Frances Perkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's only secretary of labor, drafted important New Deal legislation, including the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. She was born Fannie Coralie Perkins in 1880 in Boston, Massachusetts, to Susan Bean and Frederick W. Perkins. Her father owned a stationery business that also sold books and periodicals. He helped educate her. Fannie attended a largely male preparatory school, then went to Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts beginning in 1898. She switched her interest from chemistry and physics to social work after attending meetings of the National Consumers' League and hearing lectures by Florence Kelley (1859-1932), national secretary of the league. The group was dedicated to the elimination of child labor and of low-paying shops that exploited immigrant laborers. Not able to land a job in social work after she graduated from college, Perkins taught briefly in New England and...