We marched onto the floor of the Illinois State Legislature for a Reason: So that you would have more power than we did. Do something with it!!
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| Suffragette Parade, 23 October 1915. [Source: Wikimedia. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.] |
Cherish the vote. Now that you have it. Too many places women still cannot vote.
In 1916, Alice Paul formed the National Woman's Party (NWP), a group focused on the passage of a national suffrage amendment. Over 200 NWP supporters, the Silent Sentinels, were arrested in 1917 while picketing the White House, some of whom went on hunger strike and endured forced feeding after being sent to prison. Under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, the two-million-member NAWSA also made a national suffrage amendment its top priority. After a hard-fought series of votes in the U.S. Congress and in state legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920. It states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." [Source: Women's Suffrage in the United States. Wikipedia]
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| Women's suffragists parade in New York City in 1917, carrying placards with the signatures of more than a million women. [Source: New York Times. Created October 1, 1917] |
Remember, Jane and I and the Hull House Women accomplished what we did, and it was amazing. And we didn’t even have the vote. You can do so much more!!!
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| Some of the picket line of Nov. 10, 1917. [Source: Library of Congress. Harris & Ewing, Washington, DC (Photographer). Public domain] |
Elections? Voting? You would rather have it than not, even with all the problems. Democracy? We can’t give up on democracy, even if we are tearing our hair out.
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| Portrait of Jane Addams (1860-1935), sitting in an automobile in Chicago, Illinois. A policeman on horseback is visible in the background. [Source: Chicago Daily News DN-0064813. No Copyright. July 22, 1915] |
My mother wrote the most marvelous letters. She wrote on both sides of the paper, across lines already written to save the paper. Still I could read them. She could barely let me out of her sight after Anna died, wouldn’t let me go to school. I can’t blame her.
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| [Source: The New York Public Library Archives & Manuscripts division maintains a collection, Florence Kelley Papers, including her correspondence.] |
The Cook County Courthouse? I spent time there in my custody dispute. My husband, Lazare Wischnewetzky, the mad, abusive one, didn’t want me, but he did want the children. I had to hide the children away during all my time in Chicago. My son, Nicholas, remembered coming to Hull House as a boy and being a child of Hull House.
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| While studying in Zurich, Kelley met and married Lazare Wischnewetzky, a Russian-Polish medical student, with whom she had 3 children. [Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. "Family portrait" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1870 - 1925.] |
Henry Demarest Lloyd, and Jesse Brosse Lloyd: advocates, reformers, historians. He spent months living with the locked out workers at the time of the Strike in Pennsylvania, (?) where the mine owners did everything to starve the community into submission. Henry Demarest Lloyd then went and testified before Congress as to what he saw there.
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Letter to Florence Kelley By H. D. Lloyd, 1899 |
I spent hours, days and nights, and weeks by myself, entertaining myself. I read through all of my father’s substantial Library, all the philosophers, the novelists, starting in one corner then going all around the room. What a blessing to have those books. History, Art, Understanding. Life elsewhere.
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| Florence Kelley was one of eight children, six girls and two boys, one set of twins. Five of the children died, including both twins, some as infants, some when they were older. She was the only girl to survive to adulthood, one of her sisters, Anna, living until the age of six before dying when Florence Kelley was 12. [Source: Florence Kelley as a child. From Sklar, Katherine 'Notes of Sixty Years: The Autobiography of Florence Kelley,' p. 22] |
I fled New York City, to escape my deranged and violent husband, Lazare Wischnewetzky, with my three children, Nicholas, my beloved Margaret, and John. I borrowed money for the train fare from a young woman who worked as a governess, and escaped in the middle of the night secretly, on my way to Chicago, where I became a new person, Mrs. Florence Kelley, Henry Demarest Lloyd and his wife, the beautiful Jesse Brosse Lloyd said: Of course we will take the children. The children will live with us. And I went to Hull House. Just like that, a spontaneous act of generosity. That was the kind of people they were. Jesse Brosse Lloyd was disowned by her own father when her husband wrote a letter in support of the Haymarket anarchists. Haymarket was the symbol of rebellion, too soon after the Civil War to be forgotten.
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| When Henry Demarest Lloyd came to Chicago, he was a recent graduate of Columbia University, a lawyer, a poet, and he took the town by storm with his brilliance, his erudition, and his passion for justice. Before long he was the literary editor and then the very well respected financial editor of The Chicago Tribune. [Source: Puublic domain. H29628 U.S. Copyright Office, Library of Congress] |
My mother, a remarkable woman. She had three daughters. I was the only one who survived. My beloved sister Anna died at the age of 12, an age where children had usually escaped the diseases. Our hearts were broken. Vaccines made a difference. Of all children born in Chicago in the 1890’s, forty percent died before the age of three. People expected children to die, which didn’t make it right.
