Gutsy Women: January 2006

Friday, January 20, 2006

Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor

Frances Perkins was born in Boston, Massachussetts on April 10, 1882. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College and later worked as a social worker in Worcester and a teacher in Chicago. While living in Chicago, Illinois she became involved in Hull House, a settlement house founded by Jane Addams. Later she moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where she worked closely with immigrant girls.

Frances earned her Masters Degree at Columbia University in 1910 before becoming the executive secretary of the National Consumers League (NCL). Her work with the NCL brought her into contact with New York politicians Robert Wagner and Alfred Smith. In 1919, Smith, the new governor of New York, appointed Frances to the Industrial Board. In 1924 she became Chairman of the Board. It was while serving this appointment that she found enough time in her schedule to obtrain a reduction in the work week for women to 54 hours.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt became governor of New York in 1929 he appointed Perkins as his Industrial Commissioner. Later, in 1933 after he had become President, Roosevelt selected Frances as his Secretary of Labor. She became the first woman in American history to hold a Cabinet post. Frances was a strong advocate of government involvement in the economy and played an important role in many aspects of the New Deal including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Labour Relations Act and the Social Security Act.

In 1938 Perkins persuaded the Congress to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act. The main purpose of the Act was to eliminate "labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, efficiency and well-being of workers." To this day the Fair Labor Standards Act plays an active role in governing labor expectations and also prohibited child labour in many industries.

Frances remained as Secretary of Labor until the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945. In 1946 she published her book, The Roosevelt I Knew.

Later, President Harry Truman appointed her to the United States Civil Service Commission. After leaving office in 1953 she taught at Cornell University. On May 14, 1965 Frances Perkins died in New York, but her legacy lives on to this day.

Source: http://GutsyWomen.blogspot.com

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Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Virginia Hall, Secret Agent

Virginia Hall was born in Baltimore, Maryland USA on April 6, 1906 where her father was a cinema owner. She earned her college degree at Radcliffe College where she also developed a keen interest in languages. She was fluent in French, Italian and German.

In 1931 Hall was appointed to the staff of the American Embassy in Poland. Over the next few years she worked in Estonia, Austria and Turkey. While in Turkey she suffered a devasting blow, when after an accident, she lost a leg. The US State Department had a regulation that forbid employment of people with "any amputation of a portion of a limb" and in May, 1939 she was forced to resign.

She relocated to France and was living there when World War II began. She joined the French Ambulance Service Unit, but when the German Army invaded in May, 1940, she left for England and found work in the US Embassy there.

In 1941 Virginia was recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) as a British special agent. She was given the code name "Marie" and returned to France where she posed as a reporter for the New York Post while helping to set up resistance networks in Vichy, France.

In early 1942 she moved to Lyons, France and worked closely with the French Resistance in that area. By the end of the year German officials became suspicious of Hall and her activivites and she was forced to leave the country.

On March 21, 1944 she returned to France as a representative of the Office of Strategic Services. After landing on the Brittany cost she joined the resistance in the Haute-Loire region. The Gestapo were now aware of her activities and return to the country where she became known as the "lady with the limp." Despite the ever-present danger in her life, she was able to inform the Allies that the German General Staff of critical information.

In 1945 she was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by President Harry S. Truman. She then joined the CIA in 1951 where she became an intelligence analyst on French parlimentary affairs.

Virginia Hall retired from the CIA in 1966 and in 1982 she passed away at the Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Washington, DC.

Source: http://www.GutsyWomen.blogspot.com

Monday, January 02, 2006

Catherine Stratton Ladd, Writer

LADD, Catherine Stratton (28 Oct. 1808-30 Jan. 1899), educator and writer, was born in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of James Stratton and Ann Collins. Her father, a native of Ireland, had been in the United States for only two years when, just six months after Catherine's birth, he fell off a boat and drowned. Catherine Stratton was educated in Richmond at the same school attended by Edgar Allen Poe. in 1828 she married George Williamson Livermore Ladd, a portrait and miniature painter, who had studied with S. F. B. Morse in Boston; the couple had two children.

The Ladds first settled in Charleston, South Carolina, where not long after their marriage, she began to write stories, poems, and essays, particularly on art and education. These were published under several different pen names--Minnie Mayflower, Arcturus, Morna, and Alida--in various southern journals, among them, Floral Wreath. As reflected in "Unknown Flowers" (by Morna), which was published in the second volume of the Southern Literary Messenger (Jan. 1836), her poems focused on nature and exhibited a religious zeal that was characteristic of her era:

Oh! many are the unknown flowers,
By human eyes unseen,
That bloom in nature's woodland bowers,
Of bright and changeless green...
And lovely birds, whose brilliant wings
Are bright with hues of brighter things,
Make music in those woodland bowers,
those Edens of the unknown flowers.

In addition to her poems and sketches, Ladd is said to have contributed articles to the Charleston News and Courier, in which she advocated the use of white labor and the development of manufacturing in the South. At least as early as 1851 she argued that South Carolina could not compete with the Deep South in raising cotton and that even with an extensive system of slave labor South Carolina cotton farmers would realize no profit. Ladd also wrote at least two plays, Grand Scheme and Honeymoon, which were performed by friends and reportedly were locally popular, though this cannot be confirmed.

After living in Charleston, the Ladds moved to Augusta and eventually to Macon, Georgia, where for three years she was principal of Vineville Academy. In 1839, after hearing that an unused building that was suitable for a girl's school had become available, the Ladds returned to Charleston. In 1840 she opened the Winnsboro (also spelled Winnsborough) Female Institute at Winnsboro, South Carolina. The Winnsboro Institute was one of the largest and best-known boarding and day schools for young women in South Carolina. During the Civil War the school had full enrollment; some students were from Winnsboro, but the majority came from other parts of the state. Music, art, literature, dramatics, and the social graces were especially emphasized. The "formal education of women in Winnsboro made a notable advancement" when Ladd opened the institute (Bolick, p. 66). Still successful ten years later, the institute employed nine teachers and had an enrollment of about one hundred students. Over the years her school--and home--became cultura and social centers for the entire community.

In 1861 the Winnsboro Institute was closed by the Civil War. As permanent president of the Ladies' Relief Association of Fairfield County, Ladd spent the war nursing Confederate soldiers, among whom was her son, Albert Washington Ladd, wounded at the battle of Seven Pines (Va). Ladd's husband died in 1864, and in early 1865 her home was burned to the ground by Union troops during General William T. Sherman's march through South Carolina. Winnsboro Institute was not reopened until 1870.

In 1880 Ladd retired to "Buena Vista Plantation," situated nineteen miles from Winnsboro, near Buckhead, South Carolina, and she died there almost two decades later. She had been losing her sight for some time and by 1891 was completely blind, but she continued to write, penning the following verse as late as 1898:

Though our way be dark and dreary,
Though life's trials press us more,
Thou hast mansions for us ready,
Homes where troubles come no more.
O, my Saviour, guide me, watch me,
Lead me by Thy loving hand;
Let me feel that Thou art near me.
Until I reach the Promised Land.

Ladd's ability to organize cultural, social, and educational activities outweighs any modern interest in her minor and now obscure writings. By supporting the arts and by spreading a knowledge and appreciation of music, art, literature, and drama, Ladd provided her region with a center of culture and stability in the years of great social upheaval just before, during, and immediately following the Civil War.

Taken from: American National Biography, Volume 13, Oxford University Press. New York. 1999. pages 19-20.

Source: http://GutsyWomen.blogspot.com