"I had to do something about unnecessary
hazards to life, unnecessary poverty. It was sort of up to me. this
feeling...sprang out of a period of great confusion which overtakes
all young people. One thing was perfectly clear...the circumstances
of the life of the people of my generation was my business, and I
ought to do something about it." -Frances Perkins, Secretary of
Labor, 1933-1945 from her Oral History
This film is about conscience and politics. If
history teaches values, then in Frances Perkins' life, we learn of
a time when, as she said, "People cared to change the way things were."
This is the story of a woman whose anguish over the misery of workers
in the emerging industrial world of her youth, led her to give up
the comforts of home and family, turn from teaching to settlement
house work, ultimately becoming one of the outstanding social reformers
in the twentieth century. It is a film not only about an individual
but about her contemporaries, about how the movement for social justice
took hold of and fired the imagination of Frances Perkins and the
men and women around her. It is about a woman who denied she had any
ambition, yet was torn between her obligations to husband and child
and her devotion to public service.
Frances
Perkins was a superb storyteller with a remarkable memory.In You May
Call Her Madam Secretary, Broadway and film actress Frances Sternhagen
presents Perkins' character on camera using the words from her Oral
History, on record at Columbia University, and from lectures, letters
and writings. Whole conversations with FDR, Al Smith and others of
her era are retold here as she remembered them. "Women have got
the vote, I think they ought to be in government, I think you
should be in government." - Governor Al Smith, 1919, naming Frances
Perkins to the New York State Industrial Board.
You May Call Her Madam Secretary traces the rise of social conscience
in this country: from the outrage that followed the Triangle Shirtwaist
Fire in 1911, still the worst industrial fire in U.S. history, to
the revolutionary legislation of the New Deal: Social Security, unemployment
insurance, the minimum wage and maximum hours of work, the end to
child labor. This is a film about the complex Frances Perkins, a New
Deal "radical," a believer in state's rights, a driving force behind
those reforms which shapes our society.
You May Call Her Madam Secretary 58 minutes (may be shown in two half-hour
sessions) $49.95 (To purchase this DVD
please go to our Order Form)