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| Group of children on street; Chicago, IL. [Source: ICHi-24067. Chicago History Museum. Reproduction of photograph, photographer unknown. Date: ca. 1905.] |
I had a remarkable mother, and aunt. And father. Every year my father, Congressman Kelley, Pig Iron Kelley, would introduce legislation in the US Congress for universal women’s suffrage. He was called Pig Iron Kelley because he was from the Iron country in Pennsylvania. I remember him taking me to a smelting plant when I was a young girl. He wanted me to see how people worked in front of the giant furnace. And I never forgot it.
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| William D. Kelley was an abolitionist, a friend of Abraham Lincoln and one of the founders of the Republican Party in 1854. He advocated for the recruitment of black troops in the American Civil War, and the extension of voting rights to them afterwards. [Credit: Mathew Benjamin Brady / Levin Corbin Handy - Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cwpbh.03661] |
Every day the sun is shining is a good day, a good day to be alive. Remember that, to be alive! To pick up a pen is an act of hope. Write something. Of course if you write it down, you hope someone will read it.
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| In December of 1897, Florence Kelley found herself working as a part time librarian for the John Crerar Library, a special reference collection established by the estate of John Crerar, after being unexpectedly fired as Chief Factory Inspector in August of 1897. [Photo: 1925. Source: Unknown. Creative Commons License] |
The law is a conundrum, the law is a maze, a sea of contradictions, a wall, a labyrinth, but at the end we are better off with it than without it.
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| Crowds standing on a street corner across from a courthouse during the Leopold and Loeb murder trial. [Source: DN-0078046, Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum, 1924] |
You don’t have to scare anyone, or everyone. Just stare a man down, shame the man who is doing the bad thing, who is saying: No, you can’t do this, this good thing. And at the end of the day, we don’t have trouble recognizing what that is.
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| Playing in an empty lot at 45th and Laflin. Description: Playing in an empty lot at 45th and Laflin; Chicago, IL. [Source: ICHi-31535. Chicago History Museum. Reproduction of photographic print, photographer unknown] |
Every day you open your eyes, and see the world around you, a miracle has happened. And if the sun is shining, that is two miracles that have happened. In a minute.
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| Looking south, Administration Building from Wooded Isle Bridge; World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL. [Source: ICHi-25087. Chicago History Museum. Reproduction of photographic print, photographer ?. Date: 1893.] |
You must try. Try to imagine a better world. Six impossible things before breakfast, then take one small step towards making one happen.
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| Whiskey Row, near Union Stockyards. Description: Whiskey Row, near Union Stockyards; Chicago, IL. [Source: ICHi-13188. Chicago History Museum. Reproduction of postcard, printer - V O Hammon Publishing Company.] |
Slavery has always been wrong. Stop it wherever you see it. It has always been wrong. The gadgets, the weapons, the toys, the inventions, gone on don’t change anything. We are still all human beings, and we need to see that, respect that. Give life some dignity. That job is never over, recreated by every society, every civilization, every kingdom. Tie the hands of the brutes and the butchers.
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| Painting titled The American Slave Market by Taylor, 1852. Shows group of 13 white men, enslavers, in hats gathered at a slave auction, and a group of 7 enslaved people wait to be sold. [No known copyright. Credit: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-053543] |
It has all been said before, by a million of people over a million years. Love, death, just protect the children, who never asked for this. Everywhere, the children need to be protected.
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| Children sitting on a garbage box in a dirty alley in the 17th Ward, Chicago, Illinois, circa 1908. Advertising poster for Riverview Amusement Park behind them. [Credit: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-03808] |
The carnage? How can anyone not be appalled by the carnage?! By just wholescale, mad killing, soldiers drunk on the gore, on the thrill of seeing people running away screaming. Who could not be against that?
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| Rue de Tirlemont in Louvain, Belgium following the burning and looting by the German army at the start of World War 1, August 1914. The photographer, John T. McCutcheon, was a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune at this time. [Credit: Chicago Tribune on December 20, 1914] |
Of course Jane Addams, Gentle Jane with the backbone of steel, and I were against the war. Against all wars. Including wars long forgotten. The Spanish American War? Where did the name come from? I always fought for fair conditions for the workers making the uniforms, when the mania of war took over.
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| Ink drawing by John T. McCutcheon titled The Harvest Moon in Fodderland, depicting groups of deceased World War 1 soldiers made to look like haystacks in the moonlight. 60,000 dead in the Spanish American War.[1] WWI soldier casualties were ~15M, and the Spanish Influenza that followed claimed 17-25M lives.[2] [Credit: Chicago Daily Tribune, July 8, 1916] |
No Point giving up. The nicest thing anyone ever said about me is: "Every one immediately felt hopeful when Florence Kelley walked into the room.”
