The Shakespeare Club begins a New Year
submitted by Joan Gaughan, Shakespeare Club
On a pretty day in late September, the members of the Shakespeare Club met for lunch at Frank’s Restaurant to review their summer activities and to begin their 2026-27 season.
The next meeting of the Club on October 13, featured memorabilia of the Club’s history, courtesy of former Club member, Patty Swaney, who brought in clippings, photos, and articles of past Club activities while enriching the collection with her own memories.
The early groups met in members’ homes so children were sometimes present. The meetings included discussions of local current events as well as national and international news, a feature that remains part of the Club’s agenda. Poems, songs, piano playing, readings, and other activities that contributed to self-improvement were also included. Of particular interest was a booklet providing expenditures and membership fees of Club members. Donations of $1 or $2 were given to children’s homes, the arboretum, federation dues, memorial flowers, and Christmas cards, to name a few.
Husbands attended social events once a year, sometimes with other local groups such as the Saturday Club, the 20th Century Club, and/or the Historical Society.
Frances Perkins. francesperkinscenter.org.
The third meeting on October 27, featured a presentation by Joan Gaughan on Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a Cabinet position as Secretary of Labor under President Franklin Roosevelt. On March 25, 1911, Perkins was having tea with friends in New York City’s Washington Square when she saw flames engulfing the upper three stories of the nearby Triangle Shirtwaist Factory where dozens of women and girls, trapped by a collapsed fire escape and a door that had been locked by management in the name of preventing theft, were either jumping or falling to their deaths on the sidewalk below. In all, 146 workers, most of them immigrants, perished. Until 9/11, it was the most catastrophic event in the city’s history. For Frances Perkins, the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was “the day the New Deal was born.”
Born in Boston in 1880, her journey to the New Deal had begun at the dawn of the Progressive Era when activists such as Upton Sinclair and Eugene Debs were joined by women like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley to fight an unregulated capitalism that saw men as well as women and children, sometimes as young as five years old, often working14-16 hour days in unsanitary and unsafe conditions, where there were no minimum wage laws, no unemployment compensation, and unionization was illegal.
As a student at Mount Holyoke, under the influence of women activists such as Kelley and Annah May Soule, she had become convinced that political action was crucial to overcoming social injustice. After a short stint in Chicago working at Jane Addams’ Hull House, she had returned East and would come to work with Governors Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt to enact legislation that would improve labor conditions. Then, when Roosevelt became president, she, along with Harry Hopkins, crafted the legislation that became the New Deal—Social Security, establishing a minimum wage, an eight-hour workday, ending child labor and improving workplace safety. She helped to craft the National Recovery Act ensuring that federal money would be spent on schools, roads, housing, and many other projects that provided employment for people hit by the Depression. The one thing that had been on her agenda, universal access to health care, was not enacted.
Following Roosevelt’s death, President Truman appointed her to the US Civil Service Commission where she spoke out against government officials requiring stenographers and secretaries to be physically attractive. The members of the Shakespeare Club had no objection to that.
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