Contributed by Adele Fasick.
The old proverb “Patience is a virtue…” is quoted most often by parents trying to calm the urgent requests of children. The version I used to hear was “Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can. Seldom in a woman, and never in a man.” This sentiment has been around at least since the fifteenth century probably because people still find patience a difficult virtue to practice.
One place where we almost never find patience is in government. Voters usually want results quickly and politicians try to respond. But a few figures in American history have been willing to work patiently for years to achieve their goals. Frances Perkins was one government figure who did just that.
Frances Perkins was born in Boston in 1887 into a prosperous family, but she spent most of her life in New York and Washington D.C. Like many women of her time, she was given a good education but was not expected to use her education in a job or career. Her destiny, as her family saw it, was to marry a prosperous husband and raise children to follow the same path as her mother and aunts. But Frances saw life differently.
After Perkins graduated from college, she became a social worker in Philadelphia and New York, but a dramatic fire in 1911 changed the course of her life. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which caused the death of 146 workers, occurred in her New York City neighborhood. The workers died because bosses had locked access to the elevators in the building. This terrible accident opened Perkins’s eyes to the overwhelming unfairness of the problems faced by workers. She realized she could do more through political action than she could through providing care to individuals as a social worker and so she became an activist. She started to work with government agencies in New York City.
Frances was a young woman, just turning 30, when she decided to work in government. She soon discovered that most of the men she worked with were uncomfortable confronting a young, well-dress woman and didn’t know how to behave with her. Should they flirt with her or treat her like one of the boys? What would their wives think? Frances took an unusual approach to help them. She deliberately tried to appear older than she was. She began to wear somewhat dowdy clothes, and to project a motherly image. This was her way of not frightening off her male colleagues and she became famous for looking like someone’s middle-aged wife rather than a politician.
Patience worked for Perkins. When Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in 1932, he asked her to serve as the Secretary of Labor. Choosing a woman for that post raised an uproar. Labor leaders opposed her because she had never been a union member. She was supported by the League of Women Voters and other women’s groups. Her appointment marked the first time a woman had served as member of the president’s cabinet.
Frances Perkins became a major partner in Roosevelt’s introduction of the New Deal. She was responsible for some of its major achievements—including the minimum wage law, unemployment insurance, and Social Security. She even tried to introduce healthcare as a benefit for all workers, but the American Medical Association killed that provision. Nonetheless, Perkins’s patience led to some of the policies that have made life better for millions of Americans over the years. Perhaps that demonstrates that patience is indeed a virtue.
You can read more about Perkins and other memorable women in my blog Teacups and Tyrants.