Who is florence kelley

These visits would influence Kelley in her decision to turn toward advocacy for child labor reform. In , at the age of sixteen, Kelley enrolled at Cornell University. Due to illness that forced her to leave college for over two years, she did not graduate until After one year spent in teaching evening classes in Philadelphia, Kelley went to Europe to continue with her studies. Kelley married in to a Russian medical student, Lazare Wischnewetzky, and moved with him to New York City two years later.

The couple separated in and Kelley moved to Chicago with her three children. After obtaining a divorce, she reverted to her maiden name. She found children as young as three or four working in tenement sweatshops. The report of this survey, along with other following studies, was presented to the state, resulting in the Illinois State Legislature bringing about the first factory law prohibiting employment of children under age Kelley was subsequently appointed the first woman factory inspector, with the task of monitoring the application of this law.

To advance her credibility as an inspector, Kelley enrolled to study law at Northwestern University, graduating in , and was successfully admitted to the bar. Kelley traveled around the country giving lectures and raising awareness of working conditions in the United States. Employers who met the standard of the NCL by utilizing the labor law and keeping the safety standards had the right to display the White Label. The NCL members urged customers to boycott those products that did not have a white label.

Kelley led campaigns that reshaped the conditions under which goods were produced in the United States. Among her accomplishments were the Pure Food and Drug Act of and laws regulating hours and establishing minimum wages. She gave a series of public lectures in numerous American universities on improving the conditions of labor. Du Bois. Kelley possessed enormous energy and ability to describe the oppressive conditions of the working classes.

Her first meeting marked a turning point. London, where Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had resided since , and Zurich, where many young leaders of socialism's second generation congregated, became their chief sanctuaries. An exile from her own society, Florence Kelley felt right at home among these banished leaders. Under our industrial system the means of production are a monopoly of an irresponsible class, and the workers are forced to compete with one another for the privilege of employment in using them.

In the struggle for existence that arises out of this competition the weak go to the wall, become the wreckage that philanthropy undertakes to deal with.

As loyal members of the ruling class our work must, I repeat, be merely palliative. For a radical cure of the social disease means the end of the system of exploiting the workers. But to stop exploiting would be suicide for the class that we are born and educated into, and of which we college-bred women form an integral part. Hull House was, we soon discovered, surrounded in every direction by homework carried on under the sweating system.

From the age of eighteen months few children able to sit in high chairs at tables were safe from being required to pull basting threads.

Out of this enquiry, amplified by Hull House residents and other volunteers, grew the volume published under the title Hull House Maps and Papers. One map showed the distribution of the polyglot peoples. Another exhibited their incomes indicated in colours, ranging from gold which meant twenty dollars or more total a week for a family, to black which was five dollars or less total family income.

There were precious little gold and a superabundance of black on that income map! The discoveries as to home work under the sweating system thus recorded and charted in led to the appointment at the opening of the legislature of , of a legislative commission of enquiry into employment of women and children in manufacture, for which Mary Kenney and I volunteered as guides.

With backing from labour, from Hull House, from Henry Demarest Lloyd and his friends, the Commission and the report carried almost without opposition a bill applying to manufacture, and prescribing a maximum working day not to exceed eight hours for women, girls, and children, together with child labour safeguards based on laws then existing in New York and Ohio.

When the new law took effect, and its usefulness depended on the personnel prescribed in the text to enforce it, Governor Altgeld offered the position of chief inspector to Henry Demarest Lloyd, who declined it and recommended me. I was accordingly made chief state inspector of factories, the first and so far as I know, the only woman to serve in that office in any state.

I personally participate in the work of social reform because part of it develops along Socialist lines, and part is an absolutely necessary protest against the brutalizing of us all by Capitalism. Not because our Hull House work alone would satisfy me. We have a colony of efficient and intelligent women living in a working men's quarter with the house used for all sorts of purposes by about a thousand persons a week.

The increased discussion of socialism here is very marked, though the study of books and requests for lectures come almost exclusively from people of the prosperous middle classes.

Thus I have been asked to speak twice before the Secular Union and five times in churches in Chicago and its suburbs, and the more radically I speak the more vigorous the discussion in all these meetings. I find my work as inspector most interesting; and as Governor Altgeld places no restrictions whatever upon our freedom of speech, and the English etiquette of silence while in the civil service is unknown here, we are not hampered by our position and three of my deputies and my assistant are outspoken Socialists and active in agitation.

We have at last won a victory for our 8-hours law. The Supreme court has handed down no decision sustaining it, but the stockyards magnates having been arrested until they are tired of it, have instituted the 8-hours day for 10, employees, men, women and children. We have 18 suits pending to enforce the 8-hours law and we think we shall establish it permanently before Easter. My appointment as chief factory inspector dated from July 12, Needless to say this had been voted by a legislature predominately rural.

Secretary of Education U. Secretary of Energy U. Secretary of Health and Human Services U. Secretary of Homeland Security U. Secretary of Labor U. Secretary of State U. Secretary of the Interior U. Secretary of Transportation U. Senator U. Supreme Court U. Trade Representative Vice President.

Date: -. House Floor Speech — U.