Danica Roem has the kind of laser focus and wisdom we should demand from all our elected officials. She is vibrant, eloquent, and cool. As she has said: “No matter what you look like, where you come from, how you worship, who you love, or how you identify, if you’ve got good ideas, you can bring those ideas to the table.” That’s the government and the country we should all aspire to build and support.
Groundbreakers
Frances Perkins
Hillary
Every month, sixty-four million Americans receive benefits from Social Security. Tens of millions go home after an eight-hour workday. Others who have lost their jobs can rely on unemployment insurance. Children go to school instead of working in factories. Fire alarms and sprinkler systems are a fact of life. And while it’s still far too low, we have a federal minimum wage, mandated and enforced by law. All of these facts of modern working life are thanks in no small part to the efforts of one woman: Frances Perkins.
Frances was “the first” to do many things: The first woman named to a seat on New York’s powerful Industrial Commission, where her eight-thousand-dollar annual salary made her the highest-paid woman in state government. And the first ever “madam secretary,” when she led the federal Department of Labor for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
“I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit down on the chair that was offered, and so establish the rights of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit in the high seats.”
—FRANCES PERKINS
Born in Massachusetts in 1880 to a middle-class family, young Fannie, as she was known then, grew up comfortably. She attended Mount Holyoke, where a course on American economic history exposed her to how the vast majority of American workers lived: constantly at risk that a mistake at work could cost them their health, their job, or even their life. After college, she spent time at Hull House, the innovative settlement founded by Jane Addams in Chicago; took a dangerous job working to prevent young women from falling victim to sex trafficking in Philadelphia; and literally stood on soapboxes to advocate for women’s suffrage.
Like many young women of her social status and era, she assumed that when she married, her activism would take the form of board seats and charity fund-raisers. That all changed on March 25, 1911. Frances had moved to New York City, where she worked at the National Consumers League and was friends with a group of young social reformers. The group was sitting down to tea near Washington Square Park when they heard the clanging of fire sirens. Just a few blocks away, the building housing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was in flames. One in a sea of thousands of onlookers, Frances watched in horror as the fire ladders proved too short to reach the upper stories where the factory was housed. Workers crowded against the windows until, one by one, many chose to jump rather than burn to death.
One hundred and forty-six people died in the fire, mostly young Italian and Jewish immigrant women. Many were doomed by the fact that the factory’s doors were locked during working hours in order to prevent employees from taking unauthorized breaks or smuggling out scraps of material. It was the worst industrial accident in the history of New York City and one of the worst ever in the United States. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire changed the course of American labor history—and the course of Frances Perkins’s life.
Frances became executive secretary of a new citizen’s committee on industrial safety, where she threw herself into learning about fire escapes, building construction, and insurance policies. Over the next four years, New York State adopted dozens of laws with Frances’s fingerprints all over them: mandating fire drills and escapes, requiring automatic sprinklers, banning smoking in factories, setting occupancy limits, and other seemingly commonsense measures that we take for granted today. Through that work, Frances learned a lesson that she would carry with her through decades of public service: A small group of dedicated, creative reformers could come together and make a difference.
During this time, Frances married Paul Wilson, another progressive reformer, in his thirties. She worried that getting married would cost her the name recognition and personal identity she had painstakingly built. “I was very puffed up, I suppose, about the fact that I could sign a letter and my name meant something to the labor commissioner of California,” she said later. “If I were Mrs. Paul C. Wilson, I was just somebody’s wife.” Although she sometimes referred to herself socially as Mrs. Paul Wilson, Frances didn’t change her last name—a decision that was so far outside the norm in 1913 that at least one newspaper reporter showed up on the newlyweds’ doorstep to demand the full story.
Over the years, Frances held multiple positions in New York State government. She was confirmed to the Industrial Commission by Governor Al Smith in 1919, a year before women across America won the vote, making her one of the first female commissioners in New York. When Franklin Roosevelt became governor of New York in 1929, he appointed Frances as the state industrial commissioner. During that time, she supervised an agency with eighteen hundred employees, raised the minimum wage, and worked to end child labor.
In 1933, with the country in the grips of the Great Depression and one in four Americans unemployed, President-elect Franklin Roosevelt asked Frances Perkins to be his secretary of labor. On the campaign trail, FDR had promised a “new deal for the American people,” but Frances knew that there wasn’t a concrete plan. So, like many women, she made a list: putting millions to work through public employment, providing direct aid to states to help the destitute, setting a forty-hour workweek and a federal minimum wage, banning child labor, creating unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation systems, establishing Social Security and universal health insurance.
