Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at some women who
are our faith fore-mothers. Some are famous, some are in the Bible, some are
almost forgotten. Jerome Blanco, writing for Life for Leaders notes, “From beginning to end, the Bible suggests
a straightforward and happy truth, that the
seemingly ordinary world we spend our days in is not marginal to God’s story,
but central to it…And this means everything to me, as I live out my
everyday life, most elements of which I can only consider ordinary. Because the collection of our ordinary lives, lived
out as creatures in the created world, are somehow what God deemed worth
making, worth taking part in, worth redeeming, and ultimately, worth dwelling
with.”
This week, in honor of Labor Day, we’re meeting Frances
Perkins. I recently heard about her and wanted to know more. In 1933, Franklin
D. Roosevelt appointed her as his Secretary of Labor. She was the first woman
to hold a cabinet position in the United States and remained the Secretary of
Labor for 12 years (longer than any other appointee). In that position she
helped with the creation of the New Deal and especially with Social Security.
She worked for laws setting minimum wage, pensions,
unemployment insurance and child labor laws. We are
all beneficiaries of that work. She was born Fannie Coralie Perkins in Boston
on April 10, 1880 and died in 1965. Her life is evidence that an ordinary
woman, doing ordinary things can have broad ramifications.
While at college at Mount Holyoke in South Hadley,
Massachusetts, Perkins majored in physics, and minored in chemistry and biology even though they were not the typical ‘feminine’ subjects of the time. Her focus changed during
her senior year when she took a course in American economic history from Annah
May Soule. All students were required to visit the mills in Holyoke,
Massachusetts.
Perkins was appalled at what she saw, and later said, “From
the time I was in college I was horrified at the work that many women and
children had to do in factories. There were absolutely no effective laws that
regulated the number of hours they were permitted to work. There were no
provisions which guarded their health nor adequately looked after their
compensation in case of injury. Those things seemed very wrong. I was young and was inspired with the idea
of reforming, or at least doing what I could, to help change those abuses.”
In 1910, as Executive Secretary of the New York City
Consumers League she focused on the need for sanitary regulations for bakeries,
fire protection for factories, and legislation to limit the working hours for
women and children in factories to 54 hours per week.
Perkins foresaw the Depression while working with, then
Governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt as NY State Industrial Commissioner. Rising
unemployment concerned her, “We have awakened with a shock to the frightful
injustice of economic conditions which will allow men and women who are willing
to work to suffer the distress of hunger and cold and humiliating dependence.
We have determined to find out what makes involuntary employment.”
When FDR was elected president, he appointed Perkins
Secretary of Labor. She noted, “I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common
workingmen.” After leaving the Department of Labor in 1945, Perkins wrote The Roosevelt I Knew, a best-selling
biography of FDR published in 1946. President Truman appointed her to the
United States Civil Service Commission. This was followed by a career of
teaching, writing and speaking until she suffered a stroke.
Perkins is our faith fore-mother not just because of the
important things she did, and also because she recognized “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 on the chair that was offered, and so establish
the right of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit I the high
seats.”
Frances Perkins is recognized by the Episcopal Church in Holy Women, Holy Men as a ‘saint’. Her
feast day in Mother’s Day. Perkins was
simply an ordinary woman who used her God-given gifts to improve life. She
listened to her heart and to God and made a difference.
Perkins reminds us, “There is always a large horizon…. There
is much to be done …. I am not going to be doing it! It is up to you to
contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”
What is God and your heart calling you to do?
Is there a small or large change you can make to brighten
the lives of others?
You can read more about Frances Perkins
