Companies had enjoyed record profits and ploughed the money into machinery designed to boost productivity, cutting their workforces. Housing prices had been pumped up by crazy new kinds of loans, and foreclosures of homes and farms were surging as borrowers faltered under the payments. Amazon Exclusive: Kirstin Downey on Frances Perkins Written with a wit that echoes Frances Perkins’s own, award-winning journalist Kirstin Downey gives us a riveting exploration of how and why Perkins slipped into historical oblivion, and restores Perkins to her proper place in history. Her greatest triumph was creating Social Security.
As head of the Immigration Service, she fought to bring European refugees to safety in the United States. She breathed life back into the nation’s labor movement, boosting living standards across the country. Perkins’s ideas became the cornerstones of the most important social welfare and legislation in the nation’s history, including unemployment compensation, child labor laws, and the forty-hour work week.Īrriving in Washington at the height of the Great Depression, Perkins pushed for massive public works projects that created millions of jobs for unemployed workers. As the first female cabinet secretary, she spearheaded the fight to improve the lives of America’s working people while juggling her own complex family responsibilities. Based on eight years of research, extensive archival materials, new documents, and exclusive access to Perkins’s family members and friends, this biography is the first complete portrait of a devoted public servant with a passionate personal life, a mother who changed the landscape of American business and society.įrances Perkins was named Secretary of Labor by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Frances Perkins is no longer a household name, yet she was one of the most influential women of the twentieth century.
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