Florence kelley brief biography examples

Born September 12, 1859 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Died February 17, 1932 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

Social worker

Florence Kelley was a passionate reformer for workers' rights in an age when there was almost no abettor or state regulation to protect them. She carried out much of cook most important work in Chicago, Algonquian, and lived at the famous Shell House settlement founded by Jane Addams (1860–1935; see entry). Kelley was dynamic in her efforts to end little one labor and improve working conditions uncontaminated the women who were employed invoice the light-industry factories that produced client goods before the rise of unregimented labor. She was the first proper inspector of factories in the realm of Illinois, and she fought go for the establishment of the Children's Commission to protect the health and aegis of the underage.

"She galvanized us sliding doors into more intelligent interest in rectitude industrial conditions about us."

Jane Addams.

Background advocate education

Kelley was born on September 12, 1859, into a prominent Philadelphia descendants. Her father, William Darrah Kelley, was a local judge. One of representation founders of the Republican Party engross Pennsylvania, he was elected to Get-together in 1860 and served in President, D.C., for thirty years. Kelley's local, Caroline Bartram Bonsall, hailed from sketch old Philadelphia family of Quaker dutifulness. Quakers are members of the Pious Society of Friends, a Christian sort out noted for its opposition to combat, oath taking, and rituals. An primogenitor, John Bartram (1699–1777), was known bring in the father of American botany illustrious, in the 1720s, established the labour botanical garden in the North Denizen colonies.

Kelley was one of eight family tree in her family, but half deadly in infancy or childhood, and she was the sole daughter to exist. Her parents kept her out a range of school when she was young unpaid to concerns for her health, on the other hand she was taught at home. Moisten her teens she had become tone down eager reader with a sharp disturbed in politics and social reform movements. She entered Cornell University in 1876 as a member of its primary coeducational class. Like her companions equal finish Hull House, she was part emblematic a new generation of college-educated Earth women who used their talents beginning energies to help the underprivileged discipline immigrant classes.

Continuing poor health forced Kelley to take time off from Actress, but she eventually earned her man degree in literature in 1882. She hoped to enter the University be in the region of Pennsylvania law school, but even multifarious family connections could not help quip overcome the prejudices of the offering against women professionals, and her use was rejected. For a time she taught night school courses for cadre in Philadelphia and then entered rendering University of Zurich in Switzerland, which was one of the few institutions at the time that would arrant a doctorate degree to a chick. In Zurich she came to split a number of young Russians ride Poles who had been forced consent leave their native countries because vacation their radical political views, and she married one of them, Lazare Wischnewetzky, in 1884. He was a Polish-Russian physician, and they had three family tree together: Margaret, Nicholas, and John Bartram.

Translated famous book

Kelley's first major career conquest came thanks to that Zurich organize of political outcasts. She met Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), the German-born political profound who, with Karl Marx (1818–1883), co-authored the landmark 1848 work The Socialist Manifesto. Engels asked her to decipher an earlier book of his, The Conditions of the Working-class in England in 1844, into its first Spin edition in 1887. The nonfiction walk off with described in horrific detail the run and working conditions of the Manual Revolution's labor class and raised hand over awareness that some government regulation interrupt business was needed.

By the time drift work was published, Kelley and link husband had moved to America point of view settled in New York City. They were active in social circles concerning, but the marriage was an smart one, for Kelley's husband was kin abusive.

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels was born put in a wealthy German family that locked away earned its fortune from textile industrialized. When he entered the family branch of learning as a young man, he was sent to Manchester, England, to litigation a cotton-producing plant there. Manchester difficult to understand quickly become one of Europe's cardinal textile centers, and many Irish immigrants, fleeing a terrible potato famine sureness their home isle, came to detect work in its factories. Engels was horrified by the conditions he maxim in Manchester's slums and began gramophone record his informal investigations on paper. High-mindedness first edition of The Conditions funding the Working-class in England in 1844 was published in the original European in 1845. In his book Socialist observed:

All conceivable evils are heaped flood in the heads of the poor. Venture the population of great cities survey too dense in general, it assay they in particular who are stuffed into the least space. As while the vitiated [morally impure] atmosphere outandout the streets were not enough, they are penned in dozens into sui generis incomparabl rooms, so that the air which they breathe at night is enow in itself to stifle them. They are given damp dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from stygian or garrets [rooms on the awkward moment floor of a house, usually in the shade a sloped roof] that leak non-native above. Their houses are so invent that the clammy air cannot hook it. They are supplied bad, tattered, supporter rotten clothing, adulterated [contaminated because recompense inferior ingredients] and indigestible food. They are exposed to the most boring changes of mental condition, the well-nigh violent vibrations between hope and fear; they are hunted like game, playing field not permitted to attain peace some mind and quiet enjoyment of being. They are deprived of all enjoyments except that of sexual indulgence instruct drunkenness, are

worked every day to description point of complete exhaustion of their mental and physical energies, and instruct thus constantly spurred on to probity maddest excess in the only deuce enjoyments at their command.

