National Consumers' League

Founded in 1898 from local consumers' leagues in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, the National Consumers' League (NCL) was an alliance of working- and middle-class women producers and consumers. Originally the NCL published a White List of establishments that treated their employees fairly, thus hoping to influence other employers' discriminatory labor practices. Florence Kelley (1859–1932), social reformer, workers' rights activist, socialist, and general secretary of the National Consumers' League (NCL) for its first 33 years, was a highly effective early-20th-century community organizer. From a lifetime of connections with Chicago's Hull-House, New York's Henry Street Settlement, and state chapters of the NCL, Kelley sought to ameliorate the exploitative working conditions of women and children in modern America's factories and sweatshops.

Kelley arrived on the doorstep of Jane Addams's Hull-House with her children—6, 5, and 4 years old—during the winter of 1891. Fleeing New York and an abusive marriage to Lazare Wischnewetzky, Kelley brought to Chicago an appreciation of German sociologist Max Weber and a keen understanding of the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their provocative texts on the economic oppression of workers, her earlier studies in government and law at the University of Zurich, and her recent efforts to create an office of women factory inspectors in New York City enabled Kelley to delve into the new environment at Hull-House with purpose, energy, and effectiveness. Hull-House provided a woman-centered home for Kelley that nurtured her emotionally and politically; new friends offered care and education for her children, and Kelley quickly set to work encouraging activism among middle- and upper-class women. For example, in 1892, Kelley gave an address before the Chicago Women's Club on the plight of working-class women in sweatshops, which led to the establishment of the Bureau of Women's Labor. The Women's Club, and other organizations in the Illinois Women's Alliance, would support proposed pioneering legislation, of which Kelley was lead author, appointing women factory inspectors to investigate health and safety codes in Illinois factories and sweatshops and prohibiting child labor under the age of 14. After the legislation passed in 1893, Kelley served for 4 years as chief factory inspector with a staff of 12, 5 of whom were women.

In 1899, Kelley left Hull-House for Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York. Upon her return to the city where she had launched her career as a reformer, she began her tenure as general secretary of the NCL. She built on her success in Illinois, continuing her commitment to the cause of protective labor legislation and maintaining a steadfast belief in women's ability to develop organizations across classes to promote social justice. Under Kelley's leadership, the NCL began also to inform women consumers not only about the lack of regulation and [Page 1007]safety precautions in factories but also to instruct them on deficient standards in product manufacturing. She thus advocated the concept of the educated consumer and ran a vigorous campaign against advertisements, since they were intended to sell merchandise and not meant to dispense knowledge.

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