I had to hide the children away during all my time in Chicago

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.

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

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.

Letter to Florence Kelley By H. D. Lloyd, 1899

I was a sickly child

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.

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]

Henry Demarest Lloyd and Jesse Brosse Lloyd

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.

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]

40 percent died before the age of 3

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.

Group of children on street; Chicago, IL. [Source: ICHi-24067. Chicago History Museum. Reproduction of photograph, photographer unknown. Date: ca. 1905.]

Pig Iron Kelley

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.

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]

To pick up a pen is an act of hope

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.

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 maze

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.

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]