Early Life
Frances Perkins, born Fannie Coralie Perkins in Boston on Beacon Hill in 1880, but the place she considered home was Newcastle, Maine. In 1898, she graduated from the college preparatory curriculum at Worcester’s Classical High School and enrolled in Mount Holyoke College, near her Worcester home. Founded in 1837, Mount Holyoke is the nation’s oldest continuing institution of higher education for women.
Perkins graduated in 1902 and left Worcester for a teaching position at Ferry Hall in Lake Forest, Illinois, a women’s college for affluent young ladies. Immediately upon arrival she reinvented herself, changing her name, faith, and political persuasion.
At Mount Holyoke, Fanny majored in physics, but she was most impressed by her American economic history course, in which students visited factories and other workplaces to interview workers and take notes on their wages, hours, and working conditions. It was Fanny’s first look at modern industrial life, and it was not pleasant. She learned that losing a hand at work meant losing your livelihood and that factory work usually paid so little and irregularly that it left families with no savings for their future.
Settlement House Work
In Chicago, Frances Perkins worked at Chicago Commons and Hull House, two of the oldest and most well-known settlement houses in the country. She considered her time at Hull House life changing. She saw the hardships facing the working class first-hand and came to realize how difficult it was to unravel the social problems of the country. To take on this monumental task, the settlement houses provided a myriad of social services including job training, health services, food, child care, and even a savings bank.
In 1907, she began her career in social work in Philadelphia, where she simultaneously studied sociology and economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. At the Philadelphia Hull House, Perkins sought out young women that were being trafficked into prostitution and helped them find a safe place to live and work. She received a master’s degree from Columbia University, focusing her master’s thesis on childhood malnutrition in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen.
In 1910, Frances Perkins became executive secretary of the NYC Consumers League, an organization that fought for workers’ rights and protections. Their mission was to cut the vicious circle of poverty, sickness, and social evils through implementation of a short work day and a living wage. Much of her work was in Albany, where she worked with then Assemblyman Al Smith, Senator Robert Wagner, and even making connections with corrupt Tammany Hall officials. Perkins became an effective lobbyist for labor and social reforms during this time.
