Florence Kelley

Florence Kelley (born September 12, 1859, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died February 17, 1932, Philadelphia) was an American social reformer who contributed to the development of state and federal labour and social welfare legislation in the United States.

Kelley graduated from Cornell University in 1882. After a year spent conducting evening classes for working women in Philadelphia, she traveled to Europe, where she attended the University of Zürich. There she came under the influence of European socialism; her translation of Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 was published in New York in 1887. She returned to the United States in 1886 with her husband, Lazare Wischnewetzky, whom she had married in 1884. In 1889 she published a pamphlet, Our Toiling Children.

In 1891 she and her husband separated; they were subsequently divorced, and she moved to Chicago and resumed her maiden name. Kelley became a resident at Jane Addams’s Hull House settlement and quickly took her place among the most active and effective workers there. In 1892 she conducted parallel investigations into slum conditions in Chicago and into sweatshops in the tenements. Her reports, together with her contributions to Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), presented a vivid picture of miserable working and living conditions. The Illinois law of 1893 that limited working hours for women, regulated tenement sweatshops, and prohibited child labour was in large part the result of her findings, and in consequence she was appointed to the post of chief factory inspector for Illinois. To further the prosecution of violators, Kelley enrolled in the law school of Northwestern University; she graduated in 1894 and was subsequently admitted to the bar.

In 1899 Kelley moved to New York City to become general secretary of the new National Consumers League, which had grown out of Josephine Shaw Lowell’s Consumers’ League of New York. She retained the post until her death. She took up residence at Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement and set about the work of promoting federal legislation on hours-and-wages and child labour, as well as other reforms. She organized some 60 local and state Consumers’ Leagues and traveled and spoke indefatigably for the cause. Among her publications were Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation (1905) and Modern Industry (1913); she edited Edmond Kelly’s Twentieth Century Socialism (1910). With Wald she led in organizing the New York Child Labor Committee in 1902, and in 1904 she was a founder of the National Child Labor Committee. Her efforts contributed greatly to the creation of the U.S. Children’s Bureau in 1912.

Kelley was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, and for several years she served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.