Woman of the week.

• Author: Martin, Karen
• Position: THE 1930S FLASHBACK - United States Department of Labor Secretary Frances Perkins

June 5, 1937, Karen Martin

Frances Perkins's fight for shorter hours started with her work for the fifty-four-hour work week for women in New York, passed in 1912. She went on to champion the forty-eight-hour week, approved in 1933, and is now working for the genuinely progressive investigations now in full swing, of the possibilities of the forty-hour minimum week.

During recent days, Miss Perkins has seen four of her warmly espoused causes boosted up the ladder toward fulfillment: the new minimum hour and wage legislation; Social Security, a modern term for a principle which she has fostered from the beginning of her career, was upheld by the court; the Wagner Labor Relations Act, which she describes as "a law preventing interference with a right labor always had," was declared constitutional; and her New York minimum hour law won its case in the Supreme Court.

When, in March 1933, President Roosevelt, who had tested her steel and found it strong, found her his best candidate for the difficult post of Secretary of Labor, she had just won a battle. A few days before she took her new office, her forty-eight-hour bill for which she had been fighting, and...