PARA PAR@ ` ╕TEXT ` ¬Kelley, Florence1859╨1932reformerBorn in Philadelphia on September 12, 1859, Florence Molthrop Kelley was frequently ill as a child and was educated mainly at home. She entered Cornell University in 1876 and, after a course of study again delayed by illness, graduated in 1882. She was refused admission to the graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania in the latter year, but after a year spent conducting evening classes for working women in Philadelphia she traveled to Europe, where an encounter with M. Carey Thomas led to her enrolling in the University of Zurich. There she came under the influence of European socialism and made a translation of Friedrich Engels╒s The Conditions of the Working-class in England in 1844 that was published in New York in 1887. She returned to the United States in 1886 with her husband, Lazare Wischnewetzky, a Polish-Russian medical student she had married in June 1884. In New York City they were active in the Socialist Labor party, until they were expelled in 1887, and in various reforms. She published a pamphlet on Our Toiling Children in 1889. In 1891 she and her husband separated; they were subsequently divorced and she moved to Chicago and resumed her maiden name. She became a resident at Jane Addams╒s Hull-House settlement and quickly took her place among the most active and effective workers there. In 1892 she conducted complementary investigations into slum conditions in Chicago (for Carroll D. Wright, federal commissioner of labor) and into sweatshops in the tenements (for the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics). Her reports, together with her contributions to Hull-House Maps and Papers, 1895, were a vivid picture of terrible working and living conditions and a forceful challenge to take action. The Illinois law of 1893 that limited working hours for women, regulated tenement sweatshops, and prohibited child labor was in large part the direct result of her published findings, and in consequence she was appointed by Governor John Peter Altgeld to the job of chief factory inspector, a post created by the same legislation. The four annual reports compiled by her and her staff of 12 investigators (one of whom was Mary Kenney O╒Sullivan) were highly effective in exposing continuing violations of the laws, but the slowness of prosecution led Florence Kelley to enroll in the law school of Northwestern University. She graduated in 1894 and was subsequently admitted to the bar. In 1897 she was relieved of her position by a new and unsympathetic governor. She remained at Hull House two more years and then in 1899 moved to New York City to become general secretary of the new National Consumers╒ League, which had grown out of Josephine Shaw Lowell╒s Consumers╒ League of New York. She took up residence at Lillian Wald╒s Henry Street Settlement and set about the work of promoting federal hours-and-wages and child labor legislation and other reforms. Through her and her able assistant Josephine Goldmark, Goldmark╒s brother-in-law Louis D. Brandeis was brought into the legal fight for industrial reform. She organized some 60 local and state Consumers╒ Leagues over the years and helped organize and attended international conferences of Consumers╒ Leagues in Geneva in 1908 and Antwerp in 1913. She traveled and spoke indefatigably, contributed numerous articles to magazines, published Some Ethical Gains through Legislation, 1905, and Modern Industry, 1913, and edited Edmond Kelly╒s volume on Twentieth Century Socialism, 1910. With Lillian Wald she led in organizing the New York Child Labor Committee in 1902, and two years later she was a founder of the National Child Labor Committee. Her efforts contributed greatly to the creation of a federal Children╒s Bureau in 1912. Her early successes in winning passage of minimum-wage legislation in several states and passage of a federal child labor law in 1916 later give way to frustrating reverses before the Supreme Court, reverses that called forth her notable talent for invective. In addition to her work with the Consumers╒ League, of which she remained general secretary until her death, Kelley was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909, a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society from 1911 and president in 1918╨1920, a member of Eugene V. Debs╒s Socialist Party of America from 1912, a longtime member of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (later the Conference on Social Work) and for several years vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. During 1917╨1918 she was secretary of the federal board of control of labor standards for army clothing. She died in Philadelphia on February 17, 1932. ▐styl ` $ ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ % !I !I ▐ !I ░ !I µ !I 9 !I M !I Y 5¬ Z !I ± !I ▐ ⁿ !I s !I ì !I Ñ !I ▐ ╗ !I ▒ 5¬ ▓ !I
