Maine's Newest National Monument: Giovanna Gray Lockhart Fights for Frances Perkins

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit in its many forms. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today it is my great pleasure to interview Giovanna Gray Lockhart, who is the executive director of the Frances Perkins Center. Welcome. Thanks for coming in today. I am really interested to hear about the Frances Perkins Center because she is well known in history, one of the great women that we all know, broke a lot of barriers I think in lots of different ways. So I want to start with that and then I want to understand what your connection is.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Well, Frances Perkins is one of those, like you said, just trailblazing women. She was the first female presidential cabinet secretary in this country in 1933, when that was really something that was out of the ordinary. But really what makes her unique and special goes much further back in her career and in her life. Her family is from Newcastle, Maine, a saltwater farm on River Road, 57 acres. It was a brick making facility, then it was a farm, then during industrialization it just didn't have anything happening on it. And that's when her family left and went to Boston. So she was raised in Massachusetts, but the place that shaped her character, and she refers to it often this way, was this property, this parcel of land on River Road. When you think about great leaders, and particularly great women, looking back in time at the places that shaped them, it really gives you a sense of why they pursued the certain career paths that they did, why they bucked certain expectations of them.

Frances Perkins graduated from college in 1902. What was expected of women at that time was very limited. She was trained as a social worker. She saw what was happening in the country in the 1910s and twenties, and took her training and said, rather than helping one person one by one, I can help millions of people by creating policies that will lift folks out of poverty, help them have a living wage, make sure that they have the best possible life. And she really believed that the government had a particular role to play in that. So our mission is to educate and inspire people about the importance of the government's role in economic security and social justice, and how one woman can really change the world.

Lisa Belisle: That's such an important idea, because it's easy to get caught up in the ways that we often feel overwhelmed by what's going on around us. And to know that somebody like Frances Perkins, existing in an arguably more restrictive time, particularly with regard to being a woman, still made a decision: I'm not going to accept the status quo. I'm going to figure out how I can impact change, and I'm going to do it in such a way that it's going to impact change for lots of people. So to have somebody like that as a role model, I think is really important.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Absolutely. It came at great personal sacrifice to her too. She worked for FDR, not just when he was president for those 12 years. She's also the longest serving cabinet member in this country, which is kind of wild. Obviously we don't have multi-term presidents anymore, but she was also working for him in New York State when he was governor. She was the labor commissioner of New York State, and at the time she was paid $8,000 a year, and that was the highest paid government salary. People were not happy about her making this salary, but he knew that in order to convince her to take the job, he had to pay her what she was worth. And it's worth noting that she was the breadwinner in her family. Her husband, unfortunately early on in their marriage, was diagnosed with mental illness. She had a 2-year-old at the time and had to work to support the family, which again was very unusual for a woman at that time of her education and background. And so she went to Washington, as she said, "to serve FDR, God and the American people", and she was so focused and so steadfast on that, that the personal sacrifices that she made in her life really felt worth it.

Lisa Belisle: Giovanna, what is your connection to the Frances Perkins Center and how did you get involved?

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: I've spent my career working in this area of gender equity and in the intersection of policy, politics, and media. I worked in the United States Senate for four years for the Senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand. At that point in my career, I had not really understood how important it is to have a woman at the highest levels of power. I liked the idea of it. I was a gender and women's studies major. I was very politically active all through my twenties. But when I got to the Senate, in meetings I could see how, for instance, on the Armed Services committee, which Senator Gillibrand served on when I was there, she would bring up things like the mental health of troops who were serving at that time in Afghanistan, and what's the impact on their families of these long periods of time that they're away, and what happens when they come back? How are we taking care of them? It took her voice to actually raise those issues, and she used to tell us, when women's voices are heard, the outcomes are better. I truly believe that, and saw it firsthand.

