The ‘forgotten’ sociologist, Florence Kelley

Abstract

Florence Kelley, whose theoretical and empirical activity played a central role in the development of social analysis, started promoting social research in the US in the early 1890s, with a critique of the capitalistic organisation of labour and the exploitation of children and women in the factories and sweatshops of Illinois. This research was also decisive in the contemporary development and use of qualitative and quantitative methods. Poverty, a central element in Kelley’s observations, was to her mind, the fruit of the total subordination to work of workers, their families and their communities. Her theoretical knowledge, based on her American studies, her pragmatism and the Hull-House women’s practice of democracy, was enriched by her history, economics and law studies in European universities and her relationship with the socialist tradition, with Marx and with Engels, whose The Condition of the Working Class in England she translated into English in 1887. The construction of an American sociological canon erased Kelley’s activity and that of many other women, authors of important research, excluded by a slew of anti-women behaviours and critical silences about their lack of scientificity. But History is blotted out by a highly focused present as Anselm Strauss is said to have stated (1993, p.256), a contradictory present in which the idea of a vocation on the part of women to transform research is becoming ever more central: I am seeking an end to androcentrism, not to systematic inquiry (Harding, 1986, p.10). Reflection on Florence Kelley’s personal journey re-opens debates and questions as to the reasons why in the last century, in the 1990s, there began a process of reappropriation of women’s contribution to the history of sociological thought and social research, which necessarily leads to their founding presence in training curricula and sociological tradition thus restoring contents, dignity and memory.