A lifelong ‘radical’ indeed! Reform required bare-knuckles politics!

Today the Chicago Tribune published an article about me, Florence Kelley, a lifelong ‘radical’ who fought for worker and women’s rights, which includes mention that in a 1923 FBI report I'd been labeled “a radical all the sixty-four years of [my] life; and that 30 years later Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that I had “the largest single share in shaping the social history of the United States during the first 30 years of this century.” 

Florence Kelley, circa 1925. (Underwood & Underwood)

An audience of one

Remember there is only an audience of one. You must first and last answer to yourself, as to what you want to do, to be. How to live. We have nothing else but our lives, at the beginning and the end of the day.

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]

Jane Addams and I were pacifists

Yes, Jane Addams and I were pacifists. We didn’t  think the killings, the battles, solved anything. But we went into the new factories where some were getting rich manufacturing boots and uniforms, and we did our best to improve conditions for the urgent workers there.

Randolph Street Market, west of Desplaines Street on the Near West Side of Chicago. [Source: LOC-American-Memory-Collections with ID 13V0740]

Our City, a beacon of crazy hope.

People still pouring into Chicago from all over the world, believing they can find something to do here, find food and shelter for their families here. They have always come here, to our City, a beacon of crazy hope.

View from Auditorium Tower. Description: View from Auditorium Tower, Chicago, IL. [Source: ICHi-52235. Chicago History Museum. Reproduction of photographic print. Photographer - J. W. Taylor. Date: 1890]

We still have to live, make choices. Decide what we can do, will do, must do.

We still have to live, make choices. Decide what we can do, will do, must do. If I see a girl tied to a sewing machine, I am not going to stand for it. Especially if someone is telling me I can’t do anything about it, I certainly will.

Sweatshop. circa 1900. [Source/permission: Kheel Center, Cornell University]