Florence Kelley
Florence Kelley was the first Chief Factory Inspector of Illinois, appointed in 1893, and the head of the National Consumers League from 1899, and she argued for woman suffrage on the specific ground that women would never end child labor without a vote to enforce it with.
She lived from 1859 to 1932. Her working method was always the same: collect the facts about an industry street by street, publish them, get a law written from them, and then find out what happens to that law in court.
What Florence Kelley did as Chief Factory Inspector of Illinois from 1893
As Chief Factory Inspector of Illinois from 1893, Kelley enforced a factory act she had helped produce the evidence for. She had settled at Hull House, the Chicago settlement run by Jane Addams, and had been hired to survey the sweatshops of the city for the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics. The survey went into the tenement rooms where garments were finished and recorded who was working in them, at what age, for how long, and on what goods. The legislature passed a factory law out of that material: it limited the hours women could be made to work, barred the employment of children below a set age, and brought tenement workshops under inspection. The governor appointed Kelley to enforce it, and she took a law degree at Northwestern University while doing so, because prosecutions were being lost.
Enforcement was harder than legislation. Grand juries would not indict, judges were unsympathetic, and the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the hours clause in Ritchie v. People, holding that it interfered with a woman's right to contract for her own labor. That decision is why the rest of Kelley's career went on the courts as much as the legislatures. A reform a bench can void in an afternoon is not a reform.
What the National Consumers League did from 1899
From 1899 the National Consumers League gave Kelley an instrument she could use without waiting for a legislature: the buyer. Its device was the White Label, awarded to manufacturers whose factories obeyed the state factory laws, employed no children, and did their work on the premises rather than farming it out to tenements. Labeled goods were listed, the lists went to members, and members undertook to buy from them. The league also published where the goods sold in a given city were actually made.
The league's second instrument was the brief. Kelley and Josephine Goldmark assembled the industrial and medical material that Louis Brandeis put before the Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon, arguing an hours law from evidence about what long hours did to workers rather than from precedent alone. The Court upheld the law. The same research committee then supplied the factual basis for hours and wage laws in state after state, with Kelley running the national organization from New York and local leagues doing the surveying.
She also helped found the National Child Labor Committee and pressed for a federal Children's Bureau, established with Julia Lathrop, another of the Hull House group, as its first chief. Her accomplishments are almost all of that kind: an institution, a committee, a law, a court record.
The child labor speech of 22 July 1905 and how it is built
The child labor speech of 22 July 1905 was delivered in Philadelphia to a woman suffrage audience, and it is the text most readers meet first, because it is set as a rhetorical analysis passage. It works by accumulation rather than by argument. Kelley moves through the states one at a time, naming what each permits: the ages at which children may legally be put to work, the hours, the night shifts, and the goods that come out of those hours and are bought by the women in the hall. The night work is the hinge, because it sets the audience asleep in their beds against the children awake at the machines making what they will buy.
The devices are worth naming, because a rhetorical analysis of the passage is expected to find them.
- Repetition of one sentence frame as the list of states advances.
- Contrast between sleeping listener and working child, returned to rather than stated once.
- Shift from third person description to direct address.
- Closing turn, which converts the listener from spectator into purchaser and then into voter.
The speech does not ask for sympathy. It tells the women in the room that they are the market, that they have no vote, and that the second fact is why the first is useless.
Why Kelley argued for the vote as a labor instrument
Kelley argued for the vote as an instrument because she had tried every other one and watched them fail. Child labor and the vote were, in her case, a single subject: the buyers the league organized were women, the workers the factory acts protected were women and children, the legislators answered to voters, and none of the women in either category could vote. Consumer pressure reached a manufacturer who wanted the label and no other. A state law could be repealed by the next legislature or voided by the next bench. Only voters could hold a legislator to a factory act.
That is a narrower argument than Susan B. Anthony's generation had made, and it was narrowed on purpose. Kelley was not arguing from natural right, as the Seneca Falls resolutions had, or from personal testimony, as platform speakers such as Sojourner Truth at Akron in 1851 had. She argued that the ballot was a tool with a job, and she named the job. The Nineteenth Amendment, certified on 26 August 1920, put the tool in her hands, and she spent what was left of her working life using it on hours laws and child labor bills.
What Kelley lost, and what she opposed afterward
What Kelley lost, she lost in the courts, and the federal record is where that is plainest. Congress passed a child labor act and the Supreme Court struck it down in Hammer v. Dagenhart, holding that Congress could not use its power over commerce to reach conditions of manufacture. Congress tried again through the taxing power and that fell too. A constitutional amendment on child labor was sent to the states and never ratified. She never got a federal ban on child labor in her lifetime.
She also spent her last years opposing an amendment other suffragists were promoting. Alice Paul's National Woman's Party, formed in 1916, campaigned after ratification for an equal rights amendment, and Kelley fought it, because strict legal equality between the sexes would void the sex based protective laws on hours and night work she had spent her career building and defending in court. Both sides of that quarrel were suffragists and both were consistent with their own reasoning. Kelley died in 1932.
Two things are commonly misattributed to her. She did not write the Illinois factory act: she produced the sweatshop survey it was drawn from, and others carried the bill. Nor was she a suffragist who took up labor law; she was a labor investigator who took up suffrage, and the order matters to her argument.