Women and Progressive Reform

Workplace Regulation
   What role did Florence Kelley and other women play in the effort against sweatshops in Chicago?

With her arrival at Hull House in Chicago in 1891 Florence Kelley spearheaded a campaign to regulate garment sweatshops and limit the hours of labor of women and children. The documents in this project depict this reform effort and some of the opposition it generated. Kelley served four years as Illinois's first Factory Inspector, though her work was constrained by a ruling of the Illinois Supreme Court that declared the eight-hour provision of the law unconstitutional.

Birth Control
    Birth control was a controversial movement that also led to debates among its supporters.

The Comstock Law of 1873 essentially ended two centuries of free dissemination of information about how to prevent pregnancy, but it with relatively little opposition until the second decade of the twentieth century, when reformers Mary Ware Dennett and Margaret Sanger took up the "birth control" cause. The two women adopted differing approaches to the birth control question, however. Although many activists who fought for the legalization of contraception urged Sanger and Dennett to unite for the good of the cause, the differences between the two women set the stage for a very competitive and at times confrontational relationship. The intense rivalry that developed between them is documented in the letters, organizational reports, and published articles