Selected Letters of Florence Kelley

FAIN: RQ-50040-03

SUNY Research Foundation, Binghamton (Binghamton, NY 13902-4400)
Kathryn Kish Sklar (Project Director: September 2002 to February 2005)

The preparation of an annotated one-volume edition of the selected letters of Florence Kelley, a major 20th-century American labor reformer. (36 months)

As executive director of the National Consumers' League between 1899 and 1932, Florence Kelley (1859-1932) was a leading architect of the new edifice that reformers constructed to house American democracy in the twentieth century-one capable of embracing industrialization, urbanization and massive immigration. Focusing on the passage of state laws to regulate the industrial workplace and federal laws to improve the health of women and children, she was central to the process whereby the American social contract was reconfigured for wage-earning people. We plan a volume of 400 pages with about 300 letters, drawn from a pool of about 1000 letters.