Florence
Kelley, the daughter of United States congressman, William
D. Kelley, was born on 12th September, 1859. She studied at Cornell
University and the University of Zurich. While in Europe she became
a follower of Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels. Over the next few years she worked on an English translation
of Engel's The Conditions of the Working
Class in England and this was eventually published in the
United States in 1887.
Kelley
moved to New York City where she married
a fellow member of the Socialist Labor
Party, the Polish-Russian physician, Lazare Wischnewetzky. The
marriage was not a success and in December 1891 she left him and moved
to Chicago with her three children. Soon after arriving in the city
she joined Jane Addams, Ellen
Gates Starr, Alzina Stevens, Mary
McDowell, Edith Abbott, Grace
Abbott, Julia Lathrop, Alice
Hamilton, Sophonisba Breckinridge
and other social reformers at Hull House.
John Peter Altgeld was one of the many
visitors to Hull House. When he was
elected governor of Illinois in 1892 and the following year he appointed
Kelley as the state's first chief factory inspector. Kelley recruited
a staff of twelve, including Alzina Stevens
and Mary Kenney. In 1894 Altgeld and
Kelley managed to persuade the state legislature to pass legislation
controlling child labour. This included
a law limiting women and children to a maximum eight-hour day. This
success was short-lived and in 1895 the Illinois Association of Manufacturers
got the law repealed.
In 1899 Kelley helped establish the radical pressure group, the National
Consumer's League (NCL). The main objective of the organization
was to achieve a minimum wage and a limitation on the working hours
of women and children. Kelley, the NCL's first leader, travelled the
country giving lectures on working conditions in the United States.
One important initiative introduced by Kelley was the NCL White Label.
Employers whose labour practices met with the NCL's approval for fairness
and safety were granted the right to display the NCL's white label.
The NCL then urged consumers to boycott those goods that failed to
earn the right to use the label.
In September 1905, Kelley joined with Upton Sinclair
and Jack London to form the Intercollegiate
Socialist Society. Over the next few years she was a frequent speaker
on American campuses and one of those students she recruited to the
cause was Frances Perkins, the woman
who was eventually to become the country's first woman cabinet minister
and the person responsible for bringing an end to child
labour in America.
A strong supporter of women's suffrage
and African American civil rights,
Kelley helped to establish the National Association
for the Advancement of Coloured People in 1909. A committed pacifist,
Kelley opposed USA involvement in the First World
War and was a member of the Woman's Peace
Party (WPP) and the Women's International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).
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). Florence Kelley died in Germantown on 17th February, 1932.
(1)
Florence Kelley, Autobiography (1927)
The century-long struggle to open wide the new world of higher
education was hardly more than begun in my childhood. It is by no
means over yet, while the law schools of Harvard and Columbia still
exclude women, and Negro students strive now as we strove for admission
on equal terms everywhere. So long as women hardly exist as full professors
in state universities, and Dr. Alice Hamilton's experience as a member
of the medical faculty of Harvard remains unique, that struggle is
far from ended.
(2)
Florence Kelley, Autobiography (1927)
On a snowy morning between Christmas 1891 and New Year's 1892,
I arrived at Hull House, Chicago, a little before breakfast time,
and found there Henry Standing Bear a Kickapoo Indian, waiting for
the front door to be opened. It was Miss Addams who opened it, holding
on her her left arm a singularly unattractive, fat, pudgy baby belonging
to the cook.
At breakfast on that eventful morning, there were present Ellen Gates
Starr, friend of many years and fellow-founder of Hull House with
Jane Addams; Jennie Dow, a delightful young volunteer kindergartner,
whose good sense and joyous good humor; Mary Keyser, who had followed
Miss Addams from the family home in Cedarville and throughout the
remainder of her life relieved Miss Addams of all household care.
(3)
Florence Kelley, The Need of Theoretical Preparation for Philanthropic
Work (1887)
Under our industrial system the means of production are a monopoly
of an irresponsible class, and the workers are forced to compete with
one another for the privilege of employment in using them. In the
struggle for existence that arises out of this competition the weak
go to the wall, become the wreckage that philanthropy undertakes to
deal with.
