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Frances Perkins Accomplishments

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Raised in a strictly conservative family, Frances Perkins never saw the extraordinary poverty or drastic unemployment in Boston in the 20’s and 30’s. She had always been taught that those who were poor were lazy or uneducated. Her family’s most important value was education. Perkins’ intelligence lead her to college, which was rare for a woman. There, she found a love for politics. She realized that being poor wasn’t a result of laziness, it was a result of life. Throughout her years, she accomplished much more than anyone thought a woman could. Frances Perkins revolutionized the state of Americans by being a key-contributor to the New Deal with her bravery and intelligence, which allowed the US to be successful during the war.
Frances was …show more content…

Perkins then became very interested in all school subjects, especially literature. It was uncommon for women to go to college at this time, but Perkins did. While her father wanted her to stay home to cook and clean, he respected her love for education and thought she would be an excellent teacher. She enrolled in Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in 1898. She was very popular in college, taking the most rigorous courses, and becoming class president. She majored in physics with minors in chemistry and biology. However, she took a course in American economic history her last semester in college, and that’s the class that influenced her the most. She realized that her calling was helping people. “From the time I was in college I was horrified at the work that many women and children had to do in factories. There were absolutely no effective laws that regulated the number of hours they were permitted to work. There were no provisions which guarded their health nor adequately looked after their compensation in case of injury. Those things seemed very wrong. I was young and was inspired with the idea of reforming, or at least doing what I could, to help change those abuses.” When she got home, her parents told her that she should be a teacher or work at a church. She expected them to be more open minded and accepting of her career choice: a social worker. She ended up getting a job

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