Florence Kelley and the Hull-House Maps: Part 2
Part 1 of this series introduced the Hull-House Maps and Papers, a landmark of statistical graphics published in 1895. Who created them, and why? This post explores the statistical background and contributions of Florence Kelley, the social reformer, children’s and women’s rights advocate, and NAACP co-founder who worked on the data collection for the report to Congress (Wright, 1894) and the maps.
Early Years and Education
Figure 1. Florence Kelley at Cornell. Public domain
Florence Kelley (Figure 1) joined the Hull House community shortly after Christmas of 1891. Her circuitous path to Chicago was not what one would have expected for a woman born in 1859 to affluent parents, even if she did come from a long line of social reformers.
Kelley’s father, William Darrah Kelley, had been one of the founders of the Republican Party and served as a Congressman from Pennsylvania from 1861 until his death in 1890. Her mother, Caroline Bartram Bonsall Kelley, came from a family of Quaker abolitionists; Caroline’s aunt Sarah Pugh, “after teaching school a quarter century, had retired at the age of fifty years from her profession, to give her time entirely to promoting the antislavery movement, peace, woman suffrage, the single standard of morals for men and women, and free trade” (Kelley, 1986). Friends of the household included Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott.
Kelley, often sickly as a child (her five sisters all died in childhood), was educated at home. She began reading through her father’s extensive library at age ten, starting at the southwest corner and systematically working her way through the hundreds of volumes. She read novels by Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Louisa May Alcott; poetry by Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron; political writings and orations of James Madison and Daniel Webster; philosophy treatises by Montaigne and Rousseau; books on chemistry and other sciences; and anything else she came across, including government reports from the Library of Congress (what child wouldn’t be tempted by those?) that may have been her first exposure to published statistics.
Formal Education and Move to Chicago
In 1876, Kelley entered Cornell University as a member of one of the earliest classes to admit women, graduating with a Bachelor in Literature in 1882.* As part of the research for her thesis on the history of child labor laws (Kelley, 1882), she read reports issued by state bureaus of labor statistics, the primary source of employment statistics at the time (the national U.S. Bureau of Labor was not established until 1884). She was particularly impressed by the reports of Carroll Wright, then Chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor: “he showed incontrovertibly that in Massachusetts, after women and children were drawn into cotton textile manufacture in competition with men, the weekly earnings of father, mother and children were no more than fathers alone had previously received.” Overall, however, she found a “deplorable meagerness of American official information about women and children in industry” (Kelley, 1986, p. 64). The importance of having official and trustworthy statistics became a theme of Kelley’s writings and work throughout her career.
Kelley’s next formal education was in law and economics at the University of Zurich, the only European university that admitted women for graduate study. She became active in the socialist movement and in 1884 married a young socialist medical student from Russia, Lazare Wischnewetzky. In the next three years, she gave birth to three children. During that time, Kelley also translated Friedrich Engel’s The Condition of the Working-Class in England into English. She was immensely impressed by the book’s statistics about population, manufactures, and living conditions in Manchester, calling it “a museum specimen of painstaking, laborious, precise observation” (Kelley, 1986, p. 69).
The Wischnewetzkys moved to New York City in 1886, but Lazare’s attempts to establish a medical practice failed and the family was supported financially by Kelley. Lazare became increasingly violent and in December 1891, following an episode in which he beat her after raging that the mantelpiece had not been properly dusted, Kelley gathered up her children and a few belongings and fled to Chicago. Sklar (1995) explained Kelley’s choice of destination: “Illinois's liberal divorce laws,** the city's social ferment, and its distance from Lazare made Chicago an appealing haven.”
Kelley became a resident of Hull House; her children were welcomed into the home of Henry Demarest Lloyd and Jessie Bross Lloyd, friends of Jane Addams who lived in nearby Winnetka.
Collecting Data on Chicago Sweatshops
Kelley’s arrival in Chicago coincided with increasing public concern about the insupportable conditions in tenements and sweatshops. Her first major employment in Chicago, starting in May 1892, was as a special agent for the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics. She collected data about Chicago sweatshops and persons who worked in the sweating system, receiving 50 cents for each data sheet she filled out.
