First woman in the US Cabinet (as secretary of labor) and major architect of the New Deal. Personally witnessed the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, where over a hundred women died, many leaping to their deaths, and after that couldn’t shut up for a second about workers’ rights. Kept a big red envelope in which she filed away her “Notes on Male Minds,” a coping strategy that led her to conclude, among other things, that men respected mothers and thus she should dress like one. By and large, that seemed to work, though she found herself nicknamed Ma Perkins at the ripe old age of thirty-three as a result. It was, in her calculation, a small price to pay for such policy innovations as, you know, Social Security.