Frances Perkins Quotes

<nowiki>[</nowiki>'s speech] first opened my mind to the necessity for and the possibility of the work which became my vocation.

Would you leave me free to do what I think is best for the Labor Department, Franklin? I'd try to keep you informed, but I wouldn't always be able to... [D]irect unemployment relief, a program of public works, minimum wage and hour laws, unemployment and old age insurance, abolition of child labor... These things need doing no matter who is Secretary of Labor.

Although their commission was to devise ways and means to prevent accidents by fire in the State of New York, we... kept expanding the function of the commission 'till it came to be the report on [un]sanitary conditions and to provide for their removal and to report all kinds of unsafe conditions... all kinds of human conditions that were unfavorable to the employees, including long hours, including low wages, including the labor of children, including the overwork of women, including homework put out by the factories to be taken home by the women. It included almost everything you could think of that had been in agitation for years. We were authorized to investigate and report and recommend action on all these subjects. I may say we did.

My generation was perhaps the first that openly and actively asserted—at least some of us did—the separateness of women and their personal independence in the family relationship...

Well... he'll only win that way once, I imagine. He doesn't look as if he'd be very popular with people. What I mean is, he doesn't look as if he really likes people.

I'm the last leaf on the New Deal tree, and I think perhaps I've clung here too long already.

The Employment Service is all but dead. It needs resurrecting and reorganizing. The Statistical Bureau needs revamping too, so it will be an honest fact-finding body. As for the Immigration Service—well, really, Franklin, it is altogether too reactionary for today's world.

[I]t afterwards, seems in some way to have paid the debt society owed to those children, those young people who lost their lives in the Triangle Fire. It's their contribution to the people of New York that we have this really magnificent series of legislative acts to protect and improve the administration of the law regarding the protection of work people in the City of - in the State of New York.

The process of recovery is not a simple one. ... We cannot be satisfied merely with makeshift arrangements which will tide us over the present emergencies. We must devise plans that will not merely alleviate the ills of today, but will prevent, as far as it is humanly possible to do so, their recurrence in the future.

I would not be where I am today if it were not for you and others like you. ...I do not regard you as paying tribute to me personally, but to Frances Perkins as a symbol of the genuine desire to bring happiness to those who have it not in their own power. So that industry may bear down kindly instead of bitterly. ...I promise to use the brains I have to meet problems with intelligence and courage. ...I promise that I will be candid about what I know, of the Labor Department or of the state of industry in this state and in country.

I will fight for it up to the Supreme Court, if necessary... If the Industrial Commission does not have the right to make essential safety laws, it might as well close up shop!

The mothers don't want to bring their children [in for child labor at a vegetable cannery in Auborn, NY]—they need to. ...That need will never cease until employers pay decent wages! There ought to be a law assuring minimum pay, as well as one limiting hours worked!

Social work was an infant then. ...I just lapped it up there... I discovered... that I had a mind that starts, operates on its own scheme, inquires, penetrates, goes to the bottom of things, puts two and two together and comes to some logical conclusions that have authority.

So we proceeded and it proved to be a most educative experience. This factory investigating commission was continued... for four years and its report, is... seven volumes. ...and it's in great detail ...the recommendations, the testimony. We went all over the state. I was a young person then and certainly not fit for service on any super commission but I was the chief—I was the investigator, and in charge of the investigations and this was an extraordinary opportunity... to get into factories to make a report and be sure it was going to be heard.

You showed me which, of all the 'hats' a social worker wears, suits me best. ...[i.e.,] You convinced me that man-made evils can be corrected if people can be made to care enough. I intend to make them, if it's in my power.