Kelley, Florence
(1859-1932), social reformer. Born into a patrician Quaker family in Philadelphia, Kelley combined a tradition of female political activism inherited from her great-aunt Sarah Pugh, a leading abolitionist, with traditions inherited from her father, William Durrah Kelley, abolitionist, founding member of the Republican party, Radical Reconstructionist, and U.S. congressman from Philadelphia. Those traditions merged for her in 1891, when she joined Jane Addams and other women reformers in Chicago at one of the nation's first social settlements, Hull-House. From 1898 until her death in 1932, she served as head of the National Consumers' League (ncl), the single most effective lobbying agency for protective labor legislation for women and children.
Kelley's prodigious intellectual energy became evident when, at an early age, she systematically read through her father's extensive library. In 1882 she exemplified her generation's increasing access to higher education by graduating from Cornell, but in her wanderings during the next decade she also embodied the difficulty for educated women to locate work commensurate with their talents. Establishing her independence of her father's tradition, Kelley came into contact with European socialism while studying government and law at the University of Zurich; her translation into English of several major works by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels gave her a solid grounding in European socialist thinking. (Her translation of Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 is still the preferred scholarly version.) In Zurich she also met and married Lazare Wischnewetzky, a Polish socialist medical student, and gave birth to three children in three years. Physically abused by her husband, she fled with her children to Chicago after their return to New York in 1886, where at Hull-House her potential as a social reformer finally found fertile soil.
Kelley exerted an immediate and dramatic influence on the generation of women reformers who clustered within the social settlement movement during the Progressive Era. Her understanding of the material basis of class conflict and her familiarity with American political institutions, combined with her spirited personality, placed her in the vanguard of a generation of reformers who sought to make American government more responsive to what they saw as the needs of working people. In this way they were critical components in the process by which American governments, state and national, shifted from liberal laissez-faire policies to positive regulatory programs.
Kelley summarized her reform strategy in the phrase "investigate, educate, legislate, and enforce." These tactics drew on her talents as a social scientist, a publicist, a lobbyist, and an attorney. As secretary-general of the ncl, Kelley helped establish sixty-four local consumers' leagues throughout the United States, traveling extensively among them each year to promote policies agreed upon by the national board. She and the Oregon league orchestrated the successful defense of the ten-hour-working-day legislation for women in the 1908 U.S. Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon. This was the legal innovation of the "Brandeis brief," which argued on the basis of sociological evidence rather than legal precedent. Kelley also introduced the social experiment of the minimum wage to the United States in 1909 and campaigned against child labor on a number of fronts. She herself thought her most important social contribution was the passage in 1921 of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, which for the first time allocated federal funds for health care.
Bibliography:
Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Hull House as a Community of Women Reformers in the 1890's," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10 (Summer 1985): 657-677; Kathyrn Kish Sklar, ed., Florence Kelley, Notes of Sixty Years: The Autobiography of Florence Kelley (1986).
Author:
Kathryn Kish Sklar
See also Child Labor; Muller v. Oregon ; Progressivism; Settlement Houses.
