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] |
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 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] |
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: 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) ] |
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.”
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| Florence Kelley, circa 1925. (Underwood & Underwood) |
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.
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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] |
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.
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| 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] |
Still, there was always laughter at Hull House. There was music, theatre, the food was always fresh, good, simple, prepared by people who loved us. We ate together at a big long table after our work. With the new government men from Labor, we sent to Washington all the information, where people came from, how much they earned, about our neighborhood: One of the Slums of the Great Cities in the United States in the 1890s.
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| Corner view of Hull House building showing Hull House directory, cafeteria signs, men working and standing about. [Source: ICHi-01542. Chicago History Museum] |
For us, alive together now, there is nothing that hasn’t happened before: greed, cannibalism, towering temples, serious buildings, a wide road full of dreams, love, selflessness, foolishness, corrupt government, slaughter on the battlefield.
Pick your century, the place, and find someone who wrote about it.”
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| Thornton Niven Wilder (1897—1975, Hamden , United States ) was an American playwright, writer, novelist and screenwriter, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes. |
Time Travelers! This is Florence Kelley, Factory Inspector, live from 1890s Chicago (That’s Illinois, USA). Hello from Hull House in 1890’s Chicago, where we never stopped working. History is Life after our lives. I am still working! If you can read, you can travel anywhere, to any place, time, backwards and forward, to the past, to the future. To be free then, Time Travelers.
Question: Why are you not talking to people, real live people who live when you do?!
We talked to everyone, Jane Addams and I, wherever we found them. In the alleys, in the streets of the slums, underground in the cellar sweatshops. Why aren’t you talking to real people, not boxes?
An epidemic? We had that in 1894 Chicago. Panic, deaths, quarantine, lockdown. Jane Addams and I, and the others, did our best to get rid of the incompetent, lazy man in charge of Public Health in Chicago. We failed. Went on anyway, doing our best. Which was a lot! Officials in charge? Foolish, wrong, recalcitrant, always, still, people died needlessly, children.
Always protect the children. In my life, I taught women, girls, and especially young girls, ten, twelve, trapped on the filthy factory floor, taught them to read, and to do numbers.
Two of Leigh Bienen's websites, Florence Kelley in Chicago, 1891-1899 and Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930, made extensive use of ~500 hand-selected print images from 55,000 images of urban life in or near Chicago, Illinois, captured on glass plate negatives between ~1902 and 1933 by photographers employed by the Chicago Daily News, then one of Chicago's leading newspapers. The original images were part of the Chicago History Museum's permanent collection; and all 55,00 digitized versions are part of the Library of Congress' permanent collection, as well. The photo shown here is from the page Lives of Children, captioned:
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| Children digging with pick axes on a Chicago street Chicago IL. Source: ICHi-03889. Chicago History Museum. Reproduction of photographic print, photographer unknown. Date: 1898 |
After 20+ years of collaboration, we are delighted to announce the launch of Leigh Buchanan Bienen: Works, for one of Chicago's best-kept secrets, Leigh Buchanan Bienen—on par with Vivian Maier or Florence Kelley (who Leigh has, almost single-handedly, brought into the light of day via her website and book, "Florence Kelley, 1890s Factory Inspector, and the Children). Leigh is a writer, advocate, and teacher whose areas of expertise include capital punishment, sex crimes, and legal reform. Of luminous mind, unstoppable energy and passionate conviction, Leigh has tirelessly advocated for the rights of women, children and the wrongfully convicted (in 2011 she was instrumental in the effort that led to the repeal, in Illinois, of the death penalty). The website collects 50+ years of work. Please visit!
“This book documents and explores an important time in US history, and does so with a depth and intelligence that make it irresistibly compelling.”
—Scott Turow, author, Presumed Innocent
