The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869-1931

First-hand accounts of one woman's fight to improve working conditions for Americans in the early twentieth century

As head of the National Consumers' League from its founding in 1899 until her death in 1932, Florence Kelley led campaigns that reshaped the conditions under which goods were produced in the United States. Her efforts produced the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, as well as laws providing for an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage. She mobilized women's organizations to support the passage of the first federal health legislation for women and children in 1921, and she headed the crusade against child labor between 1890 and 1930. An ally of W.E.B. Du Bois, she was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and served on its board for twenty years.

This volume collects nearly three hundred of Florence Kelley's letters, written over the course of more than six decades and embracing such topics as improved working conditions for women and children, intense engagement in electoral politics, struggles against manufacturing interests, and the machinations of a conservative Supreme Court. Rendered in Kelley's vivid, often combative prose, these letters also provide an intimate view into the personal life of a dedicated reformer who balanced her career with her responsibilities as a single mother of three children.