Frances’s list was staggeringly ambitious, a complete rewriting of the social contract between government, employers, and workers. In some cases, her list took reforms she had helped introduce in New York and expanded them to more reluctant corners of a vast nation. In others, she was proposing an entirely untested path. She was also deeply conflicted about becoming the first woman to head a federal department, knowing that she would face more than her share of criticism for being a woman in a “man’s job.” But once FDR signed off on her list of proposed policies, Frances’s mind was made up. She signed up to join his Cabinet.
“I came to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain, common workingmen.”
—FRANCES PERKINS
Item by item, Frances’s list became the law of the land. The National Industrial Recovery Act banned child labor and created the first ever national minimum wage. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration authorized unprecedented transfers of federal money to states to help the needy. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration put hundreds of thousands of people to work. And the Social Security Act created both a national unemployment insurance system and federal pensions for the elderly.
Frances’s breakneck pace on behalf of the American people belied profound struggles in her home life. She and Paul had a daughter, Susanna, in 1916, who would struggle throughout her life with mental illness. Soon after her birth, Paul began suffering from a series of mental health crises. In manic states, he would squander the money he had inherited from his family; then, plunging into deep depressions, he would be institutionalized. Even as Frances climbed through the ranks of New York State government and, later, became labor secretary, most of her earnings went to paying for her husband’s care in a series of expensive sanitariums.
The day the Social Security Act was signed into law, Frances received word that Paul had escaped the facility where he was living. After the signing ceremony, where she was photographed standing behind President Roosevelt, Frances rushed to New York to search for her husband. She found him hours later, confused and wandering the streets. She had to work all her life to support Paul and Susanna, and she constantly struggled to keep them out of the public eye.
As the New Deal rescued the American economy, the rising tide of fascism in Europe b
egan eroding progressive political will in the United States. As labor secretary, Frances also oversaw the nation’s immigration office. She argued in favor of expanding visa allotments for labor activists, Jews, and other persecuted people from Germany and Austria. Although she was able to intervene in some individual cases, her larger efforts were blocked by the State Department. In 1940, FDR approved a plan to move the immigration bureau, as it was known then, from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice, cutting Frances out entirely. And, as we know all too painfully, the last item on Frances’s 1933 list of New Deal programs—universal health insurance—did not come to pass then. Though the Affordable Care Act brought us closer than ever, we still have work to do over eight decades later.
Frances Perkins served throughout all twelve years of FDR’s presidency, and she continued briefly as labor secretary under President Harry Truman. She had been decried as a Communist, survived an impeachment attempt by her enemies in Congress, and struggled privately with her husband’s illness—all while weaving together many of the strongest strands of America’s social safety net. The creator of Social Security worked until just a few weeks before she died, in 1965. Despite the immense challenges she faced in her personal and professional life, Frances’s tenacity and vision allowed her to make a difference in the lives of countless people across the generations. To me, she has always embodied the highest ideals of public service.
Katharine Graham
Hillary
“Frightened and tense, I took a big gulp and said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Let’s go. Let’s publish.’ And I hung up. So the decision was made.”
That’s how Katharine Graham described one of the most pivotal moments in the history of American journalism: her choice, as publisher of the Washington Post, to publish the Pentagon Papers, a collection of classified documents about the Vietnam War that contradicted much of what the government had said publicly. The Nixon administration had already won an injunction to stop the New York Times, which had already begun printing excerpts from the papers, from publishing the rest. The Post’s lawyers, and many of Katharine’s friends and advisers, had urged her not to publish. There was a chance, they reminded her, that the paper could be prosecuted by the government under the Espionage Act. But Katharine knew that, in a time of national emergency, she had an obligation to defend the Constitution and promote the highest standards of journalism. For that brave act, and the many more that followed, I called her “Mother Courage” in a speech celebrating press freedom at the American Society of News Editors in 2001.
After college and a brief stint working as a reporter for the San Francisco News, she joined the staff of the Washington Post, the paper her father owned, in 1939. The next year, she married Philip Graham, a Supreme Court law clerk. Soon after, she gave up her career to fulfill her duties—which she always said she enjoyed—as a wife, mother, and self-described socialite.
When the time came for her father to hand over the paper to the next generation, he passed it not to Katharine but to her husband. “No man should be in the position of working for his wife,” he explained to her. At the time, it didn’t occur to her to object. She claims she was perfectly happy with her life as it was—until her husband’s affair, depression, and mental health challenges created many unhappy years during which Katharine struggled to keep her family together and prevent her husband from hurting himself or anyone else. He died by suicide in 1963.
