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didn’t expect the place to be tidy—the Roosevelts liked things to have that pleasantly lived-in appearance—but I was greeted by an absolute mess. Snow-dusted hats and dripping overcoats hung on all the chairs. Folders of papers spilled out atop every table. Boots, umbrellas, and overflowing ashtrays cluttered every corner. This was the telltale detritus of a successful political campaign,
was grateful for the latter, given the assassination attempt just days before in Miami. In the face of death, the president-elect hadn’t flinched, and the bullet had somehow missed him. Tragically, a mayor in his entourage was now fighting for his life with a very poor prognosis for survival—a
instant rush of pleasure to see him. Churchill once said that meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne, and that knowing him was like drinking it.
He returned his gaze to the list. “Well, except for this social insurance plan. Now, that is crazy, Frances. Just crazy!” At last, I thought. We’ve come to an impasse. Didn’t he know that the aged, disabled, blind, deaf, widowed, and orphaned were among the worst victims of this deep economic depression? The elderly especially, having lost their life savings, were cast aside like so much refuse, many of them freezing to death this winter in ramshackle shelters the people were calling Hoovervilles.
That’s when Roosevelt called after me. “Frances, I suppose you’ll nag me about this social insurance plan of yours forever…” He said it lightly. Teasing. But I knew him too well to think it was only that. He wants me to be his conscience, I thought. It was, after all, a
Philadelphia Research and Protective Association hadn’t afforded a salary generous enough to pay for more than the occasional banana sandwich, I was thin enough to sometimes be confused with a teenaged girl.
I’m convinced that stride and expression are all that account for how I arrived unmolested at the tall wrought iron stairway entrance of the brick settlement house on West Forty-Sixth Street.
education. Mount Holyoke College. Wharton Business School. And now New York’s School of Philanthropy. Our understanding is that you’re here on a fellowship from the Russell Sage Foundation.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been given the opportunity to pursue a master’s degree in economics, and I intend to make a survey of child malnutrition for my thesis.” Her eyes narrowed over the top of the file. “Not many women go to college, much less graduate school. Unless they are quite wealthy. Are you an heiress to a family fortune, Miss Perkins?”
Before my beloved grandmother passed, she regaled me with tales of our family’s fiery revolutionaries and abolitionists. James Otis. Mercy Otis Warren. Oliver Otis Howard. With such relations, was it any wonder I had set forth like a vagabond patriot bent on improving the world? Clearing my throat, I explained, “I sought an education because it’s a point of family pride to have learned
women. You see, we are kin to the first female scholar in Revolutionary America.”
“I don’t see why,” I protested. “I’ve worked in neighborhoods like this before. You know that I volunteered at Hull House in Chicago with Jane Addams, and most recently, of course, I worked in Philadelphia’s rougher neighborhoods.”
One more thing. Why in God’s name would a woman want to study economics?” It wasn’t so absurd a question, for in those days, the field of economics had been largely centered on finance, attracting business-minded fellows, aspiring tycoons, and the occasional wild-eyed Socialist. It was, in short, a field dominated by men. And at Wharton, my classmates often whispered behind my back, making no secret that I was unwelcome. Check out Miss Dimples— —never heard of a lady economist— What’s the world coming to? But I had persevered, doing well enough to earn the admiration of my professor, who
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the pump faucet in the summer kitchen. Those were idyllic days—my sanctuary and escape from my father’s house in Worcester, where I spent my lonely adolescence buried in a book to escape my younger sister’s violent tantrums and the resulting arguments between my parents over what to do about her.
If somebody opens a door of opportunity for you, it’s the Lord’s will, she always said. So walk right in and do the best you can.
“In addition to baths, we offer a kindergarten, nursing care, a playground, a gymnasium on the roof, cooking classes for adults, and a sewing school to train young women for a profession.” I thought it an impressive array of services even before she added, “We also operate a station for the Penny Provident Bank, so child factory workers have somewhere safe to deposit their funds before they’re robbed by gang members.” Child factory workers.
