Kathryn Kish Sklar, SUNY Binghamton, and Beverly Wilson Palmer, Pomona College, present their edition of
The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, 1869-1931, on Wednesday, April 7, 2010, 3:00 – 5:00 p.m., at the 5th Floor Conference Room, Woodrow Wilson Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the Wilson Center's United States Studies Program and the National Consumers League, this is a free public event, but RSVPs are requested, to usstudies@wilsoncenter.org. Commentators are Kirsten Downey, Sally Greenberg, and Dorothy Ross. The Wilson Center explains:
Florence Kelley ran the National Consumers’ League from its founding in 1899 until her death in 1932 – Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said about Kelley that she probably had a greater impact on social reform than any other American in the first three decades of the 20th Century. Kelley helped lead the fight for the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, got enacted the first laws providing for an eight-hour workday and the minimum wage. An ally of W.E.B. Du Bois, she was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. This volume collects nearly three hundred of Florence Kelley’s letters, embracing such topics as improved working conditions for women and children, efforts to combat race discrimination and the politics of equal rights versus special protections for working women. Please join us for a stimulating discussion of Florence Kelley’s lasting contributions to labor rights in the United States.
