her idealistic goals. The dour-looking figure in the tricornered hat-the image seen throughout the years in filmstrips and photographs--disguised a woman whose intelligence, compassion, creative genius, and fierce loyalty made her an exceptional figure in modern American history. Her mother's verdict on her looks, seared in memory for life, almost certainly overstated the case, for pictures from the time depict a child romantic in appearance, with long curls and a thoughtful look. Still it became fact that when people spoke of Frances Perkins, they almost always spoke of her character, not her outward appearance. Fannie Perkins was born on April 10, 1880, on Beacon Hill, a few blocks from Boston Common, but her birthplace was almost a technicality. The place she considered home was where she spent her childhood summers, with her beloved grandmother at a homestead pioneered in the early 1700s by her great-great grandfather. It was perched on a sweeping bend of the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, Maine, at a site filled with historic debris grown over into green meadows, sprawling over hundreds of acres to a place known as Perkins Point. Frances played amid the rubble pile left from the old stockade, erected in the years when families defended themselves against Indian attacks, and among the remains of discarded, half-baked bricks, reminders of the family's riverfront brick-making factory, which had made the family wealthy for a short time. Perkins bricks had built many of the buildings in downtown Newcastle and as far away as Boston. The boom came in the 1840s. But the business failed a decade later after Boston financiers bought out the brick production of a number of local companies, including the Perkins operation, and merged them into a single corporation. The new business owners arranged for a large order from the Newcastle area to Halifax, Nova Scotia; the bricks were shipped, only to have the financiers disappear with the money. Every area brickyard went bankrupt. Afterward, all that remained of the once-prosperous Perkins business was the family home, built by their own hands, known as the Brick House.2 The family looked back at its glorious past while its present went to seed. By the 1870s, the decade before Fannie's birth, the f Excerpted from The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience by Kirstin Downey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
