The home of trailblazer Frances Perkins could soon become our newest national park site, making it just the thirteenth devoted to women’s history. Yet few people know much about the first female U.S. cabinet secretary, who established many of the workplace protections we take for granted.
If you enjoy having time off on the weekend, you can thank the woman who standardized the 40-hour workweek and made the concept possible. Frances Perkins also created Social Security and unemployment insurance, banned child labor, and put many safety measures and workplace protections in place that we simply take for granted. Yet, few people know much about the first female U.S. cabinet secretary and how she continues to shape our lives decades later.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart is executive director of the Frances Perkins Center and a key advocate for making Perkins’ homestead in Newcastle, Maine, our newest national park site; it would be just the thirteenth devoted to interpreting women’s history. In this episode, host Jennifer Errick talks with Lockhart about why Perkins was so important, why we don’t know more about her, and what visitors can see at her wooded 57-acre riverside farm.
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
This episode was produced by Jennifer Errick with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to NPCA Communications Director Alison Heis and Government Affairs Senior Vice President Kristen Brengel.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the Frances Perkins Center at francesperkinscenter.org
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org
Episode 35
The Woman Behind the Weekend
Jennifer Errick: The Maine homestead of trailblazer Frances Perkins could soon become our newest national park site, making it just the 13th devoted to women's history.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart, executive director of the Frances Perkins Center tells us all about this champion for working people who was a driving force behind FDR's New Deal and how she continues to shape our lives decades later.
I'm Jennifer Erick and this is The Secret Lives of Parks.
[Break]
Can I get personal for a moment? Because I'm wondering, how was your weekend?
Did you get outside for a walk, play with your kids, visit with friends? Maybe you binged a favorite show or just sat on the sofa for a while with a cup of coffee or a book glad you didn't have to go anywhere, or at least not anywhere fast. Maybe you took different days off during the week or got paid overtime to stay on duty, extra hours.
Whatever the weekend means to you, there's a woman we can thank who made the standard 40-hour work week possible creating the idea of a weekend. This woman also established social security and unemployment benefits. She banned child labor and she put safety measures in place that prevent horrific deaths and injuries in the workplace. She did this for all Americans, devoting her career to protecting workers from all walks of life, from exploitation and abuse.
Yet few people know Frances Perkins by name. Now a coalition of advocates, including the National Parks Conservation Association, want more people to learn about Perkins and her career. We're calling on President Joe Biden to designate her family's wooded 57-acre farm in Newcastle, Maine, as the country's newest national park site.
And the president ought to love this idea. He issued an executive order earlier this year, calling on the National Park Service to do more to recognize the contributions of women. Of the more than 430 sites in the National Park system today, only 12 were specifically created to interpret women's history.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart saw the President's challenge as a way to elevate the remarkable legacy of Frances Perkins, a woman who came from a farming family and rose to the highest levels of government after witnessing deep social inequities and working to fix them. Lockhart's organization, the Frances Perkins Center, purchased her homestead in 2020 and raised the funds to restore the site to how it looked during Perkins’ lifetime.
I asked Lockhart who Perkins was and why her legacy is so important to America.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Frances Perkins was the first female cabinet secretary in the United States. She served under Franklin D. Roosevelt for all 12 years of his presidency. So, she’s still got the record for longest serving cabinet member. She was the architect of the New Deal, and Social Security is the thing that she considered her biggest accomplishment personally, and it's obviously something that touches so many millions of Americans.
Jennifer Erick: She also established a lot of programs that we take for granted, like workplace insurance.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Workplace insurance, unemployment insurance.
Jennifer Erick: Unemployment insurance.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: So, there's a little bit that gets taken out of your paycheck for unemployment and Social Security, but that unemployment insurance, should you become unemployed, which those of us who went through the pandemic or the 2008 mortgage crisis, a lot of us were unemployed. I mean, I was unemployed at that time and laid off, and I remember being so grateful that I had that unemployment insurance to fall back on.