As loyal members of the ruling class our work must, I repeat, be merely
palliative. For a radical cure of the social disease means the end
of the system of exploiting the workers. But to stop exploiting would
be suicide for the class that we are born and educated into, and of
which we college-bred women form an integral part.
(4)
Florence Kelley, Survey Magazine (June, 1927)
Hull House was, we soon discovered, surrounded in every direction
by homework carried on under the sweating system. From the age of
eighteen months few children able to sit in high chairs at tables
were safe from being required to pull basting threads. Out of this
enquiry, amplified by Hull House residents and other volunteers, grew
the volume published under the title Hull House Maps and Papers. One
map showed the distribution of the polyglot peoples. Another exhibited
their incomes indicated in colours, ranging from gold which meant
twenty dollars or more total a week for a family, to black which was
five dollars or less total family income. There were precious little
gold and a superabundance of black on that income map!
The discoveries as to home work under the sweating system thus recorded
and charted in 1892 led to the appointment at the opening of the legislature
of 1893, of a legislative commission of enquiry into employment of
women and children in manufacture, for which Mary Kenney and I volunteered
as guides. With backing from labour, from Hull House, from Henry Demarest
Lloyd and his friends, the Commission and the report carried almost
without opposition a bill applying to manufacture, and prescribing
a maximum working day not to exceed eight hours for women, girls,
and children, together with child labour safeguards based on laws
then existing in New York and Ohio.
When the new law took effect, and its usefulness depended on the personnel
prescribed in the text to enforce it, Governor Altgeld offered the
position of chief inspector to Henry Demarest Lloyd, who declined
it and recommended me. I was accordingly made chief state inspector
of factories, the first and so far as I know, the only woman to serve
in that office in any state.
(5)
Florence Kelley, letter to Richard Ely, Professor of Economics at
the University of Wisconsin, about working at Hull
House (21st June, 1891)
I personally participate in the work of social reform because
part of it develops along Socialist lines, and part is an absolutely
necessary protest against the brutalizing of us all by Capitalism.
Not because our Hull House work alone would satisfy me.
(6)
Florence Kelley, letter to Friedrich Engels
about living in Hull House (7th April,
1892)
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.
(7)
Florence Kelley, letter to Friedrich Engels
about her success in converted people to socialism
(27th November, 1892)
The increased discussion of socialism here is very marked, though
the study of books and requests for lectures come almost exclusively
from people of the prosperous middle classes. Thus I have been asked
to speak twice before the Secular Union and five times in churches
in Chicago and its suburbs, and the more radically I speak the more
vigorous the discussion in all these meetings.
(8)
Florence Kelley, letter to Friedrich
Engels about her job as a factory inspector (1893)
I find my work as inspector most interesting; and as Governor
Altgeld places no restrictions whatever upon our freedom of speech,
and the English etiquette of silence while in the civil service is
unknown here, we are not hampered by our position and three of my
deputies and my assistant are outspoken Socialists and active in agitation.
(9)
Florence Kelley, letter to Friedrich
Engels about her job as a factory inspector (1st January, 1894)
We have at last won a victory for our 8-hours law. The Supreme
court has handed down no decision sustaining it, but the stockyards
magnates having been arrested until they are tired of it, have instituted
the 8-hours day for 10,000 employees, men, women and children. We
have 18 suits pending to enforce the 8-hours law and we think we shall
establish it permanently before Easter.
(10)
Florence Kelley, Autobiography (1927)
My appointment (as chief factory inspector) dated from July 12,
1893. The appropriation for a staff of twelve persons was $12,000
a year, to cover salaries, traveling expenses, printing, court costs,
and rent of an office in Chicago. The salary scale was, for the Chief
$1500 a year; for the first assistant, also a woman, Alzina P. Stevens
$1000; and for each of the ten deputies of whom six were men $720.
