Florence Kelley: A Factory Inspector Campaigns Against Sweatshop Labor

Abstract

FLORENCE KELLEY WAS perhaps the most famous and effective of the labor commissioners, appointed in Progressive Era America, to inspect factory working conditions and determine their level of compliance with the new protective labor legislation passed in the early 20th century.1 Kelley began life as a feminist and social democrat. She studied at the University of Zurich, at that time the only European university to grant degrees to women; married a Russian Jewish socialist medical student; joined the German Social Democratic Party; and translated into English Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England.2–4 Back in America, she left her by now abusive husband, moved to Chicago, lived in Jane Addams’ Hull House, completed a law degree, and became a leader of the fight against unsafe labor conditions. She visited roughly a thousand “sweaters’ victims” in the garment industry, recording their conditions both at work and at home. Hearing of her reputation, Carroll Wright, head of the US Department of Labor, hired her to direct a cadre of workers to collect data on every house, tenement, and room in the Nineteenth Ward of Chicago. Kelley often spoke at protest meetings against sweatshop conditions. In 1892 she wrote a sweeping report on the sweat-shop problem, from which this selection is a brief extract. (Extracts from the entire report can be accessed at http://womhist.binghamton.edu/factory/doclist.htm.) Her recommendations were adopted by the Illinois legislature, which in 1893 passed a law limiting women and children’s working hours to 8 per day, prohibiting sweatshops, and creating a factory inspector’s office with a staff of 12, half of whom had to be women. Kelley was immediately appointed chief factory inspector, and she summarized her highly effective reform strategy in 4 words: “investigate, educate, legislate, enforce.”5 Although the Illinois Manufacturers Association fought Kelley and won a Supreme Court battle declaring the limitation of women’s wage labor to 8 hours per day to be unconstitutional, and although Kelley lost her job as chief factory inspector, she was undeterred. She agreed to serve as secretary of the newly formed National Consumers League (NCL) and transformed that organization into the nation’s leading exponent of protective labor legislation for women and children. Kelley built 64 local consumer leagues across the country to help promote and pass labor legislation. In 1908, a case between the Oregon NCL and a local laundry owner was argued by Louis D. Brandeis; the court upheld as constitutional an Oregon law limiting women’s wage labor to 10 hours a day. Other states would soon agree to limit the hours of labor for women and children and, ultimately, for all workers.