Florence Kelley

Florence Kelley (1859 – 1932) Florence Kelley, A Woman of Fierce Fidelity Florence Kelley is considered one of the great contributors to the social rights of workers, particularly women and children. She is best known as a prominent Progressive social reformer known for her role in helping to improve social conditions of the twentieth century. She has been described as a woman of fierce fidelity (Goldmark, 1953). Kelley was a leading voice in the labor, suffragette, children’s and civil rights movements. She was also a well-educated and successful woman, a rare combination during the turn of the twentieth century.

Kelley was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 12, 1859 to Quaker parents, William Darrah Kelley and his second wife, Caroline Bartram. Her father was a self-educated man who left his business to become an abolitionist, a judge and an activist for a number of political and social reforms. Kelley had two brothers and five sisters; however, all five sisters died in childhood. The childhood memory of the deaths of her five sisters influenced Kelley’s lifelong fight for government funds for maternal and child health services.

The political climate during the life of Kelley and the influences of her family, education, travels and friendships contributed to her commitment to social reform. It was these influences that led this determined woman to have a profound impact on the quality of life for many individuals during her life and thereafter. Let’s examine these influences in more detail for a better understanding of this remarkable woman and reformer. Kelley had the good fortune to grow up in a progressive, cultured and affluent family. It was a family actively devoted to social reform and this devotion influenced Kelley.

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She was educated at home for most of her childhood due to being sickly as a child. Her father taught her to read at age seven and made his extensive library available to her. Her father also influenced her social conscience by taking the young Florence with him as he toured factories where young boys worked to help manufacture steel and glass. Kelley begins her autobiography by describing her father as a "companionship which has enriched my whole life" and credited him with encouraging her interest in public life. (Kelley, 1926).

It was on the factory tours with her father that Kelley first witnessed the horrendous conditions and danger that children were forced to work under. She often stated that through this experience, she developed her enthusiasm to advocate for child labor reform. While still a young woman, Kelley wrote, “We that are strong, let us bear the infirmities of the weak. ” (Sklar, 2009). At the encouragement of her father, in September 1876, at the age of seventeen, Kelley entered Cornell University, College of Arts and Sciences.

After completing her studies at Cornell, Kelley attended the University of Zurich the first European university open to women where she studied politics, economics and law. While in Europe, Kelley formed friendships with people that embraced the teachings of socialism. It was during this time that Kelley began translating the works of known socialists, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Her translation of Engels “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844” was published by New York Socialists in 1887.

In 1884, while attending the University of Zurich, Kelley met and married Lazare Wischnewetzky, a Russian medical student and member of the socialist party. Kelley and her husband moved to New York City in 1886. Her husband was abusive, and, in 1889 Kelley left her husband and moved to Chicago with her three young children. The marriage ended in divorce in 1891. It was in Chicago that Kelley turned to the study of social conditions taking a special interest in women and children. Florence boarded her three children while she became a resident of the Hull House with Jane Addams and other female social reformers.

The Hull House was a settlement house established to ease the suffering of the urban poor, improve unfair and dangerous working conditions and reform government to protect workers. Settlement houses were created to help the urban poor and to assist college educated women to find meaningful employment and to professionalize the social sciences of Sociology and Social Work through collecting statistics, reports and photographs. At the turn of the century, many Americans hoped to improve society for the better. These reform-minded citizens were called Progressives.

Kelley was among the Chicago women of her class that strongly believed that they belonged in the public arena calling attention to the working conditions of children and women, social injustice and democracy for all. These Progressives wanted to use the government as an agency of reform and they believed grassroots efforts at the local level would spread to the state and then national level. They embraced strong efforts to address the corruption of government and to make government more efficient. Kelley and the women of the Hull House actively campaigned for civil rights, children’s health and welfare and prohibition.

During her years of work at the Hull House, Kelley participated in the documentation of urban poverty. Kelley pioneered the use of scientific data to influence the decision of the U. S. Supreme Court. (Goldmark, 1953). In 1892, Kelley was hired by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics to investigate the sweat shop activity in the garment industry. In this position, Kelley was responsible for providing the numerical evidence that led to state legislation mandating an eight-hour work day for women and children. The law, enacted in 1894, was repealed the following year under pressure from the Illinois Association of Manufacturers.

Kelley held the position with the Illinois Bureau of Labor and Statistics until 1897 when she was appointed the first woman Chief Factory Inspector by Illinois Governor John P. Atlgeld. Kelley was very successful in recruiting people to socialism. She told Friedrich Engels: “We have a colony of efficient and intelligent women living in a working men’s quarter with the house used for all sorts of purposes by about a thousand persons a week. The last form of its activity is the formation of unions of which we have three, the clock-makers, the shift-makers,, and the book-binders.

Next week we are to take the initiative in the systematic endeavor to clean out the sweating dens. The Trade assembly is paying the expenses of weekly mass meetings; and the sanitary authorities are emphasizing the impossibility of their coping, unaided, with the task allotted to them. ” Kelley’s frustration with the repeal of the eight-hour work day law for women and children and the difficulty in prosecuting the sweat shop cases influenced her to enroll at Northwestern University where she earned a law degree in 1894.

In 1899, Kelley returned to New York to assume the leadership of the National Consumers’ League, an organization created to use the purchasing power of the consumer to support firms with good labor practices. She remained with this organization for over thirty years. In this role, Kelley, pioneered the use of white labels on clothing to certify garments had been produced without child labor and within the parameters of the legislation regulating factory work. During her time with the Consumer’s League, Kelley traveled extensively, speaking to various rganizations and was responsible for organizing sixty different leagues in twenty different states, plus two international conferences. Kelley played a prominent role in federal legislation for child labor minimum wages. A strong supporter of women’s suffrage and African American civil rights, Kelley helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In September 1905, Kelley joined Upton Sinclair and Jack London to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

Its stated purpose was to “throw light on the world-wide movement of industrial democracy known as socialism. ” Kelley spent the next several years as a frequent speaker on American campuses. She recruited Frances Perkins, a student to the cause and Perkins is the person responsible for bringing an end to child labor in America. Kelley wrote several books including Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation (1905), Modern Industry in Relation to the Family (1914), The Supreme Court and Minimum Wage Legislation (1925) and Autobiography (1927).

Kelley also helped establish what became known as the "Brandeis brief" (named for Justice Louis D. Brandeis), a process of integrating facts and experiences in legal action to demonstrate the need for changing laws according to human realities. Florence Kelley died in Germantown on February 17, 1932 after a long illness at the age of seventy-three. Kelley was a fascinating woman that dedicated herself to serving the victims of industrial capitalism. She is among the founders of the U. S. welfare system and is considered not only a powerful woman for social justice but also a representative of women’s empowerment.

Kelley is quoted as saying, “In order to be rated as good as a good man in the field of her earnings, a woman must show herself better than he. She must be more steady, or more trustworthy, or more skilled, or more cheap in order to have the same chance of employment. ” It is easy to conclude that Florence Kelley was ahead of her time in her ideas and approach to social reform. She laid the groundwork for many social programs that were not implemented until after her death. Her many accomplishments have contributed to an awareness of the rights of children and the working class in America.

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