Florence Kelley - Factory Inspection and Child Labor

Factory Inspection and Child Labor

Kelley's father had toured her through glass factories at night when she was little. Kelley fought to make it illegal for children under the age of 14 to work and to limit the hours of children under 16. She sought to give them the right of education, arguing children must be nurtured to be intelligent people.

From 1891 through 1899, Kelley lived at the Hull House settlement in Chicago, where in 1893, Governor Peter Altgeld made her the Chief Factory Inspector for the state of Illinois, a newly-created position and unheard-of for a woman. Hull House resident Alzina Stevens served as one of Kelley's assistant factory inspectors. In the course of her Hull House work, she befriended Frank Alan Fetter when he was asked by the University of Chicago to conduct a study of Chicago neighborhoods. At Fetter's motion, she was made a member of Cornell's Irving Literary Society as an alumna, when he joined the Cornell Faculty.

Kelley was known for her firmness and fierce energy. Hull House founder Jane Addams' nephew called Kelley "the toughest customer in the reform riot, the finest rough-and-tumble fighter for the good life for others, that Hull House ever knew,"

In 1913, she studied the federal patterns of distribution of funds for education. She noticed a lot of inequitable distributions for White schools as opposed to Black schools (Athey, 1971). This launched her to create the “The Sterling Discrimination Bill” which was an attack against the Sterling Towner Bill. This bill proposed a federal sanction of $2.98 per capita for teachers of colored children and $10.32 per capita children at White schools in 15 schools in the South and Washington, D.C. The NAACP held the position that this would perpetuate the continual discrimination and neglect of the public schools for the Colored. She and W.E.B. DuBois disagreed on how to attack this bill. She wanted to add the language that guaranteed equitable distribution of funding regardless of race. W.E.B. DuBois believed that there should be a clause added specific to race, because it would require the federal government to enforce that the schools for the Colored would be treated fairly. Kelley believed that if they added anything about race to the bill, it would not pass through Congress. She wanted to get the bill passed and then change the language. So when the bill was passed, it called for equal distribution to the schools to be handled by the states based on population. The issue remained on whether or not the states would distribute the money equally.