Who is Frances Perkins- 1st Woman US Cabinet Member

By the time Perkins came to the Department of Labor in 1933, the economy had virtually collapsed. An estimated 13 million people were unemployed and hundreds of thousands had become homeless wanderers, in search of work. The nation's industrial production had fallen by 44 percent since 1929. Millions of farmers faced foreclosure. Banks were failing by the score. Local governments were running out of money for relief programs.

President Roosevelt's approach to the problem was both conservative and innovative. He surrounded himself with able, creative minds and set out on a flexible and humane program to get the country back on its feet.

Perkins was one of the most creative of FDR's counselors, and she had his ear. Like Roosevelt, she believed that government had a major role to play in regulating economic order, to promote social justice and human freedom.

The New Deal:
As Secretary of Labor, Ms. Perkins, successfully promoted many elements that became part of the New Deal, including direct relief for the unemployed, a public works program, minimum wage legislation, unemployment and old age insurance, abolition of child labor, and the establishment of a true federal employment service, as well as an agricultural recovery program that helped beleaguered farmers.

The Civil Works Administration and later the more extensive Works Progress Administration put millions of unemployed to work on activities ranging from road-building to painting murals on government buildings.

Social Security
Of all the New Deal reform and relief programs, the most important and durable was Social Security, and without Frances Perkins it might never have been enacted.

Long a proponent of public "old-age" insurance, Perkins had only accepted her post at the Labor Department on the condition that FDR would back her in seeking this goal. She led a campaign to convince the nation that a pension system would both be humanitarian and also help prevent future depressions. By 1935, public opinion was thoroughly in favor of the idea.

The Social Security Act passed in 1935 and provided direct aid for the destitute elderly and a pension program for many, but far from all, workers. It also provided federal funding for state-operated unemployment insurance programs, as well as aid for the handicapped and for mothers with dependent children.

Photo by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration-1936.

"The door might not be opened to a woman again for a long, long time, and I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered, and so establish the right of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit in the high seats."