Frances Perkins, the First Woman in the Cabinet, and the List She Handed FDR

Early in 1933, a few weeks before he took office, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt asked Frances Perkins to be his secretary of labor, and she did something that people offered a Cabinet job rarely do. She said she would only take it on conditions. By her own account, she went to see him in New York with a list. It was a short catalogue of things the United States had never had: a federal limit on working hours, a minimum wage, a ban on child labor, unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, real federal relief for the jobless, a working national employment service, and health insurance. She told him that if she joined the government she would push for all of it, and she wanted to know whether he would back her. Roosevelt, she said, told her he would. She was fifty-two years old, a social worker and state official from New York whom many labor leaders openly resented because she was a woman and had never carried a union card. On March 4, 1933, she was sworn in as the first woman ever to serve in a president's Cabinet. The list is the best way to judge what she did with the next twelve years.

In short: Frances Perkins made her appointment conditional on a list of reforms, then spent twelve years as labor secretary turning most of it into law: relief, public works, a national employment service, unemployment and old-age insurance, a minimum wage, hours limits and a child labor ban. Two things stayed undone, national health insurance and full coverage for farm and domestic workers, and the second is a reminder that her wins came with compromises we are still paying for.

Who she was before the list

Perkins was born in Boston in 1880 and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, in a comfortable family. At Mount Holyoke College an economics course sent students to visit mills and factories, and she never quite came back from that field trip. She spent time at Hull House in Chicago, the settlement house run by Jane Addams, and then in New York she became the executive secretary of the city's Consumers' League, lobbying for limits on working hours.

On March 25, 1911, she was nearby when the Triangle Waist Company factory caught fire, and she watched workers jump from the upper floors. She went on to work as an investigator for the state commission that studied factory conditions after the fire, and to lobby in Albany for a law limiting the working week of women and minors. Governor Al Smith later appointed her to the state's Industrial Commission, and Governor Franklin Roosevelt made her New York's industrial commissioner, the head of the state's labor department, in 1929.

Her personal life gave her little shelter. She married the economist Paul Wilson in 1913 and kept her own name, which was unusual enough to cause gossip. Within a few years her husband developed a serious mental illness that would keep him in and out of hospitals for most of his life, and she became the family's sole support. She was a private person in public life, and she guarded both her husband and her daughter from the press.

When Roosevelt offered her the Labor Department, she knew both the politics and the plumbing of labor law. She knew which ideas had already worked in New York and other states, and which had been killed by courts. The list was not a wish list. It was a plan.

Item: relief and jobs for the unemployed

When she took office, roughly a quarter of the workforce was out of work, and states and charities had run out of money for relief. The first items on the list moved fastest.

In May 1933 Congress created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which sent federal money to states for direct aid. The Public Works Administration, set up the same year, funded roads, dams, schools and bridges. Perkins pushed hard for public works in the first weeks of the administration, arguing that federal spending on construction would put people to work faster than anything else. The Civilian Conservation Corps put young men to work in forests and parks, and her department handled their enrollment.

Verdict: won. These programs were imperfect and some were temporary, but the principle that the federal government had responsibility for mass unemployment was established within months.

Item: a real employment service

This one is unglamorous, which is probably why almost nobody remembers it. In June 1933 Roosevelt signed the Wagner-Peyser Act, which created the United States Employment Service, a federal-state network of public job offices. Before that, job seekers often depended on private agencies that charged fees and could be predatory. The system Perkins helped build still exists, in the form of the state job centers many readers have used.

Verdict: won, and it lasted.

Item: unemployment and old-age insurance

This is the item that made Perkins's reputation. In June 1934 Roosevelt created the Committee on Economic Security and made her its chair. Its job was to design a program to protect Americans against the two great hazards of a wage-earning life: losing your job and getting too old to work.

The constitutional question loomed over everything. The Supreme Court had already struck down federal laws regulating labor. Perkins later described a conversation at a social event in Washington with Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, who, when she mentioned her worry, told her that the federal government's taxing power was sufficient for everything she needed. She took the hint. The Social Security Act was built on taxes, a payroll tax for old-age insurance and a tax on employers that states could offset by creating their own unemployment insurance systems. When the Supreme Court considered those provisions in 1937, it upheld them.

Roosevelt signed the act on August 14, 1935. Perkins stood behind him in the photograph.

Verdict: won. But the victory was narrower than the bill she and her committee sent up. Congress, led by committee chairs from the South, cut farmworkers and domestic workers out of the old-age insurance program, along with other groups. Since most Black workers in the South at the time worked in those two occupations, the exclusion kept most of them out of the new system for years. That is the first asterisk on her record, and it belongs on any honest version of the checklist.

Item: a minimum wage, maximum hours and no child labor

This was the hardest item, and it took two tries.

The first attempt came through the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which let industries write codes of fair competition that often included minimum wages, maximum hours and bans on child labor. In May 1935 the Supreme Court struck down that system in the Schechter Poultry case. The Court had also ruled in earlier years that minimum wage laws for women violated freedom of contract, and in 1936 it struck down New York's minimum wage law on that ground.

