Florence Kelley fought for the rights of workers, women and children at the turn of the 20th Century.
Past and present factory inspectors pose in New Orleans in March 1914. Madge Nave, from left, factory inspector, Louisville, Kentucky; Mary Malone, state inspector 10-Hour Law, Delaware; Florence Kelley, Illinois chief state factory inspector; Martha D. Gould, factories inspector, New Orleans; Jean Gordon, factories inspector, New Orleans; Ella Haas, state factory inspector, Dayton, Ohio.
The experience left Kelley with indelible images that eventually brought her to Jane Addams’ pioneering outreach with the impoverished residents of Chicago’s slums. “The appropriation of the surplus value created by the workers is the real cause of the need of any philanthropic work. If they were not ground down by competition to the bare means of subsistence, plundered systematically of the fruits of their labor, they would not furnish social wreckage, as they are doomed to do.”
It was a trait that ran in her bloodline. Noticing that her Aunt Sara never put sugar in her tea, Kelley asked why. Florence Kelley got a bachelor’s degree at Cornell University and wanted to study law at the University of Pennsylvania, but was rejected “by reason of her gender.” She eventually got her law degree from Northwestern University, but first studied at a university in Switzerland, an egalitarian country. “Her mind was ‘tinder awaiting a match,’ and the match was the student socialist movement in Zurich,” she recalled in “My Novitiate.
She met a Socialist medical student in Zurich. They married and settled in New York, where she campaigned for women and children’s rights. When the relationship soured, she took their three children and fled to Chicago. “We have at last won a victory for our eight-hours law,” she wrote to Engels on New Year’s Eve 1894. “The Supreme Court has handed down no decision sustaining it, but the stock yard magnates having been arrested until they are tired of it, have instituted the 8-hours day for 10,000 employees, men, women, and children. We have 18 suits pending to enforce the 8-hours law and we think we will shall establish it permanently before Easter.
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