Kelley, Florence (Molthrop) (1859–1932)

US social reformer. She joined the Hull House in 1891 and played a major role in calling attention to working conditions of children and women. In 1899 she became the general secretary of the newly founded National Consumers' League. She dedicated herself to using public pressure to force reform in labour practices, and she played a prominent role in federal legislation for child labour minimum wages. Her best-known book was Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation 1905.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, raised in a middle-class family and influenced by the Quakers, she was educated mainly at home before attending Cornell (BA 1882). Denied entry to the University of Pennsylvania graduate school because of her sex, she taught for a time and then studied at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. There she adopted socialism and translated Friedrich Engel's Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Impatient with the prosecution of violations of new laws, she got a law degree at Northwestern University in 1894. In 1909 she helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and in 1919 she helped form the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. After World War I she worked so hard to promote child labour legislation that she was often accused of being a communist.