Frances Perkins

Perkins was having tea nearby on 25 March 1911 when the Triangle Shirtwaist factory caught fire, and she ran to the square in time to watch young women jump from the ninth floor because the doors had been locked. She later called it the day the New Deal was born. She went to work for the state factory commission, walked through mills and canneries herself, and learned to write law that inspectors could actually enforce.

When Franklin Roosevelt asked her to be Secretary of Labor in 1933 — the first woman in any American cabinet — she accepted on condition that he back a list she carried in her handbag: unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, a minimum wage, a maximum working week, an end to child labour. She served twelve years, longer than any labour secretary before or since, and most of the list became the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. She was quietly hostile to publicity, kept her married name out of office, and asked to be buried in the Maine village where her family had farmed since the eighteenth century.