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Born in Boston, Massachusetts to a middle-class Republican family
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Family moved to Worcester, Massachusetts where her father opened a profitable stationery business
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Attended Mount Holyoke College and majored in the natural sciences, studied economic history
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Graduated from Mount Holyoke - accepted series of teaching positions and volunteered time at settlement houses. There she learned firsthand of the dangerous conditions of factory work and the desperation of workers unable to collect their promised wages or secure medical care for workplace injuries
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By 1909, she had given up teaching science and moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where she earned a master's degree in economics and sociology in 1910
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Served as secretary of the New York Consumers' League; working closely with Florence Kelley, she successfully lobbied the state legislature for a bill limiting the workweek for women and children to 54 hours. She also became active in the women's suffrage movement, marching in suffrage parades and giving street-corner speeches
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She watched helplessly as 146 workers, most of them young women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and also witnessed the widespread labor upheavals among garment and other New York City workers and learned from friends about the one-word solution to poverty
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Perkins married Paul Wilson, an economist and budget expert with the New York Bureau of Municipal Research, at the age of 33 and shortly after, gave birth to a daughter
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Perkins accepted Governor Al Smith's invitation to join the New York State Industrial Commission, becoming the first female member of the commission
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She became chairwoman of the New York State Industrial commission
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New governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed Perkins industrial commissioner of the state of New York, the chief post in the state labor department.
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When Roosevelt tapped her as labor secretary, Perkins drew on the New York State experience as the model for new federal programs. She put every ounce of her formidable energy into weaving a safety net for a Depression-scarred society, securing a remarkable array of benefits for American workers
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It was also the unflappable Perkins who advised President Roosevelt to ignore the pleadings of state and local officials for federal troops to quell the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. The successful resolution of that strike as well as countless others during her tenure as labor secretary laid the foundation for the rebirth of American labor
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Perkins also chaired the Committee on Economic Security, which developed and drafted the legislation that became the Social Security Act
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The House Un-American Activities Committee brought an impeachment resolution against her after she refused to deport Harry Bridges, the head of the west coast longshore union. The impeachment proceedings eventually were dropped for lack of evidence
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Perkins resigned from her position as labor secretary to head the U.S. delegation to the International Labor Organization conference in Paris.
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President Truman subsequently appointed her to the Civil Service Commission
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Perkins assumed a professorship at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations
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Passed at age 85 in New York, New York
