Frances Perkins, third from right, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law in 1935. Photo courtesy of the Frances Perkins Center

Frances Perkins is finally getting her due.

If you earn a decent wage, are able to take time off from work and are thinking about retiring, you have Perkins to thank. Perkins, the first woman to serve in a U.S. presidential Cabinet, was the architect of socially sustaining ideas like a federal minimum wage, the 40-hour work week and self-invested retirement accounts, which we know as Social Security. Her values have been part of the social fabric of the country since the 1930s, and with conversations today about the demise of middle-class families and the uncertain future of the working class, Perkins’ ideas are as timely and relevant now as they were when she advanced them. Her life and legacy will get the recognition they’ve long deserved when her family’s Maine homestead opens to the public.

Perkins, who was born in Boston and spent summers Maine, along the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, became famous as the “woman behind the New Deal,” the popular name of the various Depression-era public policies enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help buoy unemployed workers and farmers, and help people young and old live better, safer and more fulfilling lives. Perkins, who did all of her work in a world dominated by men, also had her eyes on a national health care plan, but didn’t quite get there.

She worked with Roosevelt when he was governor of New York, and he brought her with him when he became president. Roosevelt biographer Adam Cohen has called Perkins “one of the nation’s greatest heroes – as iconic as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Paine.” Perkins died in 1965 at age 85.

She was iconic in other ways. When she married in 1913, she insisted on keeping her birth name, unusual at that time. Her husband suffered a manic depressive episode, lost the family’s money in a scam investment, and could not work. She supported the family, becoming a labor advocate and policy expert. She also had a long-term private relationship – a so-called “Boston marriage,” involving the co-habitation of two women – during some of her time in Washington. When the media refers to Pete Buttigieg as the first “openly gay” member of a presidential cabinet, “openly” is an opaque reference at least to Perkins, whose relationship with another woman was not open at the time and is now recognized.

“Her story is more timely than ever with the first woman vice president, the (first) woman of color (as vice president), Maine’s first female governor, the centennial of woman’s suffrage, and the culmination of women in politics right now,” said Jamie Kingman Rice, director of collections and research at Maine Historical Society.

The Perkins Homestead in Newcastle, which is a newly minted National Historic Landmark. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

Soon, people in Maine will be able to learn more of her story. Perkins’ vision for a compassionate, empathetic country began in the midcoast, where her family roots go back to the 1700s. In early 2020, just before the pandemic swept across the country, the Frances Perkins Center in Damariscotta, a small exhibition space and study center that opened in 2009, purchased the Perkins family homestead in nearby Newcastle. It is in the process of preserving the family’s saltwater farm, with plans to open to the public as an educational site and center for progressive thought, where people will be able to learn about the social and economic history of Maine and how it helped Perkins focus on her life’s work.

How much of the home’s interior will be open to the public in 2021 is dependent on the pandemic and the timing of renovation work at the homestead, but the center hopes to host some outdoor activities if public health conditions allow.

Inside the homestead. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

FORMING THE FABRIC

The home and surrounding 57 acres were designated a National Historic Landmark in 2014, because of Perkins’ legacy. As the first woman in a presidential Cabinet, she served 12 years as labor secretary from 1933 to 1945, the fourth-longest serving cabinet secretary in U.S. history. She was FDR’s policy expert. “She was not political, but she knew the data,” said Michael Chaney, executive director of the Frances Perkins Center. “She knew the issues. She was someone Roosevelt trusted to construct a big part of the New Deal.”

Because she served so long, it allowed her to initiate, implement and perfect the systems before she left the cabinet. “That is part of the reason they work so well,” said her biographer Kirstin Downey, whose 2009 book, “The Woman Behind the New Deal,” offers a definitive portrait of Perkins.

Her trio of accomplishments form the fabric of the U.S. social safety net still in place today: Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage. She once said, “I came to Washington to work for God, FDR and the millions of forgotten, plain, common workingmen.”

