by Kristin Downey
In view of the nasty absurdities of the current Health Care and Insurance Debate, it is interesting to read about the implementation of Social Security---a radical departure in social reform.
Miss Perkins was the Great Depression's Secretary of Labor who, in her formative years, watched the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, and watched the immigrant female factory workers, who had been locked into their workroom to do their labors making mass produced blouses for American women, leap to their deaths in their attempt to evacuate their building and workroom to avoid being burned to death. She watched the women, girls, most of them, crash to their deaths on the sidewalk below the factory high rise. The firemen had arrived but the nets to catch the working girls did not work for leaps from that height.
Miss Perkins would be responsible for creating and maintaining a very strong social net for the working class (and later the middle class) when economic and familial financial disasters left them facing the fire or the fall.
She makes most of the women in politics these days look truly contemptible. Miss Perkins actually cared about the working poor and spent her life, from early days in Jane Adams' Hull House to her days of power in Washington DC, working to improve their lives. And she didn't make money lobbying off the poor.
And while Miss Perkins passed and implemented Social Security during the Great Depression, she cared for her family who were victims of genetic and mental depressions. Her husband was in and out of insane asylums during her service, and her daughter was also a victim of her father's curse.
Miss Perkins was a formidable woman.
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