But I had never, and would never, get used to watching little children march off each morning to spend their day rag picking or threading needles or toiling over dangerous machines for a few coins, cruel overseers barking at them without a care for the butchery that might result. And I was haunted by the memory of one particular girl whose blood I could still scent in my nostrils and whose screams woke me in the middle of the night…
Be careful what you wish for, my dearly departed grandmother had said. After having lived through nearly a century of tumultuous years, she viewed the world with a raised eyebrow and strong suspicion that the Lord was a trickster.
What I learned in my graduate lectures was amply demonstrated here at Hartley House—that industrialization, which ought to have modernized and elevated the lot of mankind, was instead plunging people into impoverishment.
“Well, that is shocking,” I said dryly. Everyone in Hell’s Kitchen drank whiskey because they were hungry and whiskey was cheaper than a tin of tomatoes. I
I couldn’t condemn him for it, because I’d gone to McManus precisely because I thought he could get that boy out of jail, and I didn’t much care how. The important thing was that the Devil’s Deputy had helped me save people from starvation, which was more than all those upstanding charity-minded people were willing to do. Those pillars of rectitude wanted to feed only so-called worthy children, but a corrupt Irish boss helped when no one else would, and I wouldn’t soon forget it.
black-lace-clad Florence Kelley—one of the women I admired most in the world… Florence Kelley was a legendary reformer who trained at Hull House with Jane Addams and had earned a law degree. Having once been appointed as a public inspector in Illinois, she was also a moving spirit behind the recent founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Consumers’ League.” I’ve seldom been struck speechless in my life, but I was then. The Consumers’ League was no tin-pot operation like the one I’d run in Philadelphia. This was the sort of job I’d only dreamed of. And now Mrs. Kelley explained, “We’ll want you to lobby the state legislature to pass a bill limiting the workweek for women to fifty-four hours.” A sudden
Delano Roosevelt when I first met him. But in my defense, almost no one who met him in those days would’ve dreamed he’d amount to much. He wasn’t born a great man, and I’m not even sure he was a good one. Goodness and greatness came later. When I met him, he was still an insufferable popinjay…
sympathetic ear. Always a man for numbers, Paul asked, “How many women work in canneries?” “Ten thousand, give or take.” “How many work in other kinds of factories?” Glumly, I replied, “Four hundred thousand.” “Then it seems to me a rather straightforward calculation. If I were you, Frances, I’d do what I could for the four hundred thousand.”
my explicit instructions. But I was tired of having clean hands when someone was doing me dirty. I wasn’t going to be chased off; I was going to stand my ground and let them skewer themselves on the tip of their own dirty dealing. Suffrajitsu, I thought.
Someone was eavesdropping and raced back to demand a closed call, which meant the chamber doors would be locked. Oh, this was political warfare now.
affirmative!” I nearly swooned, grasping the sleeve of his coat in excitement, and Big Tim laughed all the way from his round belly. “It’s all right, me gal. We is with you. The big bosses forgot about Tim Sullivan.”
The bill passed. It passed! Wild applause echoed around the chamber. Some in celebration of the bill, more in appreciation of the sheer brinksmanship of it all. And I let myself get swept up in the applause and congratulations.
“Glory be to God! Oh, Frances, this is a victory! So many lives will be improved. You beat them at their own game.” “I didn’t beat them. It was a compromise…”
“Despise not the day of small things,” said Mrs. Kelley. “If they voted to limit working hours once, they’ll do it again. We’ll make the canneries an election issue.”
but I hadn’t gotten far being ladylike. I’d made progress only when, like my brickmaking forebears, I’d been willing to put my hands in the mud and get them dirty. That was another lesson I wouldn’t soon forget.
charges. The jury felt prosecutors hadn’t proved the owners knew the factory door was locked when they fled, leaving girls to die. Given the insurance money, the shirtwaist kings would actually profit from the fire. The law, as it stood, incentivized men to work girls to exhaustion and even burn them alive. Which was why I intended to topple the law as it stood…
“A few enemies too!” Mrs. Kelley patted my cheek with the motherly affection I’d craved all my life. “My dear girl, making a few enemies is how you know you’re doing things right.”
