page_title: List of female United States Cabinet Secretaries
section_title: Current departments
hierarchical_section_title: List of female United States Cabinet Secretaries / Female Secretaries / Current departments
caption_attribution_description: English: Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor.
context_page_description: The United States Cabinet has had 32 female officers. No woman held a Cabinet position before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920, which prohibits states and the federal government from denying any citizen the right to vote because of that citizen's sex.
  Frances Perkins was the first woman to serve in the Cabinet; she was appointed Secretary of Labor in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Oveta Culp Hobby became the second woman to serve in the Cabinet, when she was named head of the then newly formed Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953. This department was subdivided into the departments of Education and Health and Human Services in 1979. Patricia Roberts Harris, who was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare before the department split and had earlier served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1977, became the first female Secretary of Health and Human Services in 1979. Harris was also the first African-American woman to serve in the Cabinet.
  Former North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole is the first woman to have served in two different Cabinet positions in two different administrations.
context_section_description: Numerical order represents the seniority of the Secretaries in the United States presidential line of succession.
   denotes the first female secretary of that particular department
caption: Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was the first woman to hold a Cabinet-level position.
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