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272PERKINS, FRANCESAfrican Americans who had migrated from the South. In 1911, while working atthe New York City Consumers’ League, she witnessed the Triangle ShirtwaistFactory fire, which claimed the lives of 146 workers, mainly women and children.In the aftermath of that terrible event, she became the executive secretary of theCommittee on Safety of the City of New York, and she worked as a lobbyist onbehalf of labor organizations at the New York State legislature.Perkins married Paul Wilson, an economist, in 1913, but she insisted on retainingher maiden name. For the first years of her marriage, she worked mainlyas a volunteer social worker, but as her husband became increasingly susceptibleto prolonged depressions, she sought full-time work. In 1919, Al Smith, the governorof New York, named Perkins to the state’s Industrial Commission. Remaininginvolved both in labor issues and in the affairs of the Democratic partyin New York, she became acquainted with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who chose herto chair the same commission (then called the Industrial Board) during his twoterms as governor of the state. After Roosevelt was elected president of the UnitedStates in 1932, he appointed Perkins to the post of Secretary of Labor, makingher the first woman cabinet member in the nation’s history. She served in thatposition for virtually all of Roosevelt’s years as president, and she was instrumentalin drafting and implementing much of the New Deal legislation, includingthe creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Social Security Act.After Roosevelt’s death in 1945, President Harry Truman appointed Perkins tothe Civil Service Commission, and she continued in that capacity until the beginningof the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Following the death ofher husband in December 1952, Perkins was free to travel for long periods oftime, and she served as a visiting lecturer in the field of labor and industrialrelations. This work eventually led to the offer of a professorship at CornellUniversity. Accepting that position, she taught at Cornell from 1957 to 1965.Perkins was an associate of the All Saints’ Sisters of the Poor in Catonsville,Maryland, where she was a regular retreatant. She insisted that her religious faithwas central to her work as a government official. In 1948, she presented the St.Bede lectures at St. Thomas Church in New York City. In those lectures, shearticulated her incarnational theological views, emphasizing that God’s becominghuman in Jesus gave human beings the capacity to cooperate with God in thecreation of a Christian social order. She also spoke of “the special vocation ofthe laity to conduct and carry on the worldly and secular affairs of modern society. . . in order that all men may be maintained in health and decency.” Perkinsworked actively until just before a series of strokes led to her death in May 1965.BibliographyA. Papers at Columbia University, at the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, at theFranklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., and at the NationalArchives in Washington, D.C.; numerous articles in periodicals, including “DoWomen in Industry Need Special Protection?” Survey, 15 February 1925, 529–31;“Eight Years as Madame Secretary,” Fortune, September 1941, 76–79; and “ThePeople Mattered,” Survey, February 1946, 38–39; “Full Employment,” in Chris-