But there was a lot of unfinished business. When legislation is passed, especially legislation that had no precedent like the New Deal, there are things that get compromised out and negotiated out. And universal health insurance was one of the things that she fought for and actually demanded as part of the New Deal but couldn't negotiate in time.
So, when we talk at the Frances Perkins Center about her accomplishments, we also like to point out that Perkins philosophy was, "I did what I could do in my one life, but there is still more work to do." And her feeling was that universal health insurance was one of those things.
Jennifer Erick: I ask Lockhart about some of the measures that Perkins was able to pass in her lifetime, and she zeroes in on one of the most brutal practices that Perkins was able to outlaw through legislation in the 1930s.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Bans on child labor. She saw firsthand children working in factories, particularly immigrant children who were just working in the most dire conditions and being injured, being killed, not getting an education. And because of their family situations, there wasn't anybody to advocate for them. And she as a social worker, she saw up close and personal the lives of poor Americans and working people and saw that they didn't have protections.
She talks about a really horrible story visiting a candy factory and meeting a girl who lost her hand in a chocolate dipper and being kicked out of the factory and not given any compensation or healthcare, nothing. And in fact, the factory owner tried to get damages from the child because he lost a vat of product. When Frances saw this, she said, "This is not right."
And I think what we learned from her life and studying her life is that there was an evolution that she went through personally becoming a social worker at the turn of the century, being a woman who graduated from college in 1902, and the expectations of her parents and certainly her community was to get married and have children and not pursue career.
But once she really saw up close and personal these working conditions for Americans, she transitioned into creating policy solutions for these conditions and these situations that she saw repeating themselves all over the country. I think that she was also quite proud of some lesser known accomplishments too. During World War Two, she advocated for Jewish refugees being able to come to the United States, specifically children. And that was not a policy of the administration, but something through her leadership as Department of Labor secretary that she advocated for.
Jennifer Erick: And how did she get involved in that?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: During this time, immigration was actually under the Department of Labor. So when people were seeking asylum trying to get out of Europe, that was under her jurisdiction. But it was not necessarily something that she was tasked with doing, but was something that through her own sort of moral obligation and personal beliefs really tried to make happen and was successful in a lot of instances.
She saved 400 Jewish children that she placed with families here in the United States who were orphaned and the number of refugees that she was able to help adults is in the thousands. But I don't know an exact number. I do know that families like the [inaudible 00:08:36] family were helped by Frances Perkins and she was the one, at least from what I understand, what's been told to me, that she was the one that approved their asylum status.
Jennifer Erick: Amazing. Almost as remarkable as Perkins accomplishments was her rise to power. Starting a student of social work, science and economics, then becoming a lobbyist in New York and a policymaker at the state and national levels. I asked Lockhart to share more on her background.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Her father, when she was a young girl, helped her study Greek in the evenings when she was young. I mean, this was a very unusual upbringing for a girl of this time. She was born in 1880. She was the first person in her family to go to college. Her father and her grandmother, her father's mother really were the ones that encouraged her to pursue life beyond the domestic realm.
Jennifer Erick: Because that would've been so uncommon just to have the bachelors.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Sure.
Jennifer Erick: And then she goes on to study graduate work. And so there was a huge focus in her family on learning even though they didn't go to college themselves.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: I think they knew she was special and they knew she was different and had a seriousness and curiosity that needed to be nurtured. And her grandmother told her, "When a door opens for you, you must walk through it." And that is something that Frances kept with her.
She had many setbacks in her career as we all do, but if you layer on the gendered expectations of that time, women couldn't even vote when she was doing the work that she did. So I mean, she was lobbying legislators in Albany, certainly all men. There were no women. And she just used her wit and wisdom and the confidence that she had in what she believed was right to truly navigate these very, very difficult dynamics and was successful doing it.
Jennifer Erick: So she has been doing graduate work in Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, I believe.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Yep.
