Kelley, Florence

KELLEY, FLORENCE (1859–1932). Foremost socialist figure within the world of mainstream American reform, Florence Kelley reshaped the settlement house movement, conducted early factory inspections, and organized the passage of groundbreaking state, federal, and local labor and social legislation.

Born into an elite Philadelphia family with strong traditions of Quaker activism—the daughter of William Durrah Kelley, a radical Republican and labor advocate with fifteen consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives—Kelley graduated from Cornell in 1882. Contact with socialist refugees and students at the University of Zurich in 1884 precipitated her lifelong commitment to socialism.

That year, she married a Polish Jewish socialist medical student, Lazare Wischnewetzky. She gave birth to three children in less than four years, and also undertook major translations of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Her translation of Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, first published in New York in 1887, remains the most widely read version of that classic work.

Upon moving to New York in 1886, she and her husband joined the Socialist Labor Party, from which they were soon expelled. The party was unaccustomed to women in leadership positions, especially a woman who challenged their preference for Lasallean political rather than Marxian trade-union mobilization. Thereafter, Kelley trained herself as a critic of state reports on child labor, mirroring methods she had found in Engels and Marx. She also became a leader in the anti-sweatshop movement that led to the founding of the New York Consumers’ League in 1890. With that group she sought labor legislation for women and children as a way to limit their exploitation, and as a strategy around the hostility of American courts to legislation protecting workers.

Prompted by her husband’s physical abuse, late in 1891 Kelley moved to Chicago. There she entered into a lifelong affiliation with Jane Addams and the settlement house movement, taking up residence at Hull House and placing her children in the home of Henry Demarest Lloyd and Jessie Bross Lloyd. Herself a key factor in the shift from philanthropy to reform at Hull House, Kelley in turn gained emotional and financial support from her coworkers. Using data she collected as an investigator for the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics and as the U.S. commissioner of labor, she constructed the maps of Hull House Maps and Papers (1895) the most sophisticated social survey in the United States. Writing pathbreaking labor legislation with Clarence Darrow and others in 1893, she successfully campaigned for the law’s enactment, and as Illinois’s first chief factory inspector, became responsible for its enforcement. She and her staff of twelve vigorously enforced the law’s pioneering eight-hour statute for wage-earning women in manufacturing, which prompted the creation of the Illinois Manufacturer’s Association and their successful effort in 1895 to have the hours law declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court.

Kelley returned to New York in 1898 as general secretary of the National Consumers’ League, residing until 1926 at Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement. There she initially focused on the creation of local consumers’ leagues, establishing 60 by 1904; all were asked to measure local working conditions by the “White Label” standards of the national league. Then, coordinating the efforts of scores of local leagues, she shaped much of the nation’s early labor and social legislation. Between 1910 and 1930 she was the most important single lobbyist for the passage of state minimum-wage legislation for women, and was likewise instrumental in the creation of the U.S. Children’s Bureau in 1912 and the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act in 1921 (the only federal precedent for the child welfare portions of the Social Security Act of 1936). Her failure to achieve a federal law prohibiting child labor in 1916 was a great disappointment as was the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of minimum wage for women unconstitutional in 1923. Kelley promoted protective labor legislation for women as a strategy that would achieve an opening wedge for legislation for all workers. Her protégé, Frances Perkins, achieved those goals as Secretary of Labor in 1938 with the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which, after Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened to “pack” the court with new justices, was found constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1941.

As a member of the Socialist Party of America, Kelley played an important role in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, frequently speaking at campuses under its auspices. After 1921, much of her energies were absorbed by her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, which she viewed as a threat to her life’s work of promoting protective legislation for women wage-earners. She did not live to see the Fair Labor Standards Act remove that threat, but remained optimistic that her work would be continued by others who supported her campaigns for living wages and other regulations of the industrial workplace.

Blumberg, Dorothy Rose. Florence Kelley: The Making of a Social Pioneer. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966.

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

Sklar, Kathryn Kish, ed. The Autobiography of Florence Kelley: Notes of Sixty Years. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish and Beverly Wilson Palmer, eds. Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869-1931. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Florence Kelley. Northwestern Law. https://florencekelley.northwestern.edu/florence

Jane Addams. Janes Addams Hull House Museum. https://www.hullhousemuseum.org/about-jane-addams

Jane Addams. Digital Edition. https://digital.janeaddams.ramapo.edu/

Henry Demarest Lloyd. Northwestern Law. https://florencekelley.northwestern.edu/florence/lloyd/
National Consumers’ League. https://www.nclnet.org/

Frances Perkins. Her Life: The Woman Behind the New Deal. The Frances Perkins Center. https://francesperkinscenter.org/life-new/

Fair Labor Standards Act. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/flsa

Sklar, Kathryn Kish and Beverly Wilson Palmer, eds. Index to the Letters of Florence Kelley. http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/fkelley/1/.