From that point on, I committed my career to raising women's voices and the power of women's voices. I moved to Maine full-time during the pandemic, like many people from big cities and other places, mostly just to make sure that my children had a nice and stable school environment. I had been living here actually on Littlejohn Island just in summers and vacations. But when I came to Maine, and things were going back to normal and folks were heading back to wherever they had come from, I decided to stay here. I was consulting and working for folks in New York and Washington, and I decided I didn't want to do that anymore and I wanted to just be in this place.

So through a friend of a friend, I heard about the Frances Perkins Center. I had known about Frances Perkins, but I didn't know she had this family connection to Maine and that her homestead was just an hour up the road. So I went through the interview process and here I am. I've been in the role for a little over a year, and I'm trying to create a national cultural institution here in Maine. It's been such a rewarding experience, because while it was largely a volunteer driven organization for so long, we've had some really great wins over the last year where we've catapulted ourselves into a different level.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about those wins.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Well, the real turning point for us earlier this year was we received a Mellon Foundation Humanities in Place grant. It's the first one of its kind in the state. The purpose of it is to help us with archival work and curatorial work, because we own the property and we own all of the personal objects, books, papers, et cetera of Frances Perkins, and they're all there, but we haven't done anything with them. So this grant is going to enable us to hire the people we need to do work and grow the organization. The second thing that happened was, so this property was in the Perkins family from 1750 to 2020. We purchased it from Frances' grandson and it needed a lot of restoration and preservation work.

We did all of that. It took three years, a big capital campaign, and I came in at the tail end of that. But it got the attention of the White House and the Department of Interior. We were designated a national historic landmark, but they were interested in creating more national monuments and national parks around the country that recognized important women in history. President Biden put out an executive order in March stating this, and challenging the Department of Interior and the National Park Service to find these sites. Only 12 out of 430 national parks in this country tell the story of a significant woman in history. So we are hoping to be the 13th. We ran a campaign this summer to create the Frances Perkins National Monument, and now we are just fingers crossed, awaiting this designation.

The great thing about that is it's enabled me to talk to so many people, legislators and community leaders and business owners, to find out how they feel about it and also teach them about Frances Perkins, this amazing woman that really is so connected to this place in this state. We did not have a single person say to us that they didn't want it to happen. We had bipartisan support from our congressional delegation and wonderful op-eds in the Portland Press Herald that talked about how, in these troubling times, to remind ourselves of how far we've come and who those people were that helped our country get here. I can't think of someone more deserving of a national monument. And that way, when young people come and visit national parks as they do every year, they will learn about this person and hopefully take something away for their own journeys.

Lisa Belisle: What is the importance, in your opinion, of having representation of women amongst the national monuments?

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Millions of people visit national parks every year, and we think of the National Park system and those sites, not just the beautiful natural spaces like Acadia, but there are many cultural and historic places as well. We often think about battlefields or monuments to deceased presidents. The interpretation of history is so important, and we've learned, especially in the last several decades, that we need to tell a different story about this country. When narratives are inclusive of lots of different perspectives, even those subtle shifts matter. I took my son recently, he's a history buff, as much as an 8-year-old can be, and I took him to Mount Vernon, and on the tour they were talking about enslaved people instead of slaves. When I went and did a school trip there, they referred to the enslaved people as slaves.

Now, that small language shift reflects a different perspective. And now my 8-year-old is hearing enslaved people and asking questions about why that is, and we're talking about it in a different way. The same goes for women. I've spoken to school groups, and I've met young women, and they say, wow, someone who's also from rural Maine like me could follow this path. And that's powerful. So representation matters, not just because it's important to understand the full scope of our country's history and all of the different nuances. I'll tell you the truth, a lot of people don't know Frances Perkins, and it's because she wrote herself out of history. She didn't like talking to the press and didn't write an autobiography, all the things that people in her position would have done. So we have to tell her story. The National Park Service is the gold standard in historic interpretation, as well as preserving spaces in perpetuity. So once the federal government owns this property that we hope to donate to them, they are responsible for it forever. They talk about how they're in the forever business. And for a small nonprofit, that's really helpful, because we know that this place will be taken care of, and then we can focus our mission on education and programming.