Needless to say this had been voted by a legislature predominately
rural.
It was Governor Altgeld's definite intent to enforce to the uttermost
limit this initial labor law throughout his term of office. He was
a sombre figure; the relentless hardship of his experience as a boy
and youth had left him embittered against fate, and against certain
personal enemies, but infinitely tender towards the sufferings of
childhood, old age and poverty.
(11)
Florence Kelley, Factory Inspectors of Illinois Report (1895)
In the winter of 1893-4 the increase of smallpox in the tenement
house districts in which garment manufacture prevails became so marked
that on February 9th a circular letter was sent from this office to
each of the 176 wholesale manufacturers and merchant tailors whose
goods are made up in these districts, warning them of the existing
and increasing danger of infection. In April it became clear that
while there was an occasional case of smallpox among the Scandinavian
tailors on the North side, the disease was over-whelmingly epidemic
in the Polish and Bohemian district. In this district, in the months
of April, May, and June, smallpox was found in 325 different tenement
houses.
(12)
Florence Kelley, Factory Inspectors of Illinois Report (1895)
Tenement house manufacture is rapidly spreading in Chicago and
entering a large variety of industries. Wherever the system enters,
the trade becomes a sweated trade, carried on in the worst and most
unwholesome premises, because it falls into the hands of the very
poor.
Shops over sheds or stables, in basements or on upper floors of tenement
houses, are not fit working places for men, women and children. Most
of the places designated in this report as basements are low-ceiled,
ill-lighted, unventilated rooms, below the street level; damp and
cold in winter, hot and close in summer; foul at all times by reason
of adjacent vaults or defective sewer connections. The term cellar
would more accurately describe these shops. Their dampness entails
rheumatism and their darkness injures the sight of the people who
work in them. They never afford proper accommodations for the pressers,
the fumes of whose gasoline stoves and charcoal heaters mingle with
the mouldy smell of the walls and the stuffiness always found where
a number of the very poor are crowded together.
(13)
Federal Bureau of Information report on Florence
Kelley (1923)
Kelley is a speaker for the Harvard Liberal Club has been a radical
all the sixty-four years of her life, it seems. She was one of the
much-applauded speakers at the meeting of the Trade Union Educational
League in Washington in May, and at the June Conference of the League
for Industrial Democracy at Camp Tamiment.
(14)
Congressional Record Report on Hull House
(1926)
Florence Kelley has not only preached communism and urged a study
of the fundamental communist books by college women taking up philanthropic
or social work, but as president of the Intercollegiate Socialist
League - the organization chiefly responsible for socialist propaganda
in American schools and colleges - Miss Kelley has had great influence
for a number of years in promoting radicalism among youth while in
school.
It is of the utmost significance that practically all the radicalism
started among women in the United States centers about Hull House,
Chicago, and the Children's Bureau, at Washington, with a dynasty
of Hull House graduates in charge of it since its creation.
(15)
Josephine Goldmark wrote about Florence
Kelley in her book, Impatient Crusader (1953)
No other man or woman whom I have ever heard so blended knowledge
of facts, with, satire, burning indignation, prophetic denunciation
- all poured out at white heat in a voice varying from flute-like
tones to deep organ tones.
(16)
Frances Perkins, My Recollections
of Florence Kelley (May, 1954)
Explosive, hot-tempered, determined, she was no gentle saint.
She was a smoking volcano that at any moment would burst into flames.
(17)
William Chafe, Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American
Culture (1977)
Female college students were infused with a self-conscious
sense of mission and a passionate commitment to improve the world.
They became doctors, college professors, settlement house workers,
business women, lawyers, and architects. Spirited by an intense sense
of purpose as well as camaraderie, they set a remarkable record of
accomplishment in the face of overwhelming odds. Jane Addams, Grace
and Edith Abbott, Alice Hamilton, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley -
all came out of this pioneering generation and set the agenda of social
reform for the first two decades of the 20th century.
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