·PARA ≥PAR@ ` bTEXT ` TPerkins, Frances1882╨1965public officialBorn in Boston on April 10, 1882, Frances Perkins grew up and attended public schools in Worcester, Massachusetts. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1902 and for some years taught school and served as a social worker for the Episcopal church. She worked briefly with Jane Addams at Hull-House in Chicago and then resumed her studies, first at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania and then at Columbia University, where she took an M.A. in social economics in 1910. From that year until 1912 she was executive secretary of the Consumers╒ League of New York, for which, under its president, Maud Nathan, she directed studies of working conditions and hours and of female and child labor. She led the lobbying efforts that resulted in state legislation on factory safety standards in 1911 and on hours and wages in 1913. From 1912 to 1917 she was executive secretary of the New York Committee on Safety and from 1917 to 1919 executive director of the New York Council of Organization for War Service. She was appointed in 1919 to New York╒s State Industrial Commission by Governor Alfred E. Smith, and in 1923 she was named to the State Industrial Board, of which she became chairman in 1926. Smith╒s successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed her state industrial commissioner in 1929. She was, both before and after the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a strong advocate of unemployment insurance and close government supervision of fiscal policy. When Roosevelt entered the presidency in 1933 he named Perkins secretary of labor, making her the first woman to serve in a cabinet position. After the initial controversy of her appointment died away she settled into a 12-year term of effective administration of her department. During that time the department╒s activities in social service and research and fair labor standards enforcement were greatly expanded. It was, on the other hand, pointed out that most of the New Deal╒s innovative and controversial programs bearing on labor were established either outside the Department of Labor or upon a semi-autonomous footing within. She thus had little to do with shaping or administering the National Recovery Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Wages and Hours Board, or the Walsh╨Healy Act. She was also of limited influence in settling the major labor disputes in the steel and auto industries that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. Nonetheless much of the bitter criticism heaped upon the New Deal devolved upon her, allowing her at the least to establish a reputation as one of the most unflappable members of the Roosevelt administration. In 1934 she published People at Work. She left the cabinet in June 1945. From 1946 to 1953 she was a member of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and in subsequent years she was a much sought-after lecturer on labor and industrial problems. The Roosevelt I Knew, a record of her association with the late president, was published in 1946. She died in New York City on May 14, 1965.Movie: From a 1933 newsreel. Nstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ , !I C !I ▐ N !I ¡ !I ▐ ╕ !I 5¬ !I