Jennifer Erick: And then she goes on an internship to New York and she gets involved with the New York City Consumers League. Can you tell me a bit about how things start to happen from there?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: It was such a pivotal moment in our country's history, just generally. I mean, she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which talk about a strange coincidence that she happened to be in Washington Square Park when this fire happened. Watches these mostly women and immigrant women jumping out of this building to their death. And she had already been working for the Consumers League, but that's where she got involved with the Investigating Commission.
So there was an investigation into what happened and what led to that fire, and she ran that. Now unfortunately, this report, which is quite lengthy, found that these factory owners had not really broken any laws because there were none. So she created the first fire safety laws. This commission, this report made suggestions, things like means of egress. Things that are used today in building codes, she created.
Jennifer Erick: Because you wouldn't think about needing to say something like that because we take these things for granted. But over 140 women died. Women and girls died because they were locked. The doors were locked.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: No fire escapes. No...
Jennifer Erick: No fire escapes. And it was so they couldn't take unauthorized breaks.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Mm-hmm. And the fire started because there was all this flammable material and machines working 24/7 and they would get very hot. They were making clothing. People obviously smoked in a lot of these factories and on these factory floors. And so that was another thing that she established, which was where there are flammable materials, no smoking.
But I think broadly you had asked about how she got involved in policymaking. And she was lobbying the New York legislature when Roosevelt was actually, before he was governor, when he was in the state legislature himself.
And that was on the 52-hour work week, which was incredibly controversial at the time, which if you think about it, the New Deal federalized at 40-hour work week. Before that, they were fighting for a 52-hour work week and it was just considered so outside the norm to even put any restrictions on how long someone could work. So Frances Perkins essentially created the weekend.
Jennifer Erick: I was going to say, I've seen her characterized as the woman behind the weekend, which I think is... I mean, if you're going to have-
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: [Inaudible 00:14:07] Right?
Jennifer Erick: Yeah. If you're going to have a tagline, that's a good one.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: But I think it's so interesting because in our society today we have a lot of debate around a four-day work week or a hybrid work environment and just all of these different workplace policies that we are revisiting since the pandemic. And they all started here. They all started with Frances, these limitations on how long they should work, but also the dignity of work and being paid a fair wage and being able to negotiate a fair wage when you are a coal miner or a factory worker. And she is the mother of modern unions in this country as well.
Jennifer Erick: Why do you say that?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Well, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was something that was also crafted with her help and guidance. But if you think about during that period, during the Depression, the government had to inject a lot of capital into public works projects and helping the economy get moving again and employing people. And there were public works projects and all over this country. I mean, the Civilian Conservation Corps was an idea of hers that she got going.
Jennifer Erick: It was responsible for so many National Park improvements. So many-
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Your listeners would know this well.
Jennifer Erick: If you go hiking around, you see so many structures that have the CCC logo on them because it was a way to get people back to work and was responsible for all these infrastructure improvements.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Any kind of mobilization effort around labor and workers came through her. Obviously FDR is well known for the New Deal and these public works projects, but I don't think people really realized the... He placed Perkins in that role specifically and very purposefully. I think it's hard for us to imagine a 90% tax on the wealthy or a massive mobilization of unemployed people to go and create parks or do forestry work. We just don't. That just seems so foreign to our modern views and our modern world, but that's what they did.
Jennifer Erick: So she got this role as part of FDR's cabinet because he appreciated the work that she had been doing for the state of New York. Correct?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: She was able to, when Roosevelt was in the legislature, I think really impressed him with her lobbying ability when she was at the Consumers League and then with the Factory Fire Commission. In this time he becomes governor and he asks her to be labor commissioner of the state of New York. Obviously, no woman had held that position or any statewide appointed position either. He really thought very highly of her. She was incredible in that role and did so much on behalf of workers in New York that when he became president, it was like an, I think a no-brainer for him.
