"Although their commission was to devise ways and means to prevent accidents by fire in the State of New York, we... kept expanding the function of the commission till it came to be the report on [un]sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions... all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects. I may say we did."
Frances Perkins was an American workers-rights advocate who served as the fourth United States secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest serving in that position. A member of the Democratic Party, Perkins was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet. As a loyal supporter of her longtime friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, she helped make labor issues important in the em
"She inherited part of a tradition of service. She was its caretaker for a little while, and she passed it on to another generation. ...[T]here was a timelessness and a transcendence to the quality of her work, just a natural part of the American society..."
Frances Perkins"Despite hate mail and harsh treatment by the press, her husbands chronic mental illness, and a resolution of impeachment against her, Frances Perkins successfully fought to make life better for working people by establishing unemployment insurance, minimum wages, maximum hours, safety regulations, and Social Security."
Frances Perkins"During her lifetime, a time when women faced severe restrictions and prejudices, Frances Perkins achieved many firsts—first woman head of an industrial commission, first woman in a governors cabinet, first woman in a presidents cabinet. But never without public furor."
Frances Perkins"What she liked about [Theodore Roosevelt] were his "progressive ideas," or his ideas that everybody should get a "square deal"... not just big business owners. ...Roosevelt thought it was time for reforms—time to put some limits on big business, to drive out corrupt politicians, to provide better opportunities for working people, and to improve conditions in the cities. ..."Out of the period ...a whole generation ...emerged... who had a great passion for social justice," Perkins said years later."
Frances Perkins"During her senior year Frances... heard speak. ...[K]nown as a "raging furnace" about issues of social justice, Kelley had successfully fought to get [Illinois] laws passed... to prohibit child labor and to limit the number of hours that women worked. According to Perkins, Kelleys speech "first opened my mind to... the work which became my vocation.""
Frances Perkins"She was aware from her experience with the legislature in New York that labor legislation, like oysters, could be swallowed only in certain seasons, and she was prepared to work on whatever at the moment seemed most likely to succeed."
Frances Perkins"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."
"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."
"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."
"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"
"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"