What did Florence Kelley hope to achieve through her leadership of the National Consumers League NCL )?
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Abstract Political consumerism is often criticized for its failure to cross class lines, a failure linked to the economic resources and cultural capital of affluent consumers. The early history of the National Consumers' League (NCL) illustrates how an alternative model of consumer citizenship can lead privileged shoppers to draw social boundaries in different ways. The NCL included lower-class women and children as beneficiaries and occasional allies in consumer campaigns, but distanced itself from the organized labor movement. This alternative model of political consumerism is traced to the gender and class cultures of reformist women in the Progressive Era. Show
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Wiley has partnerships with many of the world’s leading societies and publishes over 1,500 peer-reviewed journals and 1,500+ new books annually in print and online, as well as databases, major reference works and laboratory protocols in STMS subjects. With a growing open access offering, Wiley is committed to the widest possible dissemination of and access to the content we publish and supports all sustainable models of access. Our online platform, Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) is one of the world’s most extensive multidisciplinary collections of online resources, covering life, health, social and physical sciences, and humanities. Rights & Usage This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. Florence Kelley (September 12, 1859 - February 17, 1932), a lawyer and social worker, is remembered for her work for protective labor legislation for women, her activism working for child labor protections, and for heading National Consumers' League for 34 years. BackgroundFlorence Kelley's father, William Darrah, was a Quaker and North American 19th-century anti-enslavement activist who helped to found the Republican Party. He served as a U.S. Congressman from Philadelphia. Her great-aunt, Sarah Pugh, was also a Quaker and an anti-enslavement activist, who was present when the hall in which the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women was meeting was set on fire by a pro-enslavement mob; after the women safely left the burning building in pairs, White and Black, they reconvened in Sarah Pugh's school. Education and Early ActivismFlorence Kelley completed Cornell University in 1882 as a Phi Beta Kappa, spending six years in earning her degree due to health issues. She then went to study at the University of Zurich, where she became attracted to socialism. Her translation of Friedrich Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, published in 1887, is still in use. In Zurich in 1884, Florence Kelley married a Polish-Russian socialist, at that time still in medical school, Lazare Wishnieweski. They had one child when they moved to New York City two years later and had two more children in New York. In 1891, Florence Kelley moved to Chicago, taking her children with her, and divorced her husband. While she took back her birth name, Kelley, with the divorce, she continued to use the title "Mrs." In 1893, she also successfully lobbied the Illinois state legislature to pass a law establishing an eight-hour workday for women. In 1894, she was awarded her law degree from Northwestern, and she was admitted to the Illinois bar. Hull-HouseIn Chicago, Florence Kelley became a resident at Hull-House -- "resident" meaning that she worked as well as lived there, in a community of mostly women who were involved in neighborhood and general social reform. Her work was part of the research documented in Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895). While studying law at Northwestern University, Florence Kelley studied child labor in sweatshops and issued a report on that topic for the Illinois State Bureau of Labor, and then was appointed in 1893 by Gov. John P. Altgeld as the first factory inspector for the state of Illinois. National Consumers LeagueJosephine Shaw Lowell had founded the National Consumers League, and, in 1899, Florence Kelley became its national secretary (essentially, its director) for the next 34 years, moving to New York where she was a resident at the Henry Street settlement house. The National Consumers League (NCL) worked primarily for rights for working women and children. In 1905 she published Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation. She worked with Lillian D. Wald to establish the United States Children's Bureau. Protective Legislation and the Brandeis Brief In 1908, Kelley's friend and long-time companion, Josephine Goldmark, worked with Kelley to compile statistics and prepare legal arguments for a brief defending legislation to establish limits on working hours for women, part of an effort to establish protective labor legislation. The brief, written by Goldmark, was presented to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Muller v. Oregon, by Louis D. Brandeis, who was married to Goldmark's older sister, Alice, and who would later himself sit on the Supreme Court. This "Brandeis Brief" established a precedent of the Supreme Court considering sociological evidence alongside (or even as superior to) legal precedent. By 1909, Florence Kelley was working to win a minimum wage law and also worked for womens' suffrage. She joined Jane Addams during World War I in supporting peace. She published Modern Industry in Relation to the Family, Health, Education, Morality in 1914. Kelley herself considered her greatest accomplishment the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, winning health care funds. In 1925, she compiled The Supreme Court and Minimum Wage Legislation. LegacyKelley died in 1932, in a world that, facing the Great Depression, was finally recognizing some of the ideas she'd fought for. After her death, the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided that states could regulate women's working conditions and child labor. Her companion Josephine Goldmark, with the assistance of Goldmark's niece, Elizabeth Brandeis Rauschenbush, wrote a biography of Kelley, published in 1953: Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley's Life Story. Bibliography:Florence Kelley. Ethical Gains through Legislation (1905). Florence Kelley. Modern Industry (1914). Josephine Goldmark. Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley's Life Story (1953). Blumberg, Dorothy. Florence Kelley, the Making of a Social Pioneer (1966). Kathyrn Kish Sklar. Florence Kelley and Women's Political Culture: Doing the Nation's Work, 1820-1940 (1992). Also by Florence Kelley:
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Also known as Florence Kelly, Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky, Florence Kelley Wishnieweski, Florence Molthrop Kelley What did Florence Kelley want to accomplish?Florence Kelley dedicated her life to social reform. She worked to end many social problems, including labor and racial discrimination. She influenced many social movements in the United States. Born on September 12, 1859 in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, Florence Kelley was pushed into social activism as a child.
What did the National Consumers League accomplish?During the early 1900s, she led the League in its efforts to: protect in-home workers, often including whole families, from terrible exploitation by employers. promote the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906. write and then champion state minimum wage laws for women.
What was the purpose of the National Consumers League quizlet?(NCL) group organized in 1899 to investigate the conditions under which goods were made and sold and to promote safe working conditions and a minimum wage.
Who was Florence Kelley and how did she contribute to progressivism?Florence Kelley was a social reformer active during the American Progressive Era (1890-the 1920s). She advocated for social welfare reform and eliminating child labor across the United States. Her career took her to cities such as Zurich, Chicago, and New York.
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