LEWISTON — Frances Perkins’ appointment as the first woman in the U.S. Cabinet wasn’t even her biggest accomplishment.

It was her work in leading President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal societal changes that will be her most lasting legacy, said Laura Fortman, who directs the nonprofit Frances Perkins Center in Newcastle.

When the flinty New Englander ascended to the role of U.S. labor secretary, she had plans for enacting federal child labor protection, a minimum wage, unemployment aid and health care insurance.

She defined her era with the passage of Social Security.

“She’s very driven by action and this concept of social insurance,” Fortman said. “It was always meant as something that we would all pay into to ameliorate the risk that none of us can stand on our own.”

On the most basic level, Perkins was driven by a need to act if something seemed wrong, said Fortman, a former commissioner of the Maine Department of Labor who lectured about Perkins on Thursday as part of the Great Falls Forum series of talks at the Lewiston Public Library.

Born in Boston and raised in Worcester, she was a student at Mount Holyoke College when a professor required her to go into the nearby factories and see how the workers existed.

“What she saw there helped her reframe how she looked at the income inequality in the country,” Fortman said. She’d assumed that problems in the people, such as laziness, made them poor.

“When she saw the working conditions and the wages that people were earning, she started thinking that the economy had something to do with this,” Fortman said.

By 1910, at the the age of 28, she was advocating for workers with the New York Consumers League. The next year, she witnessed the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in Manhattan that killed 146 garment workers. Many had been locked inside to keep them from leaving their jobs.

By 1929, just nine years after passage of the 19th Amendment ensured that women could vote, FDR appointed Perkins as New York’s labor commissioner.

When he was elected president three years later, she went along.

Perkins had a strict belief that change had to follow a pattern of investigation, analysis and public discussion. She had little regard for either “highbrows” who talked a lot but failed to act or anyone who tried to skip over the hard work that democracy demands, according to Fortman.

“She clearly believed in professionalism,” Fortman said Thursday. “She (also) had a lot of respect for the law and how to change it.”

Perkins was one of two people whose Cabinet tenure with FDR lasted all 12 years of his presidency, from 1933 to 1945. The U.S. Department of Labor building in Washington is named after Perkins.

Fortman is working to preserve Perkins’ family farm in Newcastle.

Though Perkins didn’t grow up in Maine, she thought of herself as a Mainer. She spent summers here and had “deep roots” in Maine, Fortman said.

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