In Albany, Perkins also learned how to deal with older men. One day she was standing by the elevators of the state capitol when a crude little senator named Hugh Frawley came out and started describing the confidential details of the backroom negotiations and moaning about the shameful work he was compelled to perform. Swept up in self-pity, he cried, “Every man’s got a mother, you know.”
Perkins kept a folder titled “Notes on the Male Mind” and recorded this episode in it. It played a major role in her political education: “I learned from this that the way men take women in political life is to associate them with motherhood. They know and respect their mothers—99 percent of them do. It’s a primitive and primary attitude. I said to myself, ‘That’s the way to get things done. So behave, dress, and so comport yourself that you remind them subconsciously of their mothers.’ ”28
Perkins was then thirty-three, and perky, though certainly not beautiful. Up until then, she had dressed in the conventional fashion of the day. But from that point on she began dressing like a mother. She wore somber black dresses with white bow ties at the neck. She wore pearls and a black tricorn hat and adopted a matronly demeanor. The press picked up on the change and started calling her “Mother Perkins” for the way she led sixty-something state legislators. She despised the nickname, but she found that the method worked. She suppressed her sexuality, her femininity, and even part of her identity in order to win the confidence of the old men around her. It’s a questionable tactic today, when women should not have to suppress themselves to succeed, but in the 1920s, it was necessary.
Among other projects, Perkins lobbied furiously for a bill to limit the workweek to 54 hours. She tried to befriend the machine bosses to get them to support the bill. They did their best to deceive and out-maneuver her, but she won support from some of the rank and file. “Me sister was a poor girl and she went to work when she was young,” one machine pol, Big Tim Sullivan, confided to her. “I feel kind sorry for them poor girls that work the way you say they work. I’d like to do them a good turn. I’d like to do you a good turn.”29
When the 54-hour workweek bill finally came to a vote, the legislators exempted one of the most egregious but politically influential industries, the canners. The activists for the bill had spent the previous months insisting that there could be no exemptions. All industries, especially the canners, had to be covered by the legislation. At the crucial moment, Perkins stood at the edge of the legislative chamber. On the spot, she had to decide whether to accept this deeply flawed bill or reject it as a matter of principle. Her colleagues argued vociferously for rejecting it. Instead, she took half a loaf. She told legislators her organization would support the bill. “This is my responsibility. I’ll do it and hang for it if necessary.”30 Many Progressives were indeed outraged. But her tough-minded mentor, Florence Kelley, completely endorsed her decision. Forever after Perkins was known as a “half-a-loaf girl,” in public or private life, as someone who would take as much as circumstances allowed.31
Around this time she met Paul Wilson, a handsome, wellborn progressive, who became a close aide to New York’s reformist mayor, John Purroy Mitchel. Wilson fell in love with Perkins and slowly won her over. “Before you came into my life,” she wrote to him, “it was a lonesome place—cold and raw and trembling except on the outside…. You stormed into my heart somehow and I could never let you go.”32
The courtship was odd. Perkins’s letters to Wilson are romantic, earnest, and passionate. But with her friends and co-workers she was extremely reticent, and decades later she would deny that she had ever felt strong emotions. They were married on September 26, 1913, at Grace Church in Lower Manhattan. They did not invite their friends or tell them of the wedding in advance. Perkins and Wilson informed their families, but too late for them to attend. Perkins dressed for the wedding alone in her apartment on Waverly Place and probably walked over. The two witnesses were just people who happened to be in the building at the time. There was no luncheon or tea afterward.
When she described her decision to marry in later years, she adopted the matter-of-fact tone that you might use for making a dental appointment. “There was a New England pride in me,” Perkins said decades later. “I wasn’t anxious to get married. To tell the truth, I was reluctant. I was no longer a child but a grown woman. I hadn’t wanted to marry. I liked life better in a single harness.”33 But people were constantly asking her when she would find a husband, so she decided to get it out of the way, thinking, “I know Paul Wilson well. I like him…. I enjoy his friends and company and I might as well marry and get it off my mind.”
Their first years were relatively happy. They lived in a gracious townhouse on Washington Square, not far from where Perkins had been drinking tea when the Triangle fire erupted. Wilson served in the mayor’s office. Perkins continued with her social work. Their home became a center for political activists of the day.
Soon things began to deteriorate. John Mitchel was voted out of office. Wilson had an affair with a society lady, which caused a furor and then was never mentioned again. Perkins began to feel stifled in the marriage and asked for a separation. “I’ve made some wretched blunders,” Perkins wrote to Wilson. “I’ve become a different kind of person with a lesser degree of working efficiency and paler kind of spiritual efficiency.”34
Then she got pregnant. The boy died shortly after birth. Perkins was consumed by grief, but that, too, was never mentioned again. Afterward, Perkins became executive secretary of the Maternity Center Association, a voluntary organization that sought to lower maternal and infant death rates. She also had a daughter, Susanna, named after the wife of the second governor of the Plymouth Colony.
Perkins wanted to have another child, but by 1918 Wilson was showing signs of mental illness. He seems to have been manic-depressive. He couldn’t withstand any pressure. “It was always up and down. He was sometimes depressed, sometimes excited,” Perkins said later. From 1918 on there were never anything but very short periods of reasonably comfortable accommodations to life. In one of these manic phases, Wilson invested his life’s savings in a gold scheme and was wiped out. Perkins was sometimes afraid to be alone with him, because he was prone to violent rages and was much stronger than she was. He would spend significant parts of the next several decades in asylums and institutional care, where Perkins would visit him on weekends. When he was home he was unable to handle any responsibility. He had a nurse—euphemistically known as a secretary—to look after him. “He was becoming a kind of nonperson,” Perkins’s biographer, George Martin, wrote, “someone to be talked at rather than with.”35
Her New England reticence kicked in. She called the loss of their family fortune “this accident,” and she realized she would have to work to support the family. She pushed such “accidents” “into the background. I haven’t brooded over them and had a Freudian collapse.”36 For the next several decades she tried to rope off her private life, conceal it from public view. This attitude was partly a product of her Yankee upbringing. But she was also reticent as a matter of philosophy and conviction. She believed that private emotions were too intricate to be exposed to public glare; she would have been horrified by the culture of exposure that is so prevalent today.
There is a general struggle between two philosophic dispositions, what the social critic Rochelle Gurstein calls the party of reticence and the party of exposure. The party of reticence believes that the tender emotions of the inner world are brutalized and polluted when they are exposed to the glare of public exhibition. The party of exposure believes that anything secret is suspect and that life works better when everything is brought out into the open and discussed. Perkins was definitely a member of the party of reticence. She stood with those who believe that everything that is complex, nuanced, contradictory, paradoxical, and mysterious about private sensations is reduced to banality when it is paraded about and summarized in pat phrases. Damage is done when people bring intimate things before mere acquaintances or total strangers. Precious emotions are lifted out of the context of trust and intimacy and trampled. Therefore people should keep what is private, private. Though she was a believer in government when it came to serving the poor and protecting the weak, she had a strong aversion to government when it trampled the right to privacy.