90 years ago this August, the Social Security Act (SSA) was signed into law. Like many women before and after her, the architect of SSA has largely been forgotten.  

This Women’s History Month, we recognize and honor Frances Perkins for the social safety net she helped create–a legacy lasting generations. Social Security is a program that provides retirement, disability, survivor, and supplemental security income to people who qualify. It was implemented during the Great Depression and designed to help limit the impoverishment of the American people.  

Frances Perkins was not just the architect of SSA: she also proposed and implemented many of the foundational labor and safety laws¹ still relied upon by the American working class. We can also thank her for the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker’s compensation, workplace safety, abolition of child labor, direct federal aid to the states for unemployment relief, a revitalized federal employment service, and universal health insurance. Well, except the last. We are still working on the last. 

 These New Deal accomplishments were part of a ten-point plan designed by Perkins. Before accepting President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s appointment to Secretary of Labor, Perkins made her vision clear. In her own words:   

“Before I was appointed, I had a little conversation with Roosevelt in which I said perhaps he didn’t want me to be the secretary of labor because if I were, I should want to do this, and this, and this. Among the things I wanted to do was find a way of getting unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, and health insurance.”² 

After FDR agreed to her ten-point plan, Frances became both the first female Secretary of the United States, and the longest (to date) serving Secretary of Labor in U.S. history. And although she broke this glass ceiling, what makes her truly remarkable is all of the long-lasting good she accomplished along the way.  

On SSA’s 25th anniversary, Frances Perkins concluded her remarks saying, “we will go forward into the future a stronger nation because of the fact that we have this basic rock of security under all of our people.”³ Now older than most Americans, SSA continues to serve as the bedrock of America’s working class⁴ and has helped vastly reduce senior poverty and child poverty rates.⁵

SSA started during one of the United States’ greatest financial struggles–the Great Depression. If the U.S. could run the program during a period of economic crisis, there is no reason why we now, as the richest country in the world, cannot revitalize and maintain this bedrock for the next 90 years.  

And in revitalizing it, perhaps we can finally make good on Frances’ vision of a universal healthcare system. We have made incremental steps toward that vision. Part of Frances’ universal health care proposal did eventually get signed into law. It became Medicaid and Medicare, which have their own 60th anniversary this July (unfortunately, Frances passed away two months before they were signed). The country moved one step closer to her vision again with the passing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. 

The history of SSA and Frances Perkins makes it clear that universal healthcare is not a newfangled or extreme idea. In America, it is an idea older than the Great Depression. It was an idea supported by FDR when Frances Perkins agreed to be the first female Secretary of Labor.  

Universal Healthcare is an idea 90 years overdue.  

As we recognize Frances this Women’s History Month, we are called to action to continue her path and move it ever forward. As she said upon her retirement, “there is always a large horizon…. There is much to be done …. I am not going to be doing it! It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”⁶  

Please join VPLC in fighting for that program of human betterment. This is a long-term effort, but there are steps you can take right now. Contact your representatives in Congress and urge them to protect public benefits programs from federal funding cuts that would hurt low-income Virginians. You can also support our work by making a donation or subscribing to our email list to receive important policy updates and action alerts.   

To learn more about Frances Perkins’ life, including her fight to open the U.S. to refugees fleeing Hitler’s regime, please see: https://francesperkinscenter.org/learn/her-life/.  

Emily Hardy is the Elder Law attorney and Deputy Director of the Center for Healthy Communities at Virginia Poverty Law Center.

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Notes:

1. Fair Labor Standards Act, Bureau of Labor Standards, National Labor Relations Act, International Labor Organization, and US Employment Service and New Deal jobs programs.
2. https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins5.html
3. https://www.ssa.gov/history/perkins6.html
4. While SSA and other social programs passed in the 1930s were instrumental in reducing poverty and wealth disparity, we also recognize their exclusionary histories–especially the ways they carry with them the legacy of the racism and sexism of the time. The final version of SSA that passed excluded certain types of work like domestic and field work. Many of these excluded workers would have been women and people of color at the time the law was passed. To this day, we see similar policy choices continue in the exclusion of certain work under minimum wage increases.
5. The benefits lift 16.3 million older adults above the poverty line. Benefits go to roughly 1 million children. More from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-lifts-more-people-above-the-poverty-line-than-any-other
6. https://francesperkinscenter.org/learn/her-life/

Image credit: Library of Congress, Harris & Ewing Collection

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