Grace Perego in Six Scenes

Meet SF’s First-Wave Feminist Housing Mogul

Grace & Jackson Perego (then ages 38 & 10) in 1923. Passport photo from the National Archives.

One.

Helen Grace Greenwood Yager stands up, cradling her three-month-old son Jackson. She’s 28, her patrician features brushed with the haze of new parenthood. She raises her right hand and swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her god. It’s 1913.