Old Missoula

Florence Kelley Speaks in Missoula – 1915

For The Children Should Women Be Voters

Mrs. Kelley of New York Asks Help in Obtaining Universal Franchise

As an emissary from the discouraged suffragists of the east to the triumphant votes-for-women advocates of Montana, Mrs. Florence Kelley of New York, for years the secretary of the National Consumers’ league, an organization with a corrective purpose, came to Missoula yesterday. Last evening Mrs. Kelley, speaking at the First Methodist Episcopal church to a large audience, delivered her appeal for aid, begged for the influence of Montana’s women in the bringing about of better conditions in the Empire state and elsewhere in the east. Mrs. Kelley’s address was the last outstanding feature of the Montana Good Government leagues session in Missoula, about to end with an “unfinished business” meeting this morning.

By Amendment.

The burden of her talk was a plea for congressional action as to equal suffrage. Mrs. Kelley believes that the “state-to-state method” of obtaining the ballot for women is impracticable, “as long as the people of the United States keep those ports on the eastern seaboard perennially open.” Her argument was that the conversion to suffrage principles of the polyglot horde that descends upon our eastern coast year by year is impossible; that universal suffrage in all the United States is impossible of achievement, save by constitutional amendment. “We who are helpless beg of you who are fortunate,” she said.

“Slowness.”

Mrs. Kelley began her address by complaining of the “slowness” of the east to accept progressive legislation. She told a discouraging tale of year-long and unsuccessful struggles in eastern states for relief in the dreadful economic lives of women and children, garnished with incidents of factory and mill life that illustrated vividly the horrible picture that she drew of the sweated industries.

“A procession of the defenseless,” Mrs. Kelley termed the alien mothers who take their children to eastern factories. On their behalf she sought support in Montana for the federal child labor bill, which is intended to exclude from interstate commerce the products of such “workmen,” employed in any institution from mill to cannery.

Iniquitous.

She denounced the convict-leasing system as iniquitous, attacking especially the southern states and Wisconsin, where, she said, “desperate young men” in the state reform school are employed at making children’s clothes, learning a trade that fits them for nothing but starvation after liberty is gained.

Mrs. Kelley reviewed the history of the fight the women of New York and the east made for suffrage. “We beg for help now,” she pleaded, “not that it would make much difference to me, but because it would mean so much to the mothers and teachers of the children of the east.”

She told of deplorable educational conditions in the south. “These would not be, if the mothers voted,” she said.

The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian on June 10, 1915.

 

Women’s Suffrage came about in 1920, with passage of the nineteenth amendment to the U. S. Constitution.

 

Florence Kelley and Jeannette Rankin, along with several other women, appear in the Library of Congress photo linked below:

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005688973/

 

A lot has been written about Florence Kelley and her influence on various social movements in the U.S. during her lifetime. She was associated with Jane Addams at Hull House in Chicago, and from there attended Northwestern University where she obtained her law degree in 1894. By 1900 she returned to New York where she was active in various social causes, chief among them child labor, minimum wage legislation and woman’s suffrage. For more information about Florence Kelley see the links below:

https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/people/kelley-florence/

http://florencekelley.northwestern.edu/

https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/directory/florence-kelley/