supreme court justice felix frankfurter said in 1953 that Florence Kelley “had probably the largest single share in shaping the social history of the United States during the first 30 years of the 20th Century” (Frankfurter x). Kelley is an unusual figure to discuss in a philosophical journal, perhaps because she has generally been classified only as a social scientist. Yet, as I discovered, she is a wonderful thinking partner, sometimes raising more philosophical questions than she resolves. Her commitments, struggles, failures, and accomplishments problematize and reveal new insights into pragmatist pluralism, feminist political choices, and the role of socialism in early pragmatism. Bringing her into the feminist pragmatist discussion gives us more examples of how to approach problem-solving from feminist and pragmatist perspectives.1Florence Kelley and Jane Addams first met when Kelley knocked on Hull House's door early one snowy December morning in 1891. She was fleeing with her three small children from her physically abusive husband in New York, needing an occupation and a home in Chicago. She became the only early resident who was a single mother. Kelley spent most of the next decade at Hull House. Kelley and Addams had similar family backgrounds and became close friends, although they had dramatically different personalities. One thing they shared in common was that both were very close to their politician fathers.Kelley's father was a longtime progressive congressman from Pennsylvania. He helped to develop her social consciousness by taking her along on his investigations of industrial conditions when, as a child herself, she often saw the horrifying conditions of children's work environments. At two in the morning, she witnessed the “terrifying sight” of boys younger than herself working near the steel mills’ red-hot furnaces and molten metal. With her father, she also witnessed young boys called “dogs” working in glass factories. Each glass blower was assisted by one of these boys who knelt with his head near the oven as the glass came out from the furnaces to prepare the hot mold for the blower's next project. These events left her with the “astonished impression of the utter unimportance of children compared with products” (Kelley, “My Philadelphia” 56–57).She entered Cornell University at age 16 and was drawn to the study of social science and economics. Like many college-bound young women in the late nineteenth century, she quickly became committed to social reform, focusing on women and children's social and economic conditions. As Kelley said in 1882, in her first published article after college, “In the field of sociology, there is brainwork waiting for women which men cannot do” (“Need Our Working Women” 521). In their lives and studies, young college women like Kelley experienced the inequalities and suffering around them and were looking for a solution. Kelley developed an approach that focused on both the causes as well as the effects of the social problems she worked to eradicate. She believed that college-educated women and working-class women could work together to produce knowledge and change.Kelley was exposed briefly to Marxism and socialism in her college years when a family friend convalesced in their home. This man's father had known Karl Marx, and he shared some Marxist pamphlets with Kelley (Autobiography 72). After college, when she continued her studies in Zurich, she became immersed in Marxism. She returned to the United States three years later, with her Russian Marxist husband and their three children. She expected to continue her Marxist work with the New York Socialist Labor Party, but the party expelled her and her husband. She then turned her attention to researching working women's financial and social struggles.In Chicago, Kelley's early research into local living and working conditions was published in the ground-breaking Hull House Maps and Papers, written by Hull House residents (Addams et al.), considered a pioneering work in sociology and an early example of what became cultural geography. Her investigations into child labor, sweatshops, and industrial conditions led to her position as Illinois's first chief factory inspector. Armed with data and the support of the Hull House network, she successfully lobbied the Illinois legislature for laws protecting industrial workers. She drafted proposed legislation, and when legislation was passed, she and her team of inspectors enforced the new regulations.After leaving Hull House in 1899, she became the first head of the National Consumers League (NCL), where she continued to change working conditions by shaping consumers’ choices. Under Kelley's leadership, the NCL became “the single most successful lobbying agency on behalf of legislative protections for working women and children”(Sklar, “Hull House Maps” 138). Kelley and Henry Street Settlement founder Lillian Wald also originated the innovative and powerful federal Children's Bureau. Her activism and her mentoring of other political leaders helped lay the foundations for the 1930s New Deal legislation. American democratic culture was altered by Kelley's continuing work to modify capitalism's brutalities and establish legal safeguards for workers, particularly for women and children.In her work in Chicago, Kelley became a pragmatist, influenced by her work with Addams and the philosophers and social scientists in Chicago. In claiming that Kelley is a pragmatist, I'm not claiming that she is a philosopher in any traditional sense. She approached all public problems as one trained in the social sciences, but then, as in current times, pragmatism was and is one of the philosophies and methodologies that support the social sciences (Morgan; Biesta) and many emerging fields.2 As an interdisciplinary field, early pragmatism stood at the boundaries of multiple disciplines. Pragmatism