This was a challenging data collection because of the distributed and mobile nature of the sweating system. The report of the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics (1893), which published the statistics from Kelley’s and other agents’ data, listed three types of clothing industry shops: (1) Inside shops, or factories, where garment manufacture took place within the building and was done by employees supervised by foremen and forewomen; (2) Outside shops, where garment manufacture was contracted out to small operations, often located in homes, that “underbid each other to obtain work” and employed unskilled and easily replaceable labor; and (3) Tenement workers, or “finishers,” who sewed garments in their homes, often under unspeakable conditions. Outside shops opened, closed, and moved frequently, making them difficult to track; families commonly moved from tenement to tenement as their financial circumstances changed.
The goal was to take a census of Chicago sweatshops.*** But there was no reliable sampling frame that listed all shops and workers. As Kelley (1895) wrote, “It is well-nigh impossible to keep perfect lists of sweaters; since a man may be an operator to-day, a sweater on a small scale next week, may move his shop in the night to avoid the payment of rent, and may be found working as operator in an inside shop at the close of the season.”
Lacking a list of shops and workers, Kelley and her fellow agents began house-to-house canvasses in areas of Chicago known to have a high density of sweatshops. From there they “extended their inquiries, and the search for these, often obscure, places in every direction until no more could be found or heard of. No suggestion nor rumor was unheeded, and every clue was diligently followed up in order to make the enumeration as complete and full as possible” (Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1893, p. 369). They also included shops listed in the local press, by Health Department inspectors, or by people they interviewed.
Altogether, they found 666 shops and 10,933 workers connected with these shops. Before the data collection, it had been supposed that there were several thousand sweatshops and perhaps 40,000 workers. It is, of course, likely that the agents failed to locate some of the shops and workers, particularly those in remote areas, but, because of the thoroughness of the data collection, Kelley conjectured that they missed at most 150 sweatshops and 3,000 workers.
For each shop, an agent collected data on construction and height of the building; location of the shop in the building (most were in the basement or on the first floor); whether the shop had street or alley frontage (some shop-owners, to save on rent, had converted stables or out-buildings in the alleys into shops); power source for the sewing machines (steam, gas, or human feet); type of garments made; number of workers along with their nationalities, genders, and ages; workers’ wages, daily hours of labor (in busy season, the “best” shops required 10 hours per day, six days per week; the “worst,” 16 hours per day, seven days per week), and periods of unemployment; and dimensions of the shop (used to calculate the number of cubic feet of air space for each person, which served as a proxy for the “healthfulness” of the shop).
Kelley’s (1895) portrayal of the horrifying work conditions in the sweating industry (Chapter 2 of Hull-House Maps and Papers) came from her data collection for this report. She described an unregulated gig economy where shops and workers underbid each other just to secure work, driving wages ever downward and conditions ever more squalid. Piecework pay forced tenement workers to labor at top speed, with no recourse if the contractor reduced or kept their pay after they had finished the agreed-upon sewing. Young girls worked long hours sewing on buttons; in the tenement houses children started working soon after they learned to walk. Kelley (1895) wrote that “the employees are always on the verge of pauperism, and fall into the abyss with every illness or particularly bad season.”
The Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics report and Kelley’s testimony before the Joint Legislative Committee investigating the sweatshop industry helped persuade the state legislature to pass the Illinois Factories and Workshops Act in 1893. The Act required workshops to be separate from living areas, prohibited the employment of children under age 14, and limited the hours worked by women to eight per day and 48 per week. The Act also called for the appointment of a state factory inspector to enforce the law.
Newly elected governor John Altgeld initially asked Henry Demarest Lloyd to be the state’s first factory inspector. Lloyd declined, and recommended Kelley for the position. Thus, in July 1893, Kelley became the first woman to hold a statewide office in Illinois, with a staff of eleven women and men. Before taking that position, however, she supervised another large-scale data collection.
Data Collection for Hull-House Maps and Papers
Concern about sweatshop conditions and poverty was not limited to Illinois. In 1892, the U.S. House of Representatives directed the Commissioner of Labor, Carroll Wright, to “make a full investigation relative to what is known as the slums of cities.” The original direction was to investigate all cities with more than 200,000 people, but preliminary studies indicated that the appropriation of $20,000 was “altogether inadequate for the collection of facts called for” and the investigation was narrowed to small areas within four cities: Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago.
Wright appointed Florence Kelley to supervise the data collection for Chicago. As with Kelley’s investigation for the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, a full census (not a sample) was to be taken. Because of the effort involved, however, the census necessarily had to be of a small area in each city. Kelley chose the area to be studied: a 1-mile-by-1/3-mile rectangle just east of Hull House.
