Florence Kelley fills the role of superwoman nicely. She graduated from Cornell University with the first class of women ever to be admitted there. She then spent seven years at Chicago's Hull House, fighting for women and children's rights in the workplace.

Florence Kelley was the first chief factory inspector for the State of Illinois. She spent four years investigating Chicago's sweatshops and poor apartment buildings to document the terrible conditions for local women and children there. She published her findings in a collection called "Hull-House Maps and Papers."

Kelley found thousands of newly arrived immigrants crowded into cramped, poorly lit rooms to sew clothing, hats, coats or shoes. These sweatshops were "damp and cold in winter, hot and close in summer; foul at all times," and the perfect breeding ground for terrible diseases. Immigrants remained in these conditions because they were too poor and felt too powerless to do anything else. Often they did not speak English, and were cursed at by other (ignorant) Americans for taking jobs away by working for such low wages.

Since families made so little money, children as young as six went to work in factories. These children rarely attended school, since they were more helpful to their parents making money. As soon as children were big enough to sit in a highchair they were often put to work. In her daily inspections, Kelley saw underfed, badly clothed children working fourteen to sixteen hours a day.

Although the rest of the country seemed content to ignore these terrible things, Florence Kelley was not. She went to Northwestern University in the evenings to earn a law degree so that she could fight for worker rights in court.

After seven years at Hull House, Florence moved to New York City. In New York overworked women and children were still making clothing in horrible conditions. Kelley decided to hit the cruel business-owners where it would hurt the most: in their pocketbooks. She organized boycotts, where any piece of clothing that was created in an employee-friendly manner would be given a white label. People could buy clothing with the white label and know that no children under 16 worked on them. When business owners realized that customers would only purchase products with the white label, they began to make changes.

In 1909, Kelley helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and then the US Children's Bureau in 1912. For the next decade she worked to establish a legal minimum wage for women, since employers had until then been able to pay whatever they wanted. Her efforts helped to get a minimum wage established for the first time in the 1930s.

What a super woman!

Rebecca

Please email me at: rebecca@ustrek.org