Downey said the lasting value of her work is evident by the 100 or so million people in the United States today who benefit from the systems she created. “The thing that made it different, and the genius of FDR and Frances Perkins, is the safety net is work-related. It’s not charity given out, but benefits earned,” Downey said. “And the whole country right now is dependent on programs that a woman from Maine created. That’s an extraordinary statement to be able to make.”

Chaney isn’t sure how Perkins would react to the living conditions in America today, but he has a hunch she would be upset by growing economic disparity and a widening income gap. “I think she would be most disappointed today in the whole 99-percent and 1-percent (wealth) structure that we find ourselves in. There is a great deal of wealth focused on very few members of society, and the vast majority of us are at a different level,” Chaney said. “That disparity would trouble her immensely, but on the other hand she would be proud that, in 2021, Social Security is something that you and I and a lot of other people are counting on later in life.”

Rice, with Maine Historical, said the pandemic has brought attention to risky and unsafe working conditions that persist at meat-packing plants and among front-line workers and among people of color in general – issues Perkins worked to address during her time in Washington. “Though we have seen a lot of changes in working conditions for people in industries like meat-packing since Frances Perkins’ time, there is still a lot of work to be done, and the pandemic and COVID have really exposed that,” she said. “She was very forward-thinking, but we are still talking about some of these issues.”

An old photo of the Perkins family home. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

FAMILY ROOTS

Perkins had deep roots in Maine. Someone from the Perkins family lived in the homestead from the mid-1700s until the center purchased it a year ago. The property includes the 1837 Brick House, which is connected to a barn complex. It’s a classic Maine house, with an ell, shed shop and carriage area connected to large post-and-beam barn.

The most recent Perkins’ family member to live there was Tomlin Coggeshall, who sold the homestead to the Frances Perkins Center. Now 67, he lives in upstate New York. He spent summers in Newcastle as a kid, and moved there year-round with his family in 1965. The decision to sell the property was motivated by his desire to tell his grandmother’s story more widely. Growing up, he didn’t know too much about his grandmother’s career other than she “was in the government. It was sort of taken for granted, in a way, in the family. My mother was made a little nervous, uneasy I would say, talking about her mother. So I didn’t learn very much about her.”

On what would have been his grandmother’s 100th birthday on April 10, 1980, he attended a ceremony in Washington when the Department of Labor building was renamed in her honor. President Jimmy Carter spoke at the ceremony, which made an impression on Coggeshall. “That was a moment of realization – ‘Wow, my grandmother really was somebody.’ People were making such an occasion out of her on her birthday,” he said. “She has so much relevance and so much gravitas today.”

Perkins spent her childhood summers in Newcastle and lived most of the year in Massachusetts growing up and in college, then was in New York and Washington. She returned to the homestead regularly – and remains nearby still, buried in a local cemetery. Perkins herself owned the property from 1927 until her death.

After purchasing the home from the family, the Frances Perkins Center received $500,000 from the National Park Service’s Save America’s Treasures grant program to preserve and restore the homestead and saltwater farm. That grant, which counts toward a continuing $5.5 million capital campaign, has jump-started the process of planning and completing work on existing historic buildings, as well as site work and design work on future buildings. Chaney said he hoped to bid the project soon, with renovation and construction work beginning in late spring or early summer.

Fundraising continues, he added.

Much of the work involves repairs to sills and floor joists, and other structural components, as well as the building’s envelope. An enclosed porch that had been removed a century ago will be replaced, allowing for better access. When the work is completed and public safety conditions allow, the homestead will function as a year-round educational and historic site, with the contents of the family home conserved and archived.

The barn and other buildings will be used for programs, a study center and public activities. A new wing, designed to complement the brick house, will be used for discussions, group activities, workshops and offices, among other things. There will be a welcome center with exhibitions, and walking paths connecting the buildings and through the fields down to the river.

Michael Chaney, the executive director of the Frances Perkins Center, points out the location of the older homesteads near the Damariscotta River. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

The farmstead will tell Perkins’ personal and family history, as well as the social and economic history of the river, the region and the people who occupied it. “The family had a working brick farm on the shore of the river for many, many years,” Chaney said. “There is a lot of history to interpret on the property in terms of how it was used for agriculture, livestock, and the manufacture and sale of bricks.”

