American Reformers, 1870-1920 by Steven L. Piott

Author:Steven L. Piott [Piott, Steven L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780742583528
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

One of Florence Kelley’s reform efforts during the Progressive Era would be to help organize the U.S. Children’s Bureau to lobby for the enactment of federal legislation to provide federal infant and maternity aid to states as part of a new national policy.

As a child, Florence Kelley attended school only in brief stints (she remembered her longest uninterrupted attendance as only five or six months). Susceptible to infection and her mother’s fear of losing her only surviving daughter, she was often kept at home. In spite of these setbacks, she continued to read voraciously on her own. With an excellent memory and some tough cramming, she passed the examinations required for entry into Cornell University in 1876 at the age of sixteen (with conditional requirements in Greek, Latin, and mathematics to be completed during her freshman year). Like Jane Addams, Kelley had joined the first generation of college-educated women, and she understood the importance of that step. “Entering college,” she said, “was for me almost a sacramental experience.”6 The time spent at Cornell would offer her the opportunity to learn the tools of social analysis that would help her later. At the end of her junior year, however, another severe illness (later diagnosed as diphtheria) forced her to drop out of school for the next two and a half years. Living in Washington, D.C., for part of that period, Kelley studied law with her father and read extensively on her own at the Library of Congress on the legal treatment of poor children, illegitimate children, and wage-earning children and divorce cases involving child custody. This reading became the foundation for her senior thesis, “On Some Changes in the Legal Status of Children since Blackstone,” and allowed her to graduate from Cornell in June 1882 with a bachelor’s degree in literature.

Her thesis, which was later published in the International Review, drew on both her father’s view of an active state as the guarantor of social justice and her great-aunt’s broadened perspective of the role of women in civic society and their ability to shape public policy. Her argument in the thesis was that the tendency in statute law since the time of Sir William Blackstone was to increase protections for children and make them more and more wards of the state. Diminished in this process was the degree of paternal authority. Kelley argued that children, in general, benefited from compulsory education and child labor and custody laws that regarded the interest of the child as more important than that of the father. In the process, the child had come to be regarded, in the eyes of the law, as “an individual with a distinctive legal status” and not merely “an appendage” of the “absolute ownership of the father.” Importantly, by advocating the interest of children in contrast to the tradition of male patriarchal authority, Kelley examined the law from a new perspective. And as the authority of the state expanded in this regard, women stood to become empowered as officials, experts, or affected parties.

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