Today, 69 million Americans receive Social Security payments of some kind, but few people know the name of Frances Perkins, the first female Cabinet secretary in U.S. history. The groundbreaking labor secretary paved the way for the women who came after her, including the record number President Biden has chosen for his Cabinet: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Deb Haaland, expected to be confirmed as interior secretary, among others.
During FDR’s first 100 days in the White House in 1933, Perkins was the force behind so many pillars of his program to combat the Great Depression that some called it “the Perkins New Deal.”
And, of course, she was attacked, with one journalist calling her “the first woman to be a president’s henchman.”
She’d already served as New York state’s labor chief during Roosevelt’s years as governor. The 52-year-old Perkins came prepared with scribbled demands when the president-elect interviewed her for a Cabinet post.
Roosevelt’s New Deal was just “a happy phrase he had coined during the campaign,” Perkins wrote later. But she had a vision for what it could be: a public works initiative to put people back to work, a minimum wage, old-age insurance and an end to child labor.
“The program received Roosevelt’s hearty endorsement, and he told me he wanted me to carry it out,” Perkins wrote.
Labor leaders opposed her nomination. The leader of a seamen’s union grumbled, “I guess us sailors, as well as bricklayers and miners, better get a powder puff and lipstick to march in the inaugural parade.”
Newspapers described Perkins in ways never used with male Cabinet members. “She is 5 feet 5 and weighs 150 pounds. Her eyes are brown and expressive,” one columnist wrote “She sleeps in a twin bed and wears an old fashioned nightgown. She kicks the blankets off her.”
The biggest controversy was that Perkins went by her maiden name. “She is really Mrs. Paul Wilson,” but she uses “her maiden name in public life,” the Oakland Tribune scolded. In 1933, married female federal employees had to use their husband’s names on their paychecks.
At this point, Perkins’s husband, Paul Caldwell Wilson, was in a mental institution. She had been living with Mary Harriman Rumsey, a widow and the daughter of railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman. Rumsey founded the Junior League to help the poor and a magazine that later became Newsweek. In Washington, Perkins and Rumsey were “roomies” in a large house in Georgetown.
Although it wasn’t widely known at the time, the first female Cabinet secretary was also was the first LGBT Cabinet secretary.