Florence Kelley: Pioneer of Labor Reform

Courtesy of Northwestern University School of Law

In 1871, William Kelley took his twelve-year-old daughter Florence on a tour so she’d appreciate the wonders of America’s new industrial age. The father was mesmerized by a Western Pennsylvania steel mill’s new Bessemer converter (a huge fiery cauldron which turned molten pig iron into steel) and a glass factory’s assembly-line operation for making bottles.

But Florence was more shocked than impressed. Touring the steel mill at two in the morning, she recalled, she witnessed the “terrifying sight” of “boys smaller than myself” carrying heavy pails of drinking water for men. These little boys, Kelley thought, “were not more important than so many grains of sand in the molds.” At the glass factory, she observed that “[t]he only light was the glare from the furnaces.” A glass blower stood in front of each furnace. Near each blower were the “dogs,” as the boys were called, whose jobs were to clean and scrape bottle molds, a tedious and dangerous task in the dark and hot factory.

Kelley never forgot these images, or her impression “of the utter unimportance of children compared with products, in the minds of the people whom I am among.”

As an adult, Kelley did more than any other twentieth-century American to rectify the awful conditions of child labor. She was also a leading organizer against sweatshops and a pioneering advocate for working women. She helped lead the battle for groundbreaking local, state, and federal labor laws, including the ones that established the minimum wage and the eight-hour day. Kelley was a pathbreaker in conducting social and statistical research to expose workplace abuses and in developing strategies—such as factory inspections and consumer organizing—to pressure state legislatures and Congress to improve working conditions. As a radical and a socialist, she viewed the struggle for workplace reform as part of the broader battle for social justice and played important roles in the feminist, civil rights, peace, and labor movements of her time.

Kelley believed that women with her class privilege had a moral duty to advocate for laws to protect workers, women, and children from the often brutal conditions of unregulated capitalism. “We that are strong,” she wrote as a young woman, “let us bear the infirmities of the weak.”

Kelley was brought up in an activist family. Her father, William—an abolitionist and a founder of the Republican Party in 1854—served fifteen terms as a U.S. Congressman from Philadelphia and was a champion of high wages for working men. Her great-aunt, Sarah Pugh, was a Quaker and an opponent of slavery. Her refusal to use cotton and sugar because they were made with slave labor made an early impression on Florence.

At a time when few women attended college, Kelley’s father—an early advocate of women’s suffrage—encouraged her to further her education. She graduated from Cornell University—where she had been a member of Phi Beta Kappa—in 1882. The University of Pennsylvania rejected her application for graduate school because of her sex. Revealing her early commitment to working women, she founded the New Century Guild for Working Women in Philadelphia and taught evening classes there.

She then decided to attend the University of Zurich, the first European university to grant degrees to women. Her mind, she recalled, “was tinder awaiting a match.” There, she joined the growing circle of students excited by socialism. The socialist critique of capitalism helped Kelley understand the exploitation of women and children she had observed in American and British factories, and the racism her family had fought against. While living in Germany, she translated Friedrich Engels’s book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844—its first English version, still in print today—and began a correspondence with Engels, Karl Marx’s co-author.

In Zurich she met Lazare Wischnewetsky, a Russian medical student and fellow socialist, whom she married in 1884. The couple had three children. In 1891, prompted by his physical...