The Woman Behind the New Deal
by Heather Boushey
Employers today are demanding more and more of employees’ time. And from campaign barbecues to the blogosphere, workers across the United States are raising the same worried question: How can I get ahead at my job while making sure my family doesn’t fall behind?
Heather Boushey argues that resolving work–life conflicts is as vital for individuals and families as it is essential for realizing the country’s productive potential. The federal government, however, largely ignores the connection between individual work–life conflicts and more sustainable economic growth. The consequence: business and government treat the most important things in life — health, children, elders — as matters for workers to care about entirely on their own time and dime. That might have worked in the past, but only thanks to a hidden subsidy: the American Wife, a behind-the-scenes, stay-at-home fixer of what economists call market failures. When women left the home — out of desire and necessity — the old system fell apart. Families and the larger economy have yet to recover. Here is a brief excerpt.
The ideas embodied in the New Deal didn’t emerge out of thin air. The seeds had been germinating for decades in states and cities around the United States, as well as within the private sector. Progressive reformers in the late 1800s and early 1900s had developed — and tested — a set of ideas to address the new economic insecurities caused by the urban industrial economy. They worked to establish state laws to limit the length of the workday, to prohibit child labor, to provide unemployment insurance, to implement health and safety regulations to prevent deaths by fire and on-the-job accidents, and to ensure that widows and orphans didn’t have to turn to begging — or worse, stealing or prostitution — to support themselves. These policies gave Franklin D. Roosevelt a menu of fully formed ideas that would become the New Deal.
In 1932, when Roosevelt won his first presidential election, Frances Perkins was a leader among Progressive-era reformers. She would become the driving force behind the three pillars supporting our nation’s employment and family policy — Social Security, fair labor laws, and meaningful labor standards — leading the charge inside the White House to push the legislation through Congress. In her view, the proper role of government was to guide families and firms toward a system that would give families real economic security and encourage a strong and competitive economy. Her reforms were grounded in the idea that the recipients of government support would work for a living; these were help-outs, not handouts. Her story sheds light on why the New Deal was successful and provides a number of lessons for how to think about work-life policies today. Perkins came to policy work after being exposed to the economic challenges facing working families. She grew up in a well-to-do family in Maine and attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, at a time when very few women (and very few men) graduated from college. In her senior year, she took a course on American economic history where she learned about industrialization in the United States and Britain. She saw firsthand the economic realities of families of her day when she visited the mills on the Connecticut River in the neighboring city of Holyoke. Perkins later said of that experience,
From the time I was in college I was horrified at the work that many women and children had to do in factories. There were absolutely no effective laws that regulated the number of hours they were permitted to work. There were no provisions which guarded their health nor adequately looked after their compensation in case of injury. Those things seemed very wrong. I was young and was inspired with the idea of reforming, or at least doing what I could, to help change those abuses. This question of how society must reshape itself to cope with the newly industrialized economy informed her career.
After graduating, Perkins took a teaching job at Ferry Hall, an elite school for girls in Lake Forest, Illinois, north of Chicago. There, she spent her evenings and weekends at Hull House, the first so-called settlement house. These were places where university-educated women engaged with the local community and provided services, such as day care, classes, or help with employment, as well as where they developed and shared new policy ideas. Jane Addams, cofounder of the Hull House, described their work as “close cooperation with the neighborhood people, scientific study of the causes of poverty and dependence, communication of [these] facts to the public, and persistent pressure for [legislative and social] reform.” It was at Hull House that Perkins became one of an emerging group of progressive leaders, many of them women.
In 1910, Perkins took a prominent position leading the National Consumers League in New York City. There, in 1911, she witnessed the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed 146 people, 123 of whom were women and girls. The doors of the factory were locked and the only escape route was through ninth-floor windows, which the fire truck’s ladders couldn’t reach. Many chose to jump to their deaths rather than burn alive. After watching this horrific tragedy from across the street, Perkins focused her efforts on policies to improve workplace safety. She became a social worker and the driving force behind the newly established New York State Factory Investigating Commission.