After Philip’s death, Katharine stepped up to lead the Post, despite her hesitations about her lack of qualifications. (“ ‘Me?’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s impossible. I couldn’t possibly do it,’ ” she recounted later, echoing a familiar refrain of generations of women confronted with a daunting new chapter in their career.) Under her leadership, and with the help of executive editor Ben Bradlee, whom she brought on board, the paper became known for its unflinching investigative reporting. Though films like All the President’s Men leave out this detail, it was Katharine as well as Ben who authorized Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to report on the Watergate scandal, providing a much-needed check on an out-of-control president. When she took over as the CEO of the Washington Post Corporation in 1972, she became the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
But it was more than her professional success that made Katharine such a source of courage to so many of us. Her autobiography, Personal History, is regarded as one of the gold standards of the Washington memoir. Even before the book won the Pulitzer Prize, the great Nora Ephron reviewed it in the New York Times: “Am I making clear how extraordinary this book is?” she asked. “Kay Graham has lived in a world so circumscribed that her candor and forthrightness are all the more affecting.” Katharine detailed her husband’s infidelity, the miserable reality of coping with his mental illness, and the trauma and guilt she felt after his death. Equally moving are her descriptions of growing up in an era when women were assumed to be inferior to men, and the unique challenge of being forced to come into her own professionally at age forty-six. She was also open about the painful process of changing not just the mind-sets of people around her but her own. “Women traditionally also have suffered—and many still do—from an exaggerated desire to please, a syndrome so instilled in women of my generation that it inhibited my behavior for many years, and in ways still does,” she confessed. She wrote about her friendship with Gloria Steinem and her relationships with younger women colleagues who helped change her views on her own place in the world.
“There was always the most acute discomfort and self-consciousness about my presence in a room. One speaker after another used to start his presentations coyly by saying ‘Lady and gentlemen’ or ‘Gentlemen and Mrs. Graham,’ always with slight giggles or snickers. It made me extremely uncomfortable, and I longed to be omitted, or at least not singled out.”
—KATHARINE GRAHAM
Katharine exemplified the importance of the press as a force for accountability in democracy. It’s not always comfortable—in fact, as someone who has been on the receiving end of good press and bad, I can say with absolute certainty that it can be downright uncomfortable. But our future depends not only on a free press but on a fearless one. We need a fourth estate willing to risk criticism, condemnation, and retaliation in order to expose the truth, just as Katharine did.
Constance Baker Motley
Hillary
In 1936, fifteen-year-old Constance Baker Motley was turned away from a public beach in Milford, Connecticut, because she was black. She had never experienced such outright racism before; it left an impression that would stay with her for the rest of her life.
The daughter of immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis, Constance grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her father worked as a chef for student groups at Yale University. Her great-grandmothers had been enslaved in the West Indies, something her parents seemed loath to talk about. Constance and her eleven siblings attended New Haven’s integrated public schools, and even from a young age, her love of learning was evident. “I grew up in a house where nobody had to tell me to go to school every day and do my homework,” she later wrote.
Constance had studied the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and other black writers in Sunday school. After the incident at the beach, she dove into other books on black history. The more she read, she recounted, the more she “began consciously to identify with black America.” Soon she decided it wasn’t enough to read about the struggle for civil rights; she wanted to be part of it. Her mother was a founder of the New Haven NAACP, and while she was in high school, Constance became president of the organization’s Youth Council. Around this time she reportedly read Abraham Lincoln’s descriptions of the legal profession as one of the hardest jobs, which led her to decide that it was the career for her. The fact that there was only a small handful of black women practicing law at the time didn’t deter her. Neither did her parents’ repeated suggestions that she become a hairdresser—a seemingly more attainable occupation. Her family’s inability t
o pay for college, however, was a bigger obstacle.
“Lack of encouragement never deterred me. I was the kind of person who would not be put down.”
—CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY
After graduating from high school, Constance found a job helping with a building reconstruction project and continued her activism. One night, at a public discussion of a community center ostensibly created to serve the black population in New Haven, Constance “caused a stir” by pointing out that “all of the people on the board were from Yale, and, therefore, the black community had no real input into what was going on.” The next day, a wealthy white man who’d been at the meeting asked to see her and offered to pay her college tuition.
With his support, she enrolled at Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee. On her first trip to the campus in 1941, as the train crossed the border from Ohio into Kentucky, she would later recall, “I had to disembark while the train employees put another passenger car behind the engine. It was older and rustier than the other cars on the train. When I went to get back on, a black porter said to me: ‘You have to go in this car,’ pointing to the one that had just been added. It had a sign reading COLORED on the coach door inside. Although I had known this would happen, I was both frightened and humiliated.” Constance ultimately transferred to New York University (NYU), where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 35