From Hull-House investigation to factory inspection
Born in Philadelphia, Kelley was the daughter of abolitionist congressman William D. Kelley. After Cornell and study in Europe, she moved to Chicago in 1891 and joined Jane Addams at Hull-House, investigating garment sweatshops.
Governor John Altgeld appointed her Illinois's first chief factory inspector in 1893. Her investigations accompanied restrictions on women's hours and child employment. In Ritchie v. People in 1895, however, the state supreme court invalidated the women's eight-hour provision on liberty-of-contract grounds. Legislative achievement did not ensure judicial acceptance.
Consumer organization and social evidence
In 1899 Kelley moved to New York to lead the National Consumers League, serving until 1932. It connected purchasing decisions with production conditions while pursuing minimum wages, restrictions on industrial homework and child-labour protection.
She assisted the reform litigation behind Muller v. Oregon in 1908, where Brandeis presented extensive statistical and social evidence supporting limits on women's hours. Kelley also worked with Lillian Wald toward the Children's Bureau established in 1912 and participated in the NAACP's early organization and legal work.
Conflict over an equality amendment
After the suffrage victory, Alice Paul and colleagues pursued a broad constitutional equality amendment. Kelley feared that courts would use it to invalidate women-specific limits on hours, night work and other conditions. Such protective laws had sometimes survived where general labour regulations failed.
Her 1921 letters to Paul and Maud Younger reveal conflict among former suffrage allies. Researcher Katie Rose Quandt interprets Kelley's strategy as defending special protections that could support broader labour rights. The disagreement concerned how equality and workplace security could be achieved together.
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