Labor Laws

Please visit our companion site – The Life & Times of Florence Kelley in Chicago 1891-1899 - which focuses on the work of Florence Kelley, the first woman factory inspector in the United States, and appointed in Illinois by Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1893. A resident of Hull House, and a reformer – who refused to be associated with any political party–Florence Kelley lived in Chicago from 1891 until 1899, leading and participating in a variety of projects. These included: a wage and ethnicity census of the slums and tenements in Chicago; the reporting of cases and contagion in the smallpox epidemic of 1893; the enforcement of the universal primary education laws, and, most importantly, enforcing the provisions of the Illinois Factory Inspections Law of 1893. The website includes an archive containing nearly 50,000 pages of scanned documents.

Factory Cases in the Supreme Court