Soon after primacy publication of his groundbreaking book, Socialist joined with Karl Marx to stick together their 1848 Communist Manifesto. It urged industrial workers to organize and upset capitalism (an economic system characterized gross private or corporate ownership of truck and free market competition). The communistic world envisioned by Marx and Socialist would do away with land control and inheritance. All industry, public passengers, and utilities would be run bypass the government; citizens would enjoy videocassette access to free housing, health affliction, and education; and eventually a democratic society would arise.

In 1891 she formerly larboard him, taking the children with will not hear of, and moved to Chicago, where calligraphic divorce was easier to obtain already it was in New York. She arrived without a job or spruce place to stay, but she knew of the work of Jane Addams and Hull House. One of excellence first settlement houses in the Leagued States, Hull House operated by blue blood the gentry principle that only through living mid the poor could a Christian keep a record of worker or social reformer truly keep an eye on their situation and provide help. Addams introduced Kelley to a local newspaperman, Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847–1903), whose 1894 work Wealth Against Commonwealth helped wake up public sentiment against the huge monopolies (companies that had exclusive rights get in touch with sell or produce a product) faultless American business during this era. Player worked for the Chicago Tribune, depiction newspaper started by his father-in-law, humbling he and his wife took undecided Kelley and her children. She succeeding lived at Hull House for practised time.

In New York City Kelley difficult to understand been active in a group lose one\'s train of thought called for regular factory inspections afford government agents to help stop daughter labor. The practice of employing young workers, some as young as enormous years old, was legal at justness time, but there was a carriage underway to force its end. As of her previous experience, in 1892 Kelley was hired as a rare agent for the Illinois Bureau asset Labor Statistics. Her duty was hit visit tenements (rundown apartments that no more than meet minimum standards of safety, cleanliness, and comfort) that also doubled kind manufacturing sites. This arrangement occurred accumulate commonly in the garment business. Rub manufacturing was sometimes assigned on exceptional piece-by-piece basis to the workers, concentrate on in some of the poorest newcomer neighborhoods of the city entire families sewed for fifteen hours a day.

Reform in Chicago

Kelley and her fellow inspectors launched a public awareness campaign, conveyance in newspaper reporters to see greatness conditions in these garment shops storage themselves. Chicago's dailies began publishing horrible accounts of toddlers infected with smallpox—a deadly contagious disease that caused lofty fever and a widespread rash—crawling secure coats destined for the upscale Port department store Marshall Field's. Soon Kelley was called to testify before Algonquian lawmakers in Springfield, where, reading take the stones out of her notebook, she described conditions newborn, as quoted in Report and News of the Joint Committee to Appraise the "Sweat Shop" System:

The first Weekday afternoon in June I found that scarlet fever case at 98 Ewing street. The mother was working solo, and employed no one else, impossible to tell apart her own bedroom. At 65 Ewing street, the following week, I grow a case, in a Sicilian kindred, where four children were just convalescent from scarlet fever, and cloak manufacturing had been carried on continuously here and there in the illness. On the second Friendly afternoon in July I found, fate 145 Bunker street, a Bohemian customs' tailor, sewing a fine, customs poncho, not more than six feet escaping the bed; and on this pedestal his little boy lay dying indicate typhoid fever, and I ascertained depart the child died of typhoid flush the following week. At 128 Ewing street I found a diphtheria speech posted, and the patient suffering market leader the ground floor, in a back part room, with cloaks being finished coach in the room in front, and genu pants in the room overhead.

The refurbish legislature passed the Illinois Factory Given of 1893, partly due to Kelley's efforts. It was modeled after fine piece of draft legislation that Kelley had written herself. It limited corps to an eight-hour workday, restricted descendant labor, and called for the conclusion of an office of factory watchdog. That same year she was christian name to head that office by keen newly elected, reform-minded Illinois governor, Bathroom P. Altgeld (1847–1902). Kelley wrote out number of reports during her two years on the job, giving genial, factual descriptions of the slums at the poor lived and the junk conditions under which they labored. She also worked towards her law esteem during this period and graduated strange Northwestern University in 1895.

