Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was the First Woman to be a Member of the President’s Cabinet – From 1933 – to 1945.

You are invited to attend the induction ceremony for the Frances Perkins Center at the University of Maine, Augusta, in Faber Forum, Jewett Hall, 46 University Drive.  The induction ceremony into the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame begins at 2:00 pm with a reception starting at 1:00 pm.

With the failure of President Hoover’s policies at the end of 1929, marked by the stock market crash on October 24, 1929, and the ensuing Great Depression, the decade that began with the dream of endless progress and prosperity came to an end with millions unemployed.  American industrial workers who had lost their jobs lined up in the streets for a bowl of soup and hunk of bread.  Depression, new technology and foreclosure by the banks drove more than half the American farmers into bankruptcy.  By 1932, something had to change and the newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) created the New Deal to put America back to work.  The Works Project Administration (WPA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) were formed to carry out this plan.

Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under FDR, established programs to hire visual artists to embellish federal buildings under construction.  She did this at the very start of the FDR Administration.  Eventually, some 10,000 artists were employed by the various New Deal Arts programs not to mention the thousands of writers, directors, actors and others who were employed in their fields during the tenure of FDR from 1933 – 1945.

She was the driving force behind many of the groundbreaking New Deal programs that are still the foundation of the American social safety net:  social security, unemployment insurance, the 40 hour work week and the minimum wage.

Secretary Perkins was born in Boston in 1880, educated in the public schools of Worcester, and a graduae of Mount Holyoke College.  She spent summers throughout her life at her ancesral family homestead in Newcastle, Maine on the River Road.  It is now a National Historical Landmark owned by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Frances Perkins Center.  The late grandson of Frances Perkins, Tomlin Coggeshall, was the force behind the creation of the Frances Perkins Center as a tribute to his grandmother and her legacy.  Secretary Perkins died in New York City in May of 1965.