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IN 1871, WILLIAM KELLEY TOOK HIS TWELVE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER Florence on a tour so she'd appreciate the wonders of America's new industrial age. The father was mesmerized by a Western Pennsylvania steel mill's new Bessemer converter (a huge fiery cauldron which turned molten pig iron into steel) and a glass factory's assembly-line operation for making bottles.
But Florence was more shocked than impressed. Touring the steel mill at two in the morning, she recalled, she witnessed the "terrifying sight" of "boys smaller than myself" carrying heavy pails of drinking water for men. These little boys, Kelley thought, "were not more important than so many grains of sand in the molds." At the glass factory, she observed that "[t]he only light was the glare from the furnaces." A glass blower stood in front of each furnace. Near each blower were the "dogs," as the boys were called, whose jobs were to clean and scrape bottle molds, a tedious and dangerous task in the dark and hot factory.
Kelley never forgot these images, or her impression "of the utter unimportance of children compared with products, in the minds of the people whom I am among."
As an adult, Kelley did more than any other twentieth-century American to rectify the awful conditions of child labor. She was also a leading organizer against sweatshops and a pioneering advocate for working women. She helped lead the battle for groundbreaking local, state, and federal labor laws, including the ones that established the minimum wage and the eight-hour day. Kelley was a pathbreaker in conducting social and statistical research to expose workplace abuses and in developing strategies - such as factory inspections and consumer organizing - to pressure state legislatures and Congress to improve working conditions. As a radical and a socialist, she viewed the struggle for workplace reform as part of the broader battle for social justice and played important roles in the feminist, civil rights, peace, and labor movements of her time.
Kelley believed that women with her class privilege had a moral duty to advocate for laws to protect workers, women, and children from the often brutal conditions of unregulated capitalism. "We that are strong," she wrote as a young woman, "let us bear the infirmities of the weak."
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