and the early social sciences in the United States developed in the same intellectual and social milieu. Pragmatist philosophers, particularly Addams, Dewey, James, and Mead, were instrumental in the early evolution of the social sciences.3 Addams's stature as a foundational figure in sociology, social work, and peace work had traditionally placed her in the social sciences. Kelley was also a participant in the evolution of the social sciences.Since its founding, the social science fields were split between those who advocated the perspective of the disinterested observer and those who were immersed in social reform. Women tended to fill the latter ranks—the practitioners who theorized from personal experiences. Kelley took the approach to social science more often practiced by women, combining her work for reform with her investigations.4 She was interested in the particulars of the situation rather than a generalized theoretical approach.The first decade of Hull House was also the first decade of the new all-male sociology department at the University of Chicago. Although many of the sociologists were involved in Hull House, Addams rejected their concept of a settlement house as a laboratory where the workers become “experts” (Deegan 35). In her criticism of the “sociological laboratory,” Addams said that settlements should be “more human and spontaneous” (Addams, Twenty Years 178). Settlements placed the individual needs of the people in the community before theory-building.5 In a letter to University of Chicago president Harper, Addams said that the Hull House residents were “living in the 19th ward, not as students, but as citizens” (qtd. in Deegan 38).The early divisions in the developing fields of the social sciences are often portrayed as gendered, with women's social science (like that of Addams) more frequently engaged in and growing out of applied community work and advocacy. In contrast, most male social scientists wanted to take a distanced observer perspective (Muncy 43–45; Sklar, “Hull House Maps” 114–15; Rynbrandt 44–54). Another way to look at this divide is to consider it a pragmatist vs. non-pragmatist perspective in the social sciences. The early social sciences appealed to many women reformers because they contained the same aspects that we would consider pragmatist: local, particularized knowledge, experiential engagement, and efforts to improve social conditions.6 Kelley was committed to empirical research, but, like her Hull House colleagues, she expected that her research would result in social change, not in new theories.Pragmatist methodology relies on “situated creativity” (Colapietro 1), which begins with lived experience, localized social context, and shared reflection. Pragmatist thinking and theorizing start with the particular lived situation and return to those situations, or as James said, “[i]t begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it” (934). The local community and historical context are starting points for thinking and the basis for final reflection, which depends on having, as Addams wrote in 1895, “an enthusiasm for the possibilities of locality” (Addams et al., Hull House Maps 207).As a theorist and a practitioner, Kelley used these concrete situations to find and then combat the causes of the evils she battled (Goldmark 67). Instead of ideals such as generalized human rights, Kelley focused on and engaged with particular settings, such as piecemeal work done in tenements, children working in industries, or the hours worked by women in factories. As she said in 1898: [I]f you are to speak as one having authority and not as the scribes in these matters of the common daily life and experience . . . you must suffer from the dirty streets, the universal ugliness, the lack of oxygen in the air you daily breathe, the endless struggle with soot and dust and insufficient water supply, the hanging from a strap on the overcrowded streetcar at the end of your day's work. (Kelley, “Hull House” 550)Like Addams and Dewey, Kelley was committed to social ethics that transcended individual ethics. She believed that changes in the law would promote equality and protect the space for social ethics through protections for social rights.7 Although human rights may appear to be individual personal rights, in Some Ethical Gains through Legislation, Kelley said asserting those rights “invariably brings the experience that they are historically interwoven with the rights of innumerable other people,” particularly “the weakest and most defenseless persons in the community” (229–30). She claims that social rights, like the right to childhood, the right to leisure, and suffrage for women, must happen through collective, not individual, action, which points to this the necessity of legislation. Social ethics requires thinking about the good of society and also requires a community to be involved in creating those goods.One reason to bring Kelley into a philosophical discussion of early pragmatism is to note how she influenced and was influenced by the pragmatist figures of her day. When Addams and Kelley first met, their philosophical orientations were dramatically different.8 In her first endeavors at Hull House, Addams had approached settlement work from the perspective of social intercourse around the humanities, consistent with her liberal arts education.9 After Kelley arrived, Addams and Hull House moved toward data-driven social science investigations and active support of the labor unions. Kelley's expertise in social science research, developed in her studies at Cornell and refined by later investigative work, added a systemic, class-based analysis to Hull House reform efforts, as evidenced in Hull House Maps and Papers (Addams et al.). That data became a tool of social change, particularly in Hull House's successful legislative work.10Kelley's commitment to race, class, and gender