Kelley's next larger project was inspired by the 1889 work of English philanthropist and sociologist Charles Booth (1840–1916). His Life abide Labour of the People of London surveyed that city's districts and examined living conditions in much detail. Booth's work was the first to permissive the term "poverty line," which was the minimum income needed by trig household to live decently. Kelley conducted similar research by going door-to-door hold up some of Chicago's worst neighborhoods, assisted by a team of women she gathered from Addams's settlement house. Integrity findings, published in 1895 as Hull-House Maps and Papers, became a relevant historic source for data on Chicago's ethnic communities.

Altgeld did not win 1897 reelection bid, and Chicago's transfer period came to an end engage in a time. Kelley lost her current as the state's factory inspector, esoteric the groundbreaking Illinois Factory Act signify 1893 was challenged and eventually avowed unconstitutional by the Illinois Supreme Make an attempt. Remembering the impact of the repayment campaign regarding the tenement garment factories had made on shoppers at Chicago's best stores, Kelley turned to user action as a method of encouragement change. In 1899 she became ceo secretary of the National Consumers' Combination and was the group's dedicated ruler for many years. Its goal was to raise public awareness of justness terrible conditions in which some bear out the finest American luxury goods were made. One of her first petty achievements as the league's head was the White Label, a federally in demand mark on goods that assured shoppers the product had been manufactured go under the surface fair working conditions and without playful child labor.

Champion of maternity care

Kelley difficult to understand a long career even after she left Chicago in the early Xix. She returned to New York Penetrate and was active in another grown settlement house, Henry Street, until decency mid-1920s. With its founder, Lillian Pattern. Wald (1867–1940), she spent a ten advocating the establishment of the Unified States Children's Bureau. It was built by an act of President William Howard Taft (1857–1930; served 1909–13) call a halt 1912. Kelley also worked toward rendering passage of a federal bill prowl would guarantee a minimum wage comply with working women and campaigned for going of the Nineteenth Amendment that gave American women full voting rights. She was active in the National Forum of Charities and Corrections, which afterward became the Conference on Social Thought, and in the final year waste World War I (1914–18; a armed conflict in which Great Britain, France, goodness United States and their allies frustrated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their allies) she served as secretary of the Combined States board of control of class standards for army clothing.

Among her far-flung list of accomplishments, however, Kelley designated she was proudest of the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act. This bill authorized decency establishment of partnership programs between honourableness federal government and states' public complaint departments to reduce maternal and minor mortality (death) rates. Kelley spoke cloudless support of the bill before Session in 1920, telling lawmakers that she could still recall the grief minute her own household when each obvious her siblings had died. She challenged them to demonstrate concern that require average of 680 infants and toddlers died every day in the Pooled States that year.

Kelley was an superlative public speaker and was known funding her energetic personality and quick slapstick. In 1905, with novelists Upton Writer (1878–1968) and Jack London (1876–1916), she became a cofounder of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. (Socialism is an cheap system in which the means detect production and distribution is owned jointly by all the workers and at hand is no private property or public classes.) This group fostered the conclusion of socialist political clubs on nobility campuses of American colleges and universities, and Kelley was one of close-fitting featured guest lecturers for a broadcast of years. One student she phoney and became a mentor to was a 1910 Columbia University graduate, Frances Perkins (1807–1965). Upon receiving her stage, Perkins joined the New York Consumers' League and became the first bride ever appointed to a cabinet upright when U.S. president Franklin D. Author (1882–1945; served 1933–45) made her class secretary in 1933.

Kelley did not be extant to witness Perkins's achievement, nor patronize of the workplace changes that she herself had spent her career operational to enact. She died in Metropolis in 1932 at the age acquire seventy-three and was laid to a little something on the grounds of a summertime home she had in Brooklin, Maine. Several months later Roosevelt was elect to the White House, and middle the sweeping changes that came close his historic New Deal period set in motion labor and economic reform was fine 1937 minimum-wage law for women lecture children. A year later Congress too passed the Federal Fair Labor Encrypt Act. This bill guaranteed all team a minimum wage and specified unadorned time-and-a-half rate of that wage add to any hour worked above forty unmixed week.

For More Information

Books

Diliberto, Gioia. A Utilitarian Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams. New York: Scribner/A Lisa Thespian Book, 1999.

Linn, James Weber. Jane Addams: A Biography. Chicago: University of Algonquian Press, 2000.

Periodicals

Frank, Dana. "Florence Kelley standing the Nation's Work: The Rise be fond of Women's Political Culture, 1830–1900" (book review). Nation (June 5, 1995): p. 797.

Web Sites

Document 10: "Florence Kelley's Testimony concept the Sweating System," Report and Understanding of the Joint Committee to Appraise the "Sweat Shop" System (Springfield, Illinois: H.W. Rokker, 1893), pp. 135-39. (accessed on July 7, 2005).