Then the Court changed course. In 1937, in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, it upheld a Washington state minimum wage law. That opened the door. Perkins and her allies drafted what became the Fair Labor Standards Act, and they fought it through a Congress where southern members wanted lower wages for their region and business groups argued that a national wage floor would destroy jobs. Roosevelt signed it on June 25, 1938. It set a national minimum wage of twenty-five cents an hour, a maximum working week that dropped to forty hours over two years with overtime pay beyond that, and limits on child labor in most industries. In 1941 the Supreme Court upheld the law in United States v. Darby, overruling an older case that had struck down a federal child labor law.

Verdict: won, with gaps. Agricultural and domestic workers were again largely left out, the starting wage was low, and many industries were exempt. Later Congresses widened coverage, sometimes dramatically. But the basic architecture of wage and hour law in this country is still the one Perkins built.

Item: workers' compensation

Compensation for workplace injuries had been one of the earliest reform causes, and by 1933 most states already had some kind of program. Perkins pushed for stronger state laws and better standards rather than a federal system. By 1948 every state had a workers' compensation law.

Verdict: won, but in a patchwork. The quality of the protection you get depends to this day on which state you are hurt in.

Item: health insurance

Here the checklist has its blank. The Committee on Economic Security studied health insurance and wanted to include it. The American Medical Association attacked the idea fiercely, and Roosevelt's advisers feared that adding health insurance would sink the whole Social Security bill. It was dropped. Later attempts in the 1940s, including President Truman's plan for national health insurance, also failed.

Frances Perkins died in New York on May 14, 1965, after years teaching at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Two and a half months later, on July 30, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the law creating Medicare and Medicaid, the closest the country has come to the item she never crossed off. Coverage for everyone is still not law.

Verdict: never, in her lifetime. Partly, after.

Off the list: the right to organize

One striking thing about Perkins's list is what it did not include. Union rights were not on it. She was a believer in labour standards set by law, minimum wages and maximum hours that would protect every worker whether or not a union represented them, and she was at first cautious about making the federal government the referee of collective bargaining. The driving force behind the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was Senator Robert Wagner, her old colleague from the New York factory commission, not the Labor Department.

Once the law passed, though, she spent much of her time living with its consequences. The great organizing wave of the mid-1930s brought sit-down strikes, the most famous of them at General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, in the winter of 1936 and 1937. Perkins pressed the company's leaders to negotiate rather than demand that the strikers be removed by force, and Roosevelt declined to send federal troops. In February 1937 General Motors agreed to recognize the United Auto Workers. Business leaders never forgave her for refusing to take their side, and some of the fury that later produced an impeachment resolution against her had its roots in that winter.

The difference between the list and the union law is worth noticing. Perkins thought the state's job was to set a floor for everyone. Wagner thought the state's job was to give workers the power to bargain for more than the floor. Both ideas became law in the same decade, and they have needed each other ever since: the floor protects those who are not organized, and organizing is how the floor gets raised.

The case her critics made

Her opponents in the 1930s made arguments that are still heard. Business groups said a federal minimum wage would kill jobs, especially in poorer regions, and that hours limits would make American industry uncompetitive. Some economists argued that a new payroll tax, collected before benefits began, pulled money out of a weak economy at the worst moment, and there is a fair argument that it contributed to the sharp downturn of 1937 and 1938. On the left, supporters of the Townsend Plan, which proposed generous pensions for everyone over sixty, and followers of Senator Huey Long attacked Social Security as stingy.

Here is my answer. Some of those criticisms were right on the details, and the program improved because people kept pressing them: benefits grew, coverage expanded, and policymakers learned to time taxes with more care. But the central predictions of the business critics did not come true. Wage floors and hours limits became normal features of a growing economy, not obstacles to it. And the decision to build Social Security on contributions, which looked conservative to the left at the time, gave the program a political durability that more generous but means-tested programs never had.

There was also a campaign against her personally. In 1939 a Republican congressman introduced a resolution to impeach her, over her department's handling of the deportation case of the West Coast labor leader Harry Bridges. The House Judiciary Committee rejected it. She kept working, and she served until 1945, one of only two Cabinet members to stay for all of Roosevelt's presidency.

The unfinished list, read in 2026

Put her list next to American life now. The federal minimum wage has been seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour since 2009, and its real value has fallen far below its peak. Millions of people still lack health coverage. Domestic workers and farmworkers have won protections, but they are still treated differently under several labor laws. Paid family leave, an idea Perkins did not put on her list but would surely recognize, is available only in some states.

What she left behind, besides the laws, is a method. She arrived with specific demands written down. She knew the evidence, often from having inspected the factories herself. She built a committee and a coalition. She gave ground where she had to, sometimes too much, and she held the core. And she kept going for twelve years in a job where many people wanted her gone.

The Department of Labor's headquarters in Washington is named the Frances Perkins Building. A better memorial would be finishing her list.

What you can do

• Write your own list. Before you back a candidate, write down three specific things you want them to commit to, the way Perkins did, and ask them in person or in writing.
• Know your wage rights. The minimum wage tracker shows the wage floor where you live, and our labor hub explains overtime and how to report wage theft.
• Follow the safety net fights. Social Security, unemployment insurance and health coverage are all on the table in Washington. Track them on the safety net page.
• Push for the missing item. Our health care for all page follows proposals to cover everyone, and your representatives can tell you where your members of Congress stand.