pluralism was evident throughout her work. She became deeply committed to fighting racial inequity, and in that work, she developed a relationship with Du Bois. After her death, Du Bois said that “save for Jane Addams, there is not another social worker in the United States who has had either her insight or her daring, so far as the American Negro is concerned” (131). Along with Addams, Dewey, and Du Bois, Kelley was a founding member of the NAACP. As an active member of its Board, she worked tirelessly on its committees, including those responsible for the budget and initiatives such as Federal Aid to Education, Anti-Lynching, and the Inequal Expenditure of School Funds. Her work for racial justice followed the same research-based methodology that she and Addams developed in their early years at Hull House. Du Bois described Kelley's approach: “Always, she asked questions: pointed, penetrating, devastating questions, and to these questions she wanted answers and was herself more than willing to furnish answers by work and inquiry and thought” (131). She analyzed upcoming legislative bills to determine their impact on discriminatory racial practices and did research to find data to support or critique forthcoming legislation. She was particularly concerned with equalizing funding for African American schools and vigorously opposed lynching. She lobbied Congress, gathered signatures, rallied her social reform colleagues, and drew on her connections within several national organizations to advocate for or against bills that affected racial equity. She didn't hesitate to engage in protests personally. In 1917, “she marched in the silent protest parade down the streets of New York to dramatize her opposition to the brutal savagery displayed by white authorities and citizens against Negroes in the East St. Louis, Illinois race riots of that year” (Athey 257).Kelley was raised in a family committed to women's suffrage, and her early exposure to the fight for women's rights contributed to her larger social justice perspective. Her great aunt Sarah Pugh was a well-known advocate for women's suffrage and African American rights and a friend of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Kelley's father was a friend of Susan B. Anthony, and he was an early sponsor of suffrage amendments in the House of Representatives. He regularly spoke on behalf of women's rights (Kelley, Autobiography 61; Sklar, Florence Kelley 46–48).Kelley's commitment to women's issues led to research and activism focused on women's working conditions and children in poverty, two threads of research that continued throughout her entire career. From her earliest studies at Cornell, women and children were her primary subjects. In her feminist economic commitment to working-class women, she constructed “a class analysis of contemporary society” often using “gender as a surrogate for class.” Even when she extended her work to include the conditions of all laborers, “her political-social-rhetorical base was female” (Sklar, “Hull House Maps” 116). In her later career, she became concerned about public health issues around infant mortality numbers and mothers dying in childbirth, which led to her work co-creating the federal Children's Bureau and her enthusiastic support of its programs.Kelley was vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) for many years and actively worked for the suffrage cause. She joined the first National Woman's Party, which was more aggressive and militant in its suffrage work than the older suffrage leaders (Goldmark 180). The National Woman's Party (NWP) was disbanded when suffrage was achieved. A new organization with the same name was formed to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, a constitutional amendment requiring the government to treat women the same as men, which touched off a debate within the National Woman's Party about the meaning of equality.After an emotionally and intellectually agonizing struggle, Kelley decided she could not support the ERA. In taking this move, Kelley became part of a feminist debate that engaged women throughout the twentieth century: Should feminists advocate for the “same” treatment as men or advocate for “equal” treatment, which considers women's differing gender needs?11 She did not believe that requiring women to be treated the same as men resulted in equality for women. Most of her career had been dedicated to promoting special legislation that protected women, such as the eight-hour workday, maternity leave, and mother's pensions. She understood that laws that mandated identical treatment for all would ignore differing social, economic, and embodied realities. Treating women the same as men would not make the workplace equal; instead, she and her NCL colleagues argued that women were equal to, but different from, men. As Kelley pointed out earlier, women “proverbially worked the longest hours, at the most wearing tasks, for the most wretched pay’ (Modern Industry 55). She believed women's equality in the workplace should require employers to make provisions for women's particular needs, such as pregnancy, breastfeeding, and childcare.12 She asked how legal equality could be achieved by the same treatment when the needs of a specific population were different.As Kelley pointed out, her decision was particular to the situation of 1923; in the year 2000, she said, her response may have been different. Her decision not to support the ERA in the 1920s was based on pragmatist reasoning about the materialist particularities of women's lives at the time. In 1923, women still needed protection, particularly working-class women and African American women who didn't have the same power structures to advocate for their needs (Kelley, “Should Women” 277). As early as 1882, Kelley argued for equal pay for women and men, but in this debate, she also noted that women's economic