Wright (1894) insisted that the data collection was to be done uniformly in each city, using the same data collection forms and procedures (I’ll discuss these in Part 4 of this series). Four men from the Bureau of Labor collected the data from households in the area between April and July 1893, turning the data schedules in to Kelley at the end of each day. Statistics from the small areas studied in each city were then compared with statistics for the whole city from the 1890 U.S. Census (which had also been superintended by Wright; he was a busy man).
Smallpox Investigation as Illinois State Factory Inspector
And Florence Kelley was a busy woman. In July 1893, Kelley began her position as state factory inspector while continuing to work on Hull House Maps and Papers.****
During that same month of July 1893, about seven miles southeast of Hull House, Chicago’s famous World’s Columbian Exposition was attracting visitors from around the world to the “White City” to see the architectural marvels, electric exhibits, world’s first Ferris Wheel, and other marvels (Larson, 2003). Kelley (1986) described her experience after having taken her son Nicholas to the fair: “Certainly no one who saw that marvelous achievement of art, architecture and enterprise unifîed for a common, noble purpose, can ever forget it.”
But there had been a neglected case of smallpox during the Exposition, and the disease began spreading through the garment district. In 1868, after a compulsory vaccination program, it was estimated that 95% of Chicago’s population had been vaccinated against smallpox. That “herd immunity” had thinned by 1893 as unvaccinated persons migrated to the city and parents neglected or refused to vaccinate their Chicago-born children. Kelley was also concerned that the virus could be exported to other areas of the city and country through the clothing manufactured in the shops; it was feared that the disease could be transmitted via the fabric.
Once again, Kelley was on the job collecting data in the sweatshops, authorized by the Factories and Workshops Act to condemn and destroy articles in shops containing infectious or contagious diseases. Her report on the epidemic (Kelley, 1894) outlined her statistical approach. She argued that it would be impossible to investigate possible infections in all of the hundreds of shops, and thousands of tenement rooms where clothing was sewn, during a short time period. Likewise, she argued, a random sample would yield few shops infected by smallpox since the majority were unaffected.
Instead, she carried out a version of contact tracing, using the lists her office had compiled of the wholesale houses, contractors employed by them in outside shops, and home finishers employed by the contractors. Her office “obtained from the city board of health a daily list of cases of infectious disease, compared these addresses with our office lists, and made immediate inspections of the shops in and near the infected premises” (Kelley, 1894, p. 7). By doing so, they found many cases not in the health department’s lists, and demonstrated the poor quality of the statistics kept by the city’s Health Commissioner.
Although Kelley could — and did — destroy goods found in shops and tenements with infections, she had no authority in the public health arena. The Board of Health ignored her requests for immediate vaccination of tenement-dwellers who had been exposed to smallpox. Kelley (1968, p. 88) wrote that “not until Gov. Altgeld announced he was about to call a conference of the governors of Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Kentucky, with a view to instituting an embargo upon all shipments of products of the needle trades from Chicago” did owners institute “in good earnest a campaign of vaccination in their factories, their contract shops, and the tenements to which these latter sent out goods.”
Shop owners and business leaders were not entirely happy about Kelley’s activities. The Illinois Manufacturers’ Association declared that the Factories and Workshops Act, under which Kelley derived her authority, was unconstitutional. In 1895, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the part of the law mandating an 8-hour workday and in 1897, newly elected governor John Riley Tanner fired Kelley (Dreier, 2012). The indefatigable Kelley then founded the Illinois Consumers’ League to lobby for better working conditions, moving to New York in 1899 to continue this work as director of the new National Consumers’ League.
Florence Kelley and Statistical Science
Kelley is best known today for her work as a social reformer and her impact on minimum wage and child labor laws (Moller-Christensen, 2008). Her post-Chicago accomplishments are well documented by Sklar (1995): helping pass the federal Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, co-establishing the NAACP in 1909, lobbying for minimum wage and maximum working hours laws, working to establish women’s right to vote, and proposing the agency that is now the U.S. Children’s Bureau, to name just a few.
But she was also a lifelong advocate for more and better data collection, and, as such, should be counted among the statistical pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th century. Kelley, along with the other social reformers of the 1890s, viewed having high-quality data as essential for documenting the need for women’s suffrage and better working conditions. Here are just some of her writings about the need for statistics.
