 That was what America was like when Roosevelt offered Francis Perkins a very important job. I had about a day's notice before showing up at Roosevelt's house. I wrote out a list of the things that I thought I would like to try to do if I were Secretary of Labor. I'd been accumulating them for some time. I had written them out on slips and dropped them in the lower right drawer. When I came to put them together, they represented quite a program of ideas. She wanted to feed the hungry, give people work, put an end to child labor. Yes, there were still many children in the factories and fields in 1932. She wanted a minimum wage and a limit on the hours of work, benefits for people who got sick or hurt on the job, unemployment insurance and pensions for old people. The federal government had no such programs. If you were out of work without savings, you could starve. If you were old without help, you were helpless. Private charities did what they could. It wasn't enough. Her ideas were revolutionary. FDR said, I won't have the dough, Francis. She didn't want the dough, either. She wanted social insurance. She once said this. Insurance is the most brilliant achievement of the mind of man. She began to think about these ideas at Mount Holyoke College. Mount Holyoke women should live for God and do something. That's what Mary Lyon, the school's founder, said. She made the college intense, rigorous, religious. By the late 1890s, when Fanny Perkins arrived, Mount Holyoke had changed. Its women were studying experimental psychology, industrial history. My teacher, Anna Mae Sewell, had the brilliant idea of having a class of perfectly innocent girls that is innocent of the industrial process. Go and look at some factories, paper mills, and textile mills. I was astonished and fascinated by what I saw. I think she also opened the door to the idea that there were some people much poorer than other people. That not everybody had comfort and security, and that the lack of comfort and security in some people was not solely due to the fact that they drank, which had been the prevailing view of society.