and physical situations are different from those of men.13 Men, particularly white men, were more likely than women to be in powerful labor unions, and women didn't make salaries that could supply war chests for strikers. She was concerned that the draft ERA legislation did not address industrial conditions, which meant the bill's safety ramifications would be battled out in the courts (Kelley, Selected Letters 274). Although its proponents claimed that the ERA would not affect industrial protections, Kelley's long experience with legal decisions that overturned protective laws had left her cynical about the courts’ willingness to decide on behalf of the health and safety of marginalized populations.The ERA debate was often class-based, with professional and upper-class women more likely to endorse the ERA. Kelley had painful knowledge of how privilege and power affected legal decisions, and she knew that the ERA would result in years of legal dispute. And, as she pointed out, most judges who would determine the effect of the laws were male (“Should Women” 278). She reluctantly decided she could not support the ERA movement. She asked Alice Paul to remove her from the Advisory Board of the National Woman's Party (Kelley, Selected Letters 272–73), thereby losing the comradery of many of her feminist friends.14When Kelley arrived at Hull House, she had been committed to revolutionary Marxist socialism. From Europe, Kelley had read of the US labor unrest and was convinced it signaled the coming revolution, signs of which, she wrote to her friend May Lewis, “fill me with awe” (Sklar, Florence Kelley 106). She expected a revolution but hoped it would be a peaceful process without bloodshed. In those early years, she criticized philanthropy as a solution to social problems. Philanthropic work, she said in an unpublished essay, was a “vain struggle to patch and alleviate an evil social system, propping up what ought to be torn down and rebuilt.”15 However, she did not reject social work, particularly if that work was based on social scientific investigations.Kelley had formed an ongoing relationship with Friedrich Engels and translated some of his writing for English audiences. Her translation of Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England became the primary English source for most of the twentieth century.16 Engels's investigations of the conditions of workers, particularly his inquiry into women's lives, resonated with Kelley's earlier Cornell thesis. Still, while Engels advocated for the end of capitalism, Kelley had endorsed cross-class cooperation and protective legislation. The Condition of the Working Class in England further developed Kelley's understanding of the effects of capitalist exploitation on the physical body, particularly for women who, Engels said, had specific physiological needs.17 In their correspondence, Engels wrote excitedly to Kelley about the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago, which he saw as “the breaking out of class war in America.”18 Kelley did not disagree. When she returned from Europe with her husband and children, she was ready to devote a considerable amount of time working for socialist causes, but she and her then-husband were kicked out of the Socialist Party in New York.Kelley's early revolutionary Marxism shifted in her relationship with Addams and her work at Hull House, moving closer to Addams's more gradualist approach to change. As Marilyn Fischer points out, Addams's philosophy resonated with English Fabian socialism, a movement for gradualist democratic change. Although she was once a revolutionary, Kelley became a reformer interested in systemic social improvements within the current governmental structures. At Hull House, Kelley came to “consider herself a proponent of English socialism, namely the realization of socialism step by step” through the labor movement and legislative interventions (Bisno 116). Instead of advocating for the overthrowing the state, by the 1890s, she was advocating using legislative methods to change democracy from within. Edmond Kelly's Twentieth Century Socialism, which Florence Kelley edited, positions socialism as social ethics rather than Marxism, a position we can assume Kelley endorsed.Marxist socialism and pragmatist socialism diverge in significant ways. Marxist utopian idealism prescribes revolution as a solution to class conflict. Pragmatist socialism (at least for Addams, Dewey, and Kelley) focuses on class cooperation, with hands-on engagement as a method of change. Kelley's pragmatist socialism still advocates radical change but through gradual change within the system. Pragmatist socialists don't envision a final ideal state but a continuing evolutionary process.19 Kelley never abandoned the label of socialism, even when it caused her a great deal of public criticism after World War I, although she “sharply repudiated communism” after the Bolshevik revolution (Goldmark 19). She remained committed to democratic social change through influencing public opinion, consumer choices, and legislative change.Kelley died in 1932, but her enduring legacy is evident in the next generation of feminist political activists she directly mentored. She hired, trained, and mentored influential women, such as Frances Perkins, who had been Kelley's protégé at the NCL, and eventually became the first female secretary of labor under FDR. Perkins, who was one of the architects of the New Deal, created Social Security. Many of the workers’ rights that Kelley fought for were incorporated into the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Perkins regarded Kelley as “the head of the family in this enterprise which binds us all together” (Kelley, Selected Letters 443). New Deal legislation legalized many of the reforms to which Kelley devoted her life, and it created safety nets that many Americans still rely on today.