In the late 1880s, Kelley proposed initiatives supporting child welfare, but the lack of reliable data on child labor hindered her ability to document her case. She presented a report on the inadequacy of data collected by the state bureaus of labor at the Seventh Annual Convention of Commissioners of State Bureaus of Labor (Wischnewetzky, 1889). She wrote: “Mr. Carroll D. Wright writes me that he thinks child labor is decreasing. I am convinced that it is increasing with frightful rapidity. Neither of us can prove our point, however, because there are, so far as I know, but two statistically perfect statements extant upon this important subject, and one of these does not refer to the question of increase or decrease.”
She proceeded to call for statistics that were computed consistently from year to year so that it would be possible to compare “the number of children employed, the proportion of children to men, to women; the proportion of their wages to those of the adults in the same industry; the proportion of wages-earning children to the children of the same age, or to children actually attending school.”
A decade later, she wrote again on the inadequacy of data about child labor: “Nothing is more sought in these days than information concerning employment; everything touching it seems to have an almost sensational charm for legislators as well as for the student and the philanthropist. But do the reports of our departments of factory inspection furnish information in the form in which it is most easily understood, verified, and used?” (Kelley, 1898a, p. 491).
Kelley (1906) touched on the same theme for women’s earnings: “We are shamefully without adequate, trustworthy, official figures showing the earnings of women in industry, in or out of unions.”
Kelley, along with Jane Addams and the other women at Hull House, advocated proper use of statistics to document the conditions of the day. She called for clear presentation of statistics, “so that the plain man who pays for the census gets what he pays for, statistical data in a form in which they are ready for him to understand” (Wischnewetzky, 1889). In Hull House Maps and Papers, Kelley and Agnes Sinclair Holbrook strove to create maps that clearly displayed the data.
Next: Agnes Sinclair Holbrook, the woman who designed and constructed the maps.
Copyright (c) 2020 Sharon L. Lohr
Footnotes
*It took Kelley six years to graduate because she contracted diphtheria in winter of 1879. Kelley (1986) wrote that in 1879, Ithaca NY had no infirmary or trained nurses: “Because the untrained local nurse was ignorant of the danger of overdosing and forgot the doctor's order to discontinue after ten days, I received large doses of brandy at two hours' intervals, from January to mid-May, following strychina, and other poisons. Three years out of college were the penalty paid for that illness and that untrained nurse.” She returned to Ithaca in March, 1882, and subsequently passed her examinations and submitted her thesis.
**Illinois in the 1890s allowed divorce on grounds of cruelty, desertion, and nonsupport, among others, while in New York the sole ground for divorce was adultery. In 1892, however, Lazare Wischnewetzky filed a writ of habeas corpus in the Chicago courts for custody of the three children, whom he argued had been removed from his home illegally (children by default legally belonged to the father at that time). During the custody trial, Kelley and the family’s nurse testified that Lazare had repeatedly hit her in the face, leaving marks that did not disappear for many days, and had habitually flown into rages. Lazare’s suit failed and Kelley maintained custody. She resumed use of her birth name, calling herself “Mrs. Florence Kelley” so that her children would not be thought illegitimate, and finally obtained a divorce in 1900.
Her elder son Nicholas Kelley later wrote: “I long have believed that I was blessed with the best bringing-up and educating of anybody I have known of my time.” He reminisced that his mother “worked very hard to support us children. The time she could find to be with us was precious to her, either visiting us when we were boarded out or having us come to see her at the House” (Kelley, 1954).
***In 1892, the time of this data collection, most people thought that only a census could give reliable statistics about a population. This was three years before Anders Kiaer’s paper at the International Statistical Institute arguing that representative samples could give reliable information without the expense of a full sample. And it was more than 40 years before the use of probability sampling for producing official statistics in the United States.
The sample they took was actually an early example of what today is called a “snowball sample.” Early members of the sample suggested others who should be interviewed, and as the sampling progressed, more and more people were included, just as a snowball gets larger as it rolls downhill.
The contract tracing method that Kelley later used to locate smallpox cases (and the contact tracing currently used for COVID-19) is another example of snowball sampling. The sample of persons with the disease grows as known cases are associated with other persons who have been in contact with them.
****She also attended lectures at Northwestern University’s law school that fall, graduating the next year (Dreier, 2012). She wrote: “The lectures were given in the evening and did not interfere with my administrative work” (Kelley, 1986, p. 86).
Kelley also carried out other statistical investigations during her time in Chicago. When arguing the need for new schools to be built in Chicago’s nineteenth ward, for example, she compared the number of school enrollments for Chicago in the 1890 census with the number of children on her surveys who were attending school, and estimated from this that places were needed in school for an additional 30,000 children.
References
References are found at the end of the last part of this series.