Lisa Belisle: I've always been impressed, being from Maine myself and growing up here, coming back to practice medicine here, raising my kids here. I've been impressed with the fact that we actually have a pretty significant number of women who have done solid things in the world, and I know that Olympia Snowe is one of them. It's a connection because you've done work with the Leadership Institute. I'm wondering, in present day, what are things that we are doing as women and women leaders to shift the perspective, not only for young women, but really for everybody, so that it is more inclusive in the way that we approach things?

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: I think that because it's a small state, in terms of numbers, not in terms of geographic area, people feel more connected to their communities and they also feel more connected to the actual place. We talk a lot about Frances Perkins. When she was in Washington, she would come back to Maine. In 1935 that was a pretty long journey, but she prioritized reconnecting to that place, that property, the river, the paths. What that did for her was restore her. It made her reflective and helped her reorganize her thoughts. She talks about how she would take long walks, these are all in her letters, to work through problems.

I have felt this myself personally. I spent my career in New York and Washington, and there was this constant feeling of, I need to fill my time. Every minute needs to be busy, and there's a sense of urgency around work, personal, all aspects of my life, oftentimes everything overlapping and being enmeshed. Since I've moved here and I've met these incredible women, many of whom you've interviewed, I realize how they, and this is a tricky word, balance, how they organize their lives between what's important to them in their soul, what are their values and how does that show up in their lives, their work. Sometimes these two things are connected, and then their family. I have two kids. I am a single mother and in the process of blending a family, and it's complicated, but I feel so supported by the women in my life here.

It's not like anything I've experienced. So when I look at these historic women from Maine, Olympia Snowe, Margaret Chase Smith, Frances Perkins, and we have a female governor, we have wonderful female leaders in this state, there is this common thread. You look at how they are connected to their families, how they're connected to their communities. I see Chellie Pingree all the time. This is not usual in other places, to see your member of Congress just at regular community events. That helps. When young people, and this is what Olympia Snowe's Institute talks a lot about, understand their values, having a vision for what your life can be and how you're going to turn those values into action, and then using your voice, and then when they can see other women doing that or learn about women in history who are doing that, it tells you that it's possible. Growing up, I didn't know what was possible. It took me a while to figure that out. So I'm just thrilled that my daughter is growing up here and seeing how you can really be the truest form of yourself, but also have big goals, and that they're achievable.

Lisa Belisle: As you're talking, I can't help but think about not only my own daughters, but also my mother, my grandmothers, the very important women in my life. I think about the context from which each of us came. This is something that for my mother and I, we will have conversations around my grandmother, who was alive during Frances Perkins' time. She was from a large family, but she decided, rather than making the choice of being home with children, she became a nurse. She joined the military. She was a military nurse at a time when military nurses were not recognized as being part of the military. And then my mother making her choices and becoming a teacher, and now my daughters. I want to somehow bridge the gap. I want to be able to say, what we have right now, it probably feels less than ideal, and it is certainly less than ideal where we are now, but we have so much more than what we had before.

What lessons can we draw from what happened and how we got to where we are now, that we can move forward? So rather than being discouraged, we can really embrace that need to stay energized.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: If I knew the actual answer to that question, I would be shouting from the rooftops. But you talk about the inspiration of grandmothers and mothers and people who trailblazed before us. Perkins was inspired by her grandmother, who told her, Frances, when a door opens for you, you must walk through it. And that stayed with her. There were plenty of moments where she could have said, you know what, this is too much, the pressure is too hard, the sexism, the misogyny that I'm facing every single day is just too much. But she just remembered that I am helping other people. That was core to her values. It's hard to see what's happening in the news right now. I worked in politics for a long time, and in advocacy, and progress feels slow when you're in it. Wins, either at the legislative level in Congress or even at the community level, it feels so arduous.

