Alzina
Stevens was
born in Maine in 1849. At the age of thirteen she went to work in
a local textile company and soon afterwards lost her right index finger
in a factory accident. She later told friends that this missing figure
became a perpetual reminder of her need to improve working conditions
and regulate child labour.
When Stevens was eighteen she moved to Chicago
and found work in the printing trade as a typesetter and proof-reader.
An active trade unionist, Stevens became one
of the leaders of the Knights of Labor
in Chicago.
In 1892 Stevens became a resident of Hull
House where she joined other social reformers such as Jane
Addams, Ellen Gates Starr, Edith
Abbott, Grace Abbott, Mary
McDowell, Florence Kelley, Julia
Lathrop, Alice Hamilton and Sophonisba
Breckinridge at the settlement. Stevens became a key member of
the group and one of the few women involved at Hull House who had
first-hand experience of working-class life.
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
Florence Kelley as the state's first
chief factory inspector. Stevens became her chief assistant and together
the two women helped Altgeld to pass and enforce legislation that
controlled child labour in the state. 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of Manufacturers got the law repealed.
After Altgeld's defeat in 1896 Stevens became the first probation
officer of the recently established Cook County Juvenile Court Committee.
Alzina Stevens died in 1900.
Reception
room and library in Hull House
(1)
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.
(2)
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.
(3)
Florence Kelley and Alzina Stevens, Hull House Maps and Papers
(1895)
The Nineteenth Ward of Chicago
is perhaps the best district in all Illinois for a detailed study
of child labour, both because it contains many factories in which
children are employed, and because it is the dwelling-place of wage-earning
children engaged in all lines of activity.
The largest number of children to be found in any one factory in Chicago
is in a caramel works in this ward, where there are from one hundred
and ten to two hundred little girls, four to twelve boys, and seventy
to one hundred adults, according to the season of the year. The building
is a six-story brick, well-lighted, with good plumbing and fair ventilation.
It has, however, no fire escape, and a single wooden stair leading
from floor to floor. In case of fire the inevitable fate of the children
working on the two upper floors is too horrible to contemplate.
In the stores of the West Side, large numbers of young girls are employed
thirteen hours a day throughout the week, and fifteen hours on Saturday:
and all efforts of the clothing-clerks to shorten the working-time
by trade-union methods have hitherto availed but little.
Bennie Kelman, a Russian Jew, four years in Chicago, was found running
a heavy sewing-machine by foot-power in a sweat-shop of the nineteenth
ward where knee-pants are made. A health certificate was required,
and the medical examination revealed a severe rupture. Careful questioning
of the boy and his mother elicited the fact that he had been put to
work in a boiler factory two years before, when just thirteen years
old, and had injured himself lifting masses of iron. Nothing had been
done for the case; no one in the family spoke any English, or knew
how help could be obtained.
The legislation needed is: (1) The minimum age for work fixed at sixteen;
(2) School attendance made compulsory to the same age; (3) Factory
inspectors and truant officers, both men and women, equipped with
adequate salaries and travelling expenses, charged with the duty of
removing children from mill and workshop, mine and store, and placing
them in school; 94) Ample provision for school accommodations; money
supplied by the State through the school authorities for the support
of such orphans, half-orphans, and children of the unemployed as are
now kept out of school by destitution.
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