It was also in New York City that Perkins met Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1929, when he became governor of New York, Roosevelt appointed her as New York State industrial commissioner. Then, in 1933, a week before his inauguration as president of the United States, Roosevelt called Perkins to his office to invite her to serve as the first secretary of labor and the first woman to hold a cabinet-level position in the United States (and, as such, the first woman in line for the presidency). She was ready with a plan. All along, Perkins had kept notes of what needed to change for workers and their families. She preserved the ideas “on individual slips of paper, storing them in the lower right-hand desk drawer,” waiting for the right moment to unfold them. According to the biography by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kirstin Downey, Perkins told Roosevelt that she would take the job on one condition: he must agree to support her work-life reforms. Perkins presented Roosevelt with a to-do list for the family of the 1930s. This list covered the most common reasons for economic insecurity for working families in her day. It included addressing unemployment through temporary public works, prohibiting child labor, instituting an eight-hour day and a minimum wage, creating workers’ compensation for those injured on the job, establishing workers’ safety regulations, devising plans for a national system of unemployment insurance, and creating an old-age pension. These reforms became the cornerstones of the New Deal. The benefit programs for the aged and the unemployed were the core elements of the Social Security Act, while the prohibition of child labor, the eight-hour-day, and the minimum wage were combined into the Fair Labor Standards Act. Perkins understood the importance of giving workers a voice, and she was a fierce advocate for the National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the right to unionize, even when her boss was not always as keen as she was on the idea.
Perkins navigated a new path through the old debate. In the sections that follow, we will see how her proposals were carefully tailored to the needs of her time. A few conclusions jump out. First, this wasn’t a welfare agenda; this was an agenda to support working families and reduce economic insecurity. Key pieces of the New Deal elevated what the historian Michael Katz later called the “deserving poor,” those who should receive assistance because they were striving to be part of the workforce. These were not handouts to encourage people to disengage from the economy when they could not work. Rather, they were help-outs for those for whom work wasn’t possible (the young, the old, the sick) or for whom work wasn’t available (the unemployed). They also governed the time spent on work and the ability of workers to bargain over working conditions with their employer.
Second, Perkins’s reforms established the roles of government, firms, and families in addressing economic insecurity in that era — not for all time, but for that time. The New Deal was grounded in contemporary assumptions about what families looked like and how they interacted with the economy. Specifically, the policies were designed for an economy in which most women married and did not work outside the home, and most men assumed the role of family breadwinner and so needed a family wage. Policymakers did not need to prioritize the issue of how workers split their time between work and care. In Perkins’s day, she — a married mother and bread-winner — was the exception to the rule. Most women who worked outside the home did so out of necessity because the male bread-winner was incapacitated or no longer around.
The ideal of a stay-at-home mother never applied to the families of African American or immigrant women, many of whom toiled in the homes of upper-class whites. In 1920, married African American women were five times more likely than white married women to work outside the home. Further, many working women were newcomers to the United States. But the family with a male breadwinner was the norm among whites and among the majority of families.
It wasn’t just that women were unlikely to work outside the home. Leading Progressive-era feminists actively sought to encourage families to adopt the male breadwinner/female homemaker model in the belief that this was best for children and mothers. Some activists did seek a set of policies that would support working women, but the overriding sentiment at the time was that policymakers should not actively encourage women to take outside employment. There were good reasons for this position. At the time, work was typically arduous, often unsafe, and the hours were long. This was not good for anyone, but working conditions were especially hard for pregnant women and mothers of young children. Seeing women’s employment as a choice, however, didn’t change the fact that the women who were in the workplace were there out of necessity; they needed the money.
Third, every item on Perkins’s list had already been put in place somewhere within the United States. Perkins was able to look to state and local models for inspiration and validation. State and local policy experimentation showed what worked — and what did not — as well as how social policy interacted with the economy. Further, it demonstrated the public’s appetite — at least at the local level — for this new and practical set of work-life ideas.
Finally, the New Deal reforms were not always inclusive. Political compromises often meant that some people and families were not covered. The politics of the day drove these choices, as did the capacity of the government to implement and enforce reforms. At the end of the day, to get the votes necessary to pass the legislation into law, many of the New Deal’s employment protections and social policies included eligibility rules that categorically excluded African Americans.
The combination of these factors points to a key failing of the New Deal: the needs of workers with caregiving responsibilities were left out, as were the needs of many of those who worked for pay as caregivers, mostly women of color. Perkins successfully pushed for her reforms in the decade just after women had earned the right to vote and during the heyday of Jim Crow in the South. Perkins was the lone woman among the men of Roosevelt’s cabinet. To this day, however, the lack of attention to the compromises made at the time limited the economic benefits of the New Deal — a serious flaw that has continued to reverberate in the decades since. Today, families have neither policies to let them stay at home nor policies to support them when they work outside the home. Therein lies the key contradiction still facing families.
