Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 444

same book and were not impressed by it - young people don't think like that. What I know now is that out of the period that I was in school in college a whole generation, particularly women, emerged, but men too, who had a great passion for social justice. Where did we get it? We hadn't influenced each other at that time because we didn't know each other. We met later, but we had all been touched by the same ideas. I really shouldn't say ideas, because they weren't ideas. They were feelings. They were emotions. It was an emotional conception.

The whole principle of social work was not established. It was missionary work, as it was called. In being a missionary you might relieve the physical needs of the people who were distressed, but your purpose was to convert them to the Christian faith. The missionaries who came back from far countries and told the Sunday schools about life in the mission field always touched me very deeply too because they told about the children with nothing to eat and no clothes. I suffered a kind of vicarious physical agony from the concept that there could be children without clothes and without food.

The illustrations now of CARE or of the Save the Children Fund and that kind of picture was the exact story and picture that the Christian missionaries, who went off





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help