Biden establishes national monument for first female Cabinet secretary
President Joe Biden on Monday signed a proclamation to establish a national monument in Newcastle, Maine, that will honor Francis Perkins, who became the first woman named to a Cabinet-level position when she was chosen by FDR to serve as secretary for the U.S.
Department of Labor. The move highlights the Biden-Harris administration’s record of advancing women’s rights and strengthening the labor movement while also commemorating Perkins’s achievements, including the establishment of pensions, unemployment, and workers’ compensation, the minimum wage and overtime pay, the 40-hour workweek, and child labor laws.
Perkins is also credited with helping to lay the blueprint for legislation like the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the National Labor Relations Act.
Research suggests she may have been a lesbian, perhaps even the first LGBTQ Cabinet secretary. According to the National Park Service, “Perkins’ relationship with one roommate, Mary Harriman Rumsey,” who was a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, “was very intimate,” though an entry for the late labor secretary on the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project quotes her biographer Kirsten Downey’s assertion that “it is probably impossible to know whether Frances’s relationship with Mary was also sexual or romantic.” The post Biden establishes national monument for first female Cabinet secretary appeared first on Washington Blade: LGBTQ News, Politics, LGBTQ Rights, Gay News.