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| Hull House was among the first settlement houses to be founded in the United States, but was soon joined by over 400 others across the country. As settlement pioneers, Hull,House residents were leaders in the national settlement movement. Here settlement leader from around the United States meet at Hull House to discuss reform efforts, programs, fundraising, and the settlement philosophy. (JAMC 1795) [Credit: Twenty Years at Hull House: Jane Addams (1910)] |
Florence Kelley Live from 1890s Chicago: Always hold your head high. Especially when they—whoever the They is—are saying you can’t do something. And you know it is the right thing to do. And you are going to do it, not just to spite them.
[Credit: Voices from the Field Florence Kelley, Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University]
Florence Kelley Live from 1890s Chicago: My stockings had holes. I didn’t have the time or will to darn them. To busy rushing to bang on the door of the next illegal sweatshop. Open UP. It’s Florence Kelley. Factory Inspector. And her pals. You know they didn’t want to open that door.
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| April 24, 1894—Anton Horky, 665 Alport Street [Credit: First Special Report on Small-Pox in the Tenement House Sweat-Shops of Chicago By Factory Inspectors of Illinois, 1894, pg. 10] |
Florence Kelley Live from 1890s Chicago: I was thick skinner, tough, but always smiling. I looked everyone right between the eyes. Then the others. Miracle workers: came out of those hellhole factories and laundries and joined us, marched with us, to the State Legislature! We said, together: Listen!
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| Florence Kelley, a socialist and committed anti-child labor advocate, became a resident at Hull-House in 1891. Jane Addams said of her arrival, "She galvanized us all into a more intelligent interest in the industrial conditions all about us." Unlike Addams, who favored conciliation and arbitration, resident Edith Abbott described Kelley's methods as "direct assault." (JAMC 40) [Credit: Twenty Years at Hull House: Jane Addams (1910) ] |
Florence Kelley Live from 1890s Chicago: An eclipse! We puny mortals foolishly believe we control the sky the sun the moon. If there are gods they are laughing at us.
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| Two women and two men watching a solar eclipse from a mountain in Michigan. 1926 [Credit: DN-0080760 Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection Chicago Historical Society] |
Florence Kelley Live from 1890s Chicago: I didn’t ask what was the right thing to do. Teach an illiterate girl, and her father, and her mother, the miracle of reading. And they taught the rest of the family, even the deaf grandmother. How could that be anything but a good?
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| In 1894, Ellen Gates Starr helped found the Chicago Public School Art Society to provide art to the public sclhools. Urban children with no exposure to nature, Starr argued, especially needed the solace of good artwork and its spur to the imagination. Starr hoped that exposure to beauty and heroism through art would stir the atnbitions and emotions of young chidren. ( ART) [Credit/source: Hull-House (IL) (Images of America), Peggy Glowacki] |
Florence Kelley Live from 1890s Chicago: Fail. Fail again. Fail Better. Fail differently. Let everyone see you are failing. Failing to get rid of the sweatshops and how wrong they are. How Godless.
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| Sweatshop. circa 1900. [Source/permission: Kheel Center, Cornell University] |
Florence Kelley Live from 1890s Chicago: And Yet, and yet. We must continue. In spite of our pride, our greed, our stupidity, our repeated mistakes. We must go on.
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| On 24 April 2013, Rana Plaza, an eight-story commercial building, collapsed in Savar, a sub-district in the Greater Dhaka Area, the capital of Bangladesh. The search for the dead ended on 13 May with a death toll of 1,129. Approximately 2,515 injured people were rescued from the building alive. [Source: Wikimedia Creative Commons] |
Always better to get started. Do something that begins something. Look at what we did with our little Factory Inspection Reports!! We got people’s attention! Made some people mad. Sometimes that is all you can do!
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| Sewing Hall at D. B, Fisk & Co., Wholesale Millinery at 225 N. Wabash Ave. built in 1912. Description: Sewing Hall at D. B, Fisk & Co., Wholesale Millinery at 225 N. Wabash Ave. built in 1912, Chicago, IL. Source: ICHi-14489. Reproduction of film negative, photographer unknown. Date: ca. 1910. |
Florence Kelley Live from 1890s Chicago: People will surprise you. In a good way. We were few at Hull House. Mostly women. But some like minded men. We just set out to do it. And we did it. Gentle Jane Addams had a strength of 10!
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| For residents including Jane Addams right the constant intrusion of visitors must have been disconcerting. Frances Hackett recalls one incident in which "one of the visitors caught a glimpse through the windowof Jane Addams sitting at a table…without waiting for an invitation or asking permission she opened the door to the dining room ... 'Oh girls,' she cried 'come here quickly. Here's one of them eating'." (JAMC 557) [Credit/source: Hull-House (IL) (Images of America), Peggy Glowacki] |