In “The Woman Behind the New Deal,” Downey describes the land like this: “It was perched on a sweeping bend of the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, Maine, at a site filled with historic debris grown over into green meadows, sprawling over hundreds of acres to a place known as Perkins Point.”

Downey said Maine was the most important place in Perkins’ life. “She spent a lot of time in New York and Washington, but she considered Maine home. She went there every summer, and it’s where her family had been from for hundreds of years. It was that place in the world where she felt most personal security and at home. She loved the beauty of Maine and spent a lot of time outdoors, and she loved the people of Maine, and loved the gutsiness of the population. She felt they were really exemplars of Yankee, in the best meaning of the word,” she said.

RECOGNITION OVERDUE

Frances Perkins is shown during some of her testimony. Getty Images/Courtesy of Frances Perkins Center

U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree praised Perkins for making history as the first woman to serve in the Cabinet and her “visionary policies” that improved the lives of generations of American workers. “From the establishment of a minimum wage, to a 40-hour work week, her positive mark on the country continues to be felt nearly a century later. Mainers hold great pride in Frances Perkins’s legacy and opening her homestead to the public will allow countless others to appreciate her life and deep connection to our state,” Pingree said in a statement.

Three years ago, Maine Preservation flagged the Perkins homestead as one of Maine’s most endangered historic places. Now, the homestead is safe.

“We’re thrilled,” said Maine Preservation executive director Greg Paxton. “It’s hard to overstate the importance of this site to the country’s history. She brought us out of the days of the sweatshops, where people were forced to work long hours in unsafe conditions, and into our modern workplace environment, where people have some leisure time, safe working conditions and a floor for their retirement. She was one of Maine’s most important historical figures.”

Maine Preservation, a nonprofit agency that promotes and preserves important places and buildings, often doesn’t recommend opening new museums, because they require a lot of financial resources to maintain and a lot of effort to draw visitors. It endorsed this project because of the unique environmental attributes of the site and the potential to explore Perkins’ life and legacy, Paxton said. “In this case, we’re talking about a national figure who is not as recognized as she ought to be,” he said.

Downey, who serves on the board of the Perkins center, said the homestead will become a valuable cultural resource for Maine as people learn more about Perkins and her accomplishments. “The purchase of this house and establishing it as a center for workplace study and progressive thought is the perfect way to recognize all her valuable contributions. Her life has meant so much to so many of us,” Downey said. “It’s so wonderful there is a place we can go and learn more about about her life.”

Perkins at her desk during her tenure as secretary of labor. Photo courtesy of the Frances Perkins Center

Perkins was a labor activist at the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911 in Manhattan, which she witnessed. It was New York’s deadliest industrial disaster and one of the country’s worst; 146 workers died, including 123 women and girls, mostly young immigrant women. The tragedy focused her work and led her to New York capital city of Albany, where she lobbied for worker safety laws and eventually became state labor secretary. She once said the New Deal began on March 25, 1911, the day of the factory fire.

Maine playwright Callie Kimball has not written directly about Perkins, but Perkins’ life and work surface across Kimball’s body of work, including the her new play “Perseverance” about women, education and equality across centuries. Portland Stage will likely produce the play this year.

“When you think not just of her legacy, but of the traditional gendered constraints of the time in which she lived, her accomplishments are even more remarkable. Though she married in her 30s, and had a daughter, she later lived in a ‘Boston marriage’ for over a decade. I find her inspiring partly because, in my plays, I often center the work of historical women who either choose not to marry or marry late so they might better control their lives and focus on their work,” Kimball wrote in an email.

“Whether my characters live in the Renaissance art world (‘Sofonisba’), the Yukon gold rush (‘Rush’), or 1920s America (‘Perseverance’), they sacrifice much for rejecting the social norms of their times, but they gain the freedom to live a principled life on their own terms. It’s a conundrum many women still struggle to resolve today.”

For information, visit francesperkinscenter.org