However, it's still so important, because that iterative process of making progress, even if it's moving slowly, it's happening. When I was in Congress, it was like, you're not going to get everything you want out of a bill, but you might get something that you want, and then you have to build on that. But I do think that the process and understanding history and how policy gets made isn't something that younger women are as attuned to. You talk to many who say, well, I didn't know that Roe v. Wade was even a law that could be undone. All the things that my mother and grandmother had to fight for, my generation and younger, I think, took for granted. And now we're seeing, okay, regardless of what your political views are, there are still real discrepancies and injustices when it comes to gender discrimination, whether that's pay equity.

Women still make less than men. I think the last figure is 72 cents on the dollar. If you're a Black woman or Hispanic woman, it's even less. So body autonomy, pay, these are just basic human rights, and we have a long way to go. When I talk to young people, instead of depressing them with all of those figures, we mention them, we talk about them, but in order to get inspired, you have to see that the work you're doing is actually making a difference. And there's no better way to do that than in your community. I think that's something that women in Maine truly understand. Look at the nonprofit landscape and the advocacy landscape in this state. It's largely led by women. I have a lot of hope when I meet those Olympia leaders and I hear them talk about what they're going to do in their lives. I'm like, okay, we're going to be all right, because they have such confidence and excitement about what they're doing. But don't get me wrong, I get worried and I get discouraged, and I have to remind myself that this is worthy work to keep doing.

Lisa Belisle: I think it's a helpful thing for you to reflect on the fact that you do get discouraged. Because it's easy to look at someone who's the executive director of the Frances Perkins Center and be like, wow, she seems like she is really energized around this, she's so inspired, she's bringing this great message everywhere, and say, I could never be that person. But if you're saying, of course I get discouraged. The fact that we had Roe v. Wade be overturned, which, like you, I never really thought was possible. And now, as a woman in medicine who is caring for women, the actual very real ramifications that we deal with on a day-to-day basis because that was overturned, has been mind blowing. I never would've expected that in my generation professionally. So to hear you say, okay, I am sobered by this, and yet I have to find a way every day to continue to do the work, to continue to show up in whatever way is possible for me in that moment, at that time.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: When you look at who's creating the laws. Yes, we've made huge progress and there are incredible women in Congress and at the highest levels of government now. There have been many female cabinet secretaries since Frances Perkins. But I saw a shift, I want to say 2017, after the presidential election in 2016. Obviously there were many women who ran for office. That 2018 midterm election was a record year for women running for office. But what I saw that was different than before, and I worked on my first presidential campaign in 2004, was women starting to talk about their personal lives and their families and their struggles and their health conditions and all the different challenges they had. It really was different before that. And this is certainly true with Frances Perkins, you had to present a perfect image, like glass.

Don't get too excited, don't get too upset. Frances said in her oral history, which when you have many hours is worth listening to, she talks about when she first got there, in her first meeting, she's surrounded by men, obviously all white men, and all men who come from either wealthy families or created wealth themselves. And she is a woman from a farming, brick making family in Maine. She said, I didn't want to talk too much, because I didn't want them to think, oh, of course she's a woman, so of course she's talking too much. But they would all go around the table. It's this long rectangular table, and you sit in order of your seniority and what your department is, and this is the Great Depression. There are millions of people out of work.

Her position as labor secretary is quite important, but in the beginning she did not speak up, and he would call on her. So sometimes it takes a man in power to lift women up too. I don't want people to lose sight of that. It's not just women that have to lift up women, that's important, but there are men who are in power, and when they say, I'm going to put a woman in a leadership position, that's really important too. So I hope that the men who are listening, and they're thinking about hiring in their organizations and who gets promoted, think about their responsibility to women in leadership. And then, back to what I was saying earlier, sharing more depth of yourself, it's humanizing and it's relatable. I like this trend that I'm seeing of women running for office and talking about their challenges with caregiving, whether it be their children or elderly parents. If Frances had talked about the multiple miscarriages she had and the baby that she lost in childbirth, those are really difficult things, and all the while she's having this huge, big job. That realness, that authenticity, not only does it help them be a better leader, but it helps the people who are either voting for them or working for them really connect.

