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