Having seen a few factories, now the legislators wanted to see more. So I took them to pea-canning factories, where we discovered children as young as five years working. Some of these exhausted little cherubs fell asleep right on the factory floor in the slurry of discarded and rotting vegetables. And Al Smith finally exploded. “You can’t have that!” I put a hand on his arm, but he continued to yell at the supervisor. “You can’t treat children this way.” “They’re helping their mothers,” the manager offered in feeble justification. Which made Al shout even louder. “Day after day, hour after
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and I gathered for a Bacchanalia
odd duck, swimming in a sea of swans. But I truly adored Sinclair Lewis, and not only because he was a brilliant writer. He always cracked the surface of my New England reserve with his clever humor. And because I had always felt a little lonely in the world—a square peg trying to fit in the round hole of expectations—I felt as if we were kindred spirits.
“But you’re a Republican.” “Was,” he said. “The progressive movement is breaking both parties apart, and I want to egg it on. Why not come along?”
forgiving… I accepted a groveling apology from Red over a game of dominoes at the Cafe Lafayette, which he finished by announcing,
Freak Art exhibit in New York City. And we were entertained as much by the reactions of the crowd as we were by the work of avant-garde painters like Matisse and Duchamp.
doctor’s visit,” Paul insisted. I humored him because I didn’t want to lose another child. Alas, I was in no way prepared for the doctor’s grim diagnosis. “You’re in a preeclamptic state. You’ll need to stay in bed for the duration of your pregnancy, Mrs. Wilson.” I feared I’d go mad if I must really lie abed and do nothing, but still I said, “Yes, whatever is necessary for the well-being of my baby.”
holy trinity… Separate but indivisible. Being of one substance. And what task, is this great trinity of mine, but love?
“It’s over, Paul,” Mitchel groaned in my parlor, holding his head. “The progressive movement is dead.” I tried to comfort him. “You musn’t say that. As Mrs. Kelley always reminds me, reform is very hard, and sometimes there are setbacks.” Progress was rarely linear. After all, more than a century earlier, some women in the United States had been allowed to vote, and we were only now winning that right back.
“Well, as someone running for governor, I think you ladies are doing the country proud, even if I’ve been half hounded to death by Mrs. William Astor Chanler about that new Lafayette charity.”
“I know of him! Otis was brilliant. No Taxation without Representation was a slogan of his invention, wasn’t it? I often wonder, in fact, why he isn’t mentioned by Americans with reverence, like Washington and Adams.” “Probably because a British tax collector bashed his skull, and he was never right in the head again.”
“Congratulations on your election once again. I have some materials I thought you might like about the child labor bill.” “I’ve got something else to talk to you about.” I said, “All right.” “I was thinkin’. How would you like to be on the Industrial Commission of New York?” Just like that, with no preliminaries, no dancing up to it. “You can’t mean it,” I said, for an appointment to the state’s industrial commission wasn’t just some kind of job. He was offering to make me a public officer. Hardly anyone had ever heard of a woman in public office. Women couldn’t even vote in federal elections
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election. Women are gonna vote from now on in New York State and I oughtta show ’em some attention. Bring ’em into my administration.
“Oh, no, Governor, there isn’t anything wrong that I know of. It’s only that I’ve spent my whole life poking at the system. Now you’re asking me to be part of it.” “That’s the only way to fix it, Miss Perkins.”
you girls are going to get what you want through legislation, there better not be any separation between social workers and the government.”
He shook his head. “Now, that’s the kind of mistake a lotta good people make. They think they got somethin’ if they’re independent. Your husband probably thought so when he worked for Mayor Mitchel.”