Lisa Belisle: My mind has so many different subplots that I would love to explore more, and I'm trying to figure out which one rises to the top for me the most. I think for me it's the idea of story, and the idea that you've just described, that context is truly everything. When we read about leaders who tend to be male, there often is a conversation around, let me tell you about all the leadership things I did in my workplace.

And there's less about, how did I get to be in a place where I could focus on this and I could do these things? This is actually a conversation my mother and I have quite a bit, because my father was a doctor, and for many, many years, what she did was she raised the 10 children that she gave birth to, and also went on, and is an incredible woman, and became a teacher and has done a lot in the community. But I don't think we often hear about the context when it comes to, how was it possible, if you were a man, for you to do these things? Because sometimes you actually do have quite a bit more support than some of the women that do great things.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: If someone's raising your 10 children, that's enabling you to go to work every day.

Lisa Belisle: And my father was always very much about the partnership. Everybody knew that they were in partnership. I think about my Uncle John, who went in and was high up in a national bank and hired many, many women into leadership positions. And my Aunt Sue, who was also incredibly intelligent, worked with him to make it possible for him to do his job. She had her doctorate in social work, and she was doing her job. But I do think what you're describing, where women actually bring forth a more complete story and provide us with qualitative information, not quantitative information, but very important qualitative information about context. I think that power is something that we need to maintain perspective on.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Absolutely. And also, don't let someone else tell your story for you. Our responsibility at the Frances Perkins Center is to bring Frances Perkins into the 21st century. One of the principles that I talk to our staff about as we're making decisions is, what would Frances do? How would she tell her story if she were here today? I'm not sure that she would talk about her personal travails in quite the same way that we do. That being said, the story needs to be told, because it's the complete picture, like you say, and that helps you understand, okay, why certain things were available to her and why certain things just were not. She never made money. She had enough to live on and cover her expenses, but when she left the administration after FDR died, she went into academia and was a professor at Cornell.

Others went off to the Secretary of Agriculture. Henry Wallace went on to start Pioneer Seed Company, which his family sold for billions of dollars. Frances didn't have those options. So I think sometimes, what would've happened if her husband hadn't gotten sick, and what would've happened if she had had more children? All of these different aspects of her personal life just shaped who she was and how she made decisions. I think about it in my own life, and I'm coming from a place of real privilege to be able to choose what kind of work I want to do, but some people really don't have that choice. The more you can understand about a person's real individual lives, whether it's underemployment or the wage crisis in this country, when you hear people talk about how it's impacting them, it puts policy in a different light. Not everyone has that partnership that helps them go and not worry about whether their kids will be taken care of. And not to put too fine a point on it, but that's what Perkins was trying to do, to say, okay, let's create some policies so that the bottom doesn't fall out for people who don't have that support.

Lisa Belisle: I really enjoyed our conversation today.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Thank you. I did too.

Lisa Belisle: I've learned so much about Frances Perkins, and I think you've given me things to continue to ponder, even after our conversation ends. I'm assuming that other people who are listening or watching will feel the same way. What's the best way for people to learn about the Frances Perkins Center?

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: We have a website, francesperkinscenter.org. Right now, we are still collecting signatures to send to President Biden for our national monument. We've collected over 4,000 from people across the country, and we'd like to have as many as possible, because those names will be added to the proclamation designating her national monument when that happens. You can learn a lot of information there, and you can visit her homestead between May and October. It's a beautiful place. The trails are open all year round, and they're very easy walking trails, so come check those out.

Lisa Belisle: Very good.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart: Thank you very much.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you've been listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and truly celebrate creativity and the human spirit in its many forms, today talking about Frances Perkins in particular with our guest, Giovanna Gray Lockhart, who is the Executive Director of the Frances Perkins Center. We invite you to learn more about the Frances Perkins Center by going to their website. We also invite you to learn more about the Portland Art Gallery located in Portland, Maine, because we truly understand creativity and we understand the importance of connections and community. Thank you so much for coming in today, Giovanna.