Jennifer Erick: He must have had an inkling of how progressive her reforms would become.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Absolutely. After he won the election, he asked her to come see him. And she had been seeing headlines in the papers about people speculating whether or not she was going to be labor secretary. And all of her friends were saying, "Oh my gosh, this is our moment. Frances, you've got to take this." And she was very reticent to do it because one, she had a family and two, no woman had ever done this before.
And so she'd be obviously facing a huge uphill battle and a lot of unknowns. But I think the part about her not wanting to take on the personal risk and sacrifice that it entailed, this is something that hasn't changed. And that in order to be a woman in leadership, there is an expectation that you are going to have to sacrifice your personal and your family commitments. But she went into that meeting and this I find very inspiring.
She knew that he really wanted her. So she went into the meeting with a list of what her goals were going to be in the job. And she said, "I am only taking this job if you commit to having my back on these policy reforms." And that's where you see social security show up a 40-hour work week, bans on child labor. And this is federal, right? So she's saying to him, "I want you to create once in a generation policies or I'm not taking the job." So that way she could kind of say like, "Well, I put it all out on the table." He's probably going to say, "No way Frances." But instead he was like, "You have my word."
Jennifer Erick: One of the questions that I was going to ask is do you think the New Deal could have happened without her?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: No.
Jennifer Erick: And it sounds like the New Deal was her.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Yeah. The crazy thing is that she was so private, and she was so understated about her accomplishments, her role, that it has taken us a while to sort of really unpack how much she influenced American society. And she's one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, and yet we don't know that much about her. My children have PJs with RBG's face all over them. They don't have any PJs with Frances Perkins on them.
Jennifer Erick: You don't have that for your kids?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Well, I mean, I should. And trust me, it's on my to-do list. But the way that I believe, and I believe my work here, is to make sure that she becomes a symbol of what it means to have dignity and work and to believe in a government that serves all of us. And that government, it can be a force for good, I think is a needed message right now. And she is the face of this idea. And I would love for her to be a modern icon, not just a feminist icon, but an American icon.
Jennifer Erick: We'll have more in just a minute on what you can see at Frances Perkins’ riverside homestead, the podcast Giovanna Gray Lockhart wishes someone would create, and the worst way to have to exit your own dinner party, after this short break.
[break]
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[break]
So, what now are you doing to ensure that her story is more widely told?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: President Biden put out an executive order during Women's History month in March, challenging the National Park Service to designate more sites to women's contributions to our country's history. 12 out of 430 park sites are devoted to women. So we'd like to be the 13th.
Not just because we want more people to visit her family homestead and learn about her, but you and I both know a national park is sort of the gold standard of historic interpretation, and we need more attention on her life so we can extract these gems to be put out into social studies classes. I can't tell you how many people say to me of all ages, "I didn't learn about Frances Perkins in school." And that seems like a missed opportunity.
Jennifer Erick: Because you said earlier she wanted people to carry forward the work she was doing, and if more people know about her work, there could be others carrying that mantle forward.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Absolutely. But I really think it was her philosophy on the dignity of work and the role of government to provide the framework for people to live their best possible life. I think if she were alive today, that would be a fun podcast actually. Just, what would Francis do? And I think she would be really astonished to see that in America in 2024 that children live in poverty.
Jennifer Erick: You think that would've been her next step, fighting poverty?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Absolutely. Putting people to work during the Great Depression was one way to do that. And it wasn't that she didn't want women to work. She absolutely did want women to work, but she was also incredibly realistic about a dynamic in which, "Well, okay, who's going to look after the children?"
When Frances Perkins mobilized women to work during the war in factories and making airplane parts and Rosie the Riveter and that whole timeframe, she recognized that, okay, if the men are off in combat and the women are working all day in a factory, the federal government needs to provide child care.
And they did. And you look at the cost of child care today, and you think, how is anybody supposed to afford $25,000 a year for daycare if they're only making 10 or 15 thousand dollars more than that a year? And I think when there was an economic imperative and a national security imperative to take care of the country's children, we figured it out.
