1859-1932
Social Reformer

At the Vanguard.

As a single mother, a socialist, and a sociologist working for suffrage, women's rights, and urban reform in Chicago and New York, Florence Kelley was at the vanguard of several reform movements. For thirty-four years, after she helped to found it in 1899, she served as the head of the National Consumers' League (NCL), the single most effective lobbying agency for protective labor legislation for women and children.

Background.

The daughter of Quaker abolitionist William Darrah Kelley — a founding member of the Republican Party, a Radical Reconstructionist, and a U.S. congressman from Philadelphia — Florence Kelley combined the firsthand education acquired from her father with the tradition of female political activism she inherited from her great-aunt Sarah Pugh, a leading abolitionist. After she graduated from Cornell University in 1882, Kelley discovered that women of her generation had no real opportunity...