Florence Kelley was a social reformer and political activist who championed government regulation to protect working women and children.
Kelley was born into a Pennsylvania Quaker and Unitarian family with a strong commitment to abolitionist and women's rights activism. After reading through her father's library and graduating from Cornell, Kelley studied law and government at the University of Zurich, joined the German Social Democratic party, and translated Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England into English. In 1884 Kelley married a socialist Russian medical student and the couple had three children. After returning to the US, she divorced in 1891 and joined Jane Addams and other reformers at Hull-House, the Chicago social settlement. In 1892 the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics hired her to investigate the "sweating" system in the garment industry, and the federal commissioner of labor, Carroll Wright, asked her to survey Chicago's 19th ward, her findings appearing in Hull-House Maps and Papers. She was soon appointed chief factory inspector by Illinois Governor John Peter. Kelley earned her law degree from Northwestern University in 1895.
In 1899 Kelley became head of the National Consumer's League (NCL), a position she held for over 30 years, and she moved to Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York City. Working for the NCL, Kelley organized local leagues and lobbied for better working conditions and minimum-wage and shorter-working-hours legislation. She helped Josephine Goldmark, director of research at NCL, to prepare the successful "Brandeis brief" defense of 10-hour workday legislation for women in the 1908 US Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon. The following year the NCL launched a minimum-wage campaign, which eventually succeeded in obtaining the passage of 14 state laws for women. Kelley later helped extend such state legislation to male workers.
In 1909 Kelley also helped organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was a founder of the National Child Labor Committee, and her efforts contributed greatly to the creation in 1912 of the US Children's Bureau, the only government agency run by women, In 1912, Kelley provided presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt with facts and figures to substantiate his call for a minimum wage, pensions, and health insurance, as she became part of his "Female Brain Trust" and a significant supporter of the Progressive Party. Many of Kelley's ideas were later incorporated into New Deal programs.
Roosevelt and Kelley parted ways during World War I, when Kelley, a pacifist, helped to create the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and led the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (from 1913 until 1920). For several years she served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Kelley spent her final decade defending herself from attacks during the "red scare" of the 1920s and stressing the concrete gains of gender-specific labor legislation to those committed only to laws applying to both sexes. . An icon of labor reform, Florence Kelley died on February 17, 1932, of natural causes in Germantown, Pennsylvania.
Was there a specific event or perhaps an experience that led you to become a social reformer?
"When I was at the age of twelve, my father had me visiting glass factories at night. There, I saw a little boy bending towards a hot furnace, coughing, and everyone besides me were looking at this as if it was something that is seen every day in the daily routine. Which, in fact, it was. I still can’t forget that scenery. In fact, I don’t think I will forget this ever. So yes, there was something that gave me an impact to become a reformer."
Wow, you were against child labor since you were twelve, then.
"I think for many social reformers there are big and little events like this for every issues, or ‘evils’ as they call it these days."
By that you mean?
"I was first known through my work, the translation of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ by Engels. Then, I guess, someone noticed that I was a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which I joined when I was back in Cornell. That became an issue, and soon the papers started introducing me as an activist for civil rights movement. I think it was because I was constantly fighting for woman suffrage and African-American civil rights. And having this idea of myself being a well known reformer, now everywhere I go, I noticed something that is to be changed. At this state, it is likely to come across an event or an experience about... anything."
After you came back from Europe, You campaigned for state statistical bureaus and the creation of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. How did you come across that?
"After returning from Europe, I was thinking of writing a book of my own, on the condition of the working class in the United States. But I discovered that there were no adequate statistics. That was the start of it."
You are now living in the Hull House settlement in Chicago.
"Yes,"
The founder of the Hull House, who is also Ja ne Addams' nephew, called you"the toughest customer in the reform riot, the finest rough-and-tumble fighter for the good life for others, that Hull House ever knew." Any comments on that?
"I know I am known for firmness and fierce energy. Merely, I try my best to fighting for the good."
A brief look at the life of Florence Kelley, a social and political reformer who founded the National Consumers League and worked tirelessly to set the minimum wage, limit the hours in a work day, and remove children from the workplace.
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