Jennifer Erick: Are there other ways that you're hoping having a park service presence there can help?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: I think it will. I mean, obviously just preserving this place. It's a 57-acre saltwater farm on the Damariscotta River in Maine, in mid-coast Maine, about a little over an hour from Portland. It's a beautiful place. It's a place that many people visit anyway. Maine is called Vacation Land after all. This house, it's an 1837 brick house farmhouse with a barn, and our organization lovingly restored and preserved it, but it will need to continue to be preserved in perpetuity.
And we are a small organization and the support of the federal government and Congress helping us will be wonderful. But also it's a stamp of approval in a way because it's saying, this matters. This place matters. This person matters. It matters to our history. And sitting in her living room looking at her books tells you something about this person. I mean, seeing the land and walking the trails that she would come and walk, it's very powerful.
This is someone who came from a very modest upbringing and was not expected to change the world, but she did. And you can see the aspects of life in Maine at that time were very much foundational to her beliefs. I mean, taking care of your community, caring for your neighbors, that was something that was instilled in her at a young age there.
Jennifer Erick: Are there particular parts of the property that you like to point out as indicative of her character or things that you just think are cool?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Yeah, I do. I was a gender and women's studies major. I graduated from college in 2002, a hundred years after Frances Perkins did. And I knew of Frances Perkins mostly because I worked in New York government. I just assumed she was like a Eleanor Roosevelt type who was sort of born into privilege and into that position. And so it was really, really exciting for me to see that, oh no, this woman comes from a background not similar to mine.
And you go to the house, and you see the furniture, the bed that she slept in. And Frances Perkins really loved to entertain. She loved having dinner parties. Visit the house, you can see she has this pantry full of dishes and glasses and vases and pitchers and knickknacks and pepper shakers. I mean, everything you could possibly imagine to host a big dinner. Not a fancy one, just all your friends.
And she was hosting an annual Labor Day dinner. This was September 1st, 1939. And her chauffeur knocked on the door and said, "Madam secretary, I think you should come listen to the radio." Because they didn't have a radio in the house. It was only in the car.
And she leans against this stone wall that's right, it's sort of in between the house and the garden. And she's learning about the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. And she goes back into the house and she says to her friends, "I'm so sorry. Please carry on without me." And she got in the car, he drove her to Boston where she got on the train and headed back to the Oval Office.
Jennifer Erick: What inspired you to want to be involved with the homestead?
Giovanna Gray Lockhart: I feel really hopeful that when people learn about Frances Perkins and they visit our site, they will walk away with something, one, that they didn't know before. Two, an idea about how they could make a difference in their own communities. And lastly, help us do the work that we need to do, which we need to educate more people about this part of our history and this person in our history.
And so that takes collective support. Designating this site a national monument, what it also does is it will attract further scholarship. And I think that is another important reason to do this. The New Deal, the Depression, World War II — there are a lot of parallels to our contemporary society in terms of social justice issues and economic security, et cetera. Wealth disparity is 300 times what it was then.
And what I hope is that young people who are choosing their paths or are wanting to go deeper on an issue would see this work, the work of this period in time, as a launching off point for future scholarship and future thought leadership around what the role of government is in our society.
And I know that we always think of going to national parks and visiting them because they're beautiful. And luckily, we check that box too.
Jennifer Erick: There are many boxes that remain unchecked in Perkins vision for America, from ensuring healthcare for all Americans to making childcare affordable for working parents to reducing poverty. None of these are social issues with easy policy solutions, but creating a new national park site that continues the conversation spurs new ideas and preserves the home of a true pioneer, much like FDR's choice to appoint Perkins as labor secretary, this decision should be a total no-brainer.
And hey, I hope you have a nice weekend.
[End theme]
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 35, The Woman Behind the Weekend was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to NPCA Communications Director Alison Heis and Government Affairs Senior Vice President Kristen Brengel.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the Frances Perkins Center at Francesperkinscenter.org.
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org.
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America's national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation's only independent non-partisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we're proud of it too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org.