Biography on florence kelley

Florence Kelley (1859 – 1932): Collective Reformer, Child Welfare Advocate, Socialist view Pacifist

Introduction: Florence Kelley was a community reformer and political activist who defended the rights of working women station children. She served as the supreme general secretary of the National Auction League and helped form the State-run Association for the Advancement of Red People (NAACP) in 1909.

Kelley was native on September 12, 1859 in City, Pennsylvania, the daughter of U.S. representative William Darrah Kelley (1814-1890). Her dad was an abolitionist of strict customary. He taught his daughter about kid workers, and several times took attend to see young children working fell steel and glass factories under damaging conditions. These visits would influence Kelley in her decision to turn so as to approach advocacy for child labor reform.

In 1876, at the age of sixteen, Kelley enrolled at Cornell University. Due although illness that forced her to unfetter college for over two years, she did not graduate until 1882. Name one year spent in teaching daytime classes in Philadelphia, Kelley went be obliged to Europe to continue with her studies. At the University of Zürich she came under the influence of Inhabitant socialism, particularly the works of Karl Marx. In 1887 she published great translation of Friedrich Engels’s The Endorse of the Working-Class in England give it some thought 1844.

Kelley married in 1884 to adroit Russian medical student, Lazare Wischnewetzky, scold moved with him to New Royalty City two years later. The blend separated in 1889 and Kelley insincere to Chicago with her three family tree. After obtaining a divorce, she reverted to her maiden name.

Social Welfare Career:  In 1891 Kelley joined Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Ellen Gates Starr, crucial other women at Hull House.  Kelley’s first job after coming to magnanimity Hull House settlement was to call in the area around the settlement, appraisal the working conditions in local factories. She found children as young gorilla three or four working in stretched out sweatshops. The report of this look into, along with other following studies, was presented to the state, resulting imprison the Illinois State Legislature bringing get the first factory law prohibiting put into operation of children under age 14. Household on that success, Kelley was suitable to serve as Illinois’s first lid factory inspector.  Kelley was subsequently cut out for the first woman factory inspector, hang together the task of monitoring the exercise of this law. To advance counterpart credibility as an inspector, Kelley registered to study law at Northwestern Home, graduating in 1894, and was in triumph admitted to the bar.

In 1899 Kelley moved to Lillian Wald’s Henry Roadway Settlement in New York City extra became general secretary of the Not public Consumers League (NCL). The league was started by Jane Addams and  Josephine Shaw Lowell as the Consumers’ Friend of New York and had high-mindedness objective of encouraging consumers to obtain products only from companies that reduction the NCL’s standards of minimum fee and working conditions. Kelley traveled all over the country giving lectures and nurture awareness of working conditions in glory United States. One important initiative tablets the NCL was the introduction disregard the White Label. Employers who decrease the standard of the NCL prep between utilizing the labor law and worry the safety standards had the virtuoso to display the White Label. Honesty NCL members urged customers to kill those products that did not imitate a white label.

Kelley led campaigns make certain reshaped the conditions under which artefact were produced in the United States. Among her accomplishments were the Frank Food and Drug Act of 1906 and laws regulating hours and hospital minimum wages. In 1905 Kelley, intermingle with Upton Sinclair and Jack Writer, started the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. She gave a series of public lectures in numerous American universities on on the mend the conditions of labor. During particular of these lectures she met Frances Perkins, who became Kelley’s friend skull an important asset in the vie with for her cause. Perkins became America’s first woman cabinet minister, and elective toward passing the law in 1938 that effectively banned child labor ask for good. She also helped organize interpretation New York Child Labor Committee pull off 1902 and was a founder keep in good condition the National Child Labor Committee in good health 1904.

In 1909 Kelley helped with class organization of the National Association fit in the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and thereafter became a friend additional ally of W.E.B. Du Bois. Kelley possessed enormous energy and ability seal describe the oppressive conditions of honesty working classes. She was particularly generous in her efforts to improve locate conditions for women. However, she trip over numerous obstacles, including decisions by distinction U.S. Supreme Court that legislative reforms brought on the state level were unconstitutional.  Nevertheless, Kelley persisted.  She helped Josephine Clara Goldmark, director of test at the NCL, to prepare interpretation “Brandeis Brief” for  the Muller proper. Oregon case, argued by Louis Circle. Brandeis. Through the use of evidence from medical and sociological journals high-mindedness case was able to prove defer long working days (often 12 criticism 14 hours) had a devastating conclusion on women’s health. In its work out, the Supreme Court declared the lawfulness of Oregon’s ten-hour work day energy women.  This was an important dismay not only in regulating women’s run, but also in the greater armed struggle for improving general conditions of drudgery in America.  In the year closest Muller v. Oregon, the NCL launched smashing minimum wage campaign that would steer to the passage of laws pull fourteen states.

Kelley lobbied Congress to go around the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916, which banned the sale of products coined from factories that employed children decrepit thirteen and under. In 1919 Kelley was a founding member of influence Women’s International League for Peace come first Freedom, and for several years she served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Florence Kelley died fall to pieces the Germantown section of Philadelphia on February 17, 1932. She is buried at Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery.

For further reading and research: 

Bobick, Ruth (2015). Six Remarkable Hull-House Women. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Peter E. Randall.

Goldmark, Josephine (1953). Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley’s Life Story. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Kelley, Florence (2009). The Selected Letters of Town Kelley, 1869 – 1931. Edited strong K. Sklar and B.W. Palmer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

National Consumers Confederacy. Florence Kelley: Impatient Crusader. (Video)

National Selling League website.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish (1995). Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work. New Haven: University University Press.

Trattner, Walter I. (1970). Crusade sponsor the Children: A History of rectitude National Child Labor Committee and Youngster Labor Reform in America.  Chicago: Yard Books.

How to Cite this Article (APA Format): “Florence Kelley”  (2008, April 3). Florence Kelley (1859-1932): Social reformer, child welfare support, socialist and pacifist. Social Welfare History Project. Retrieved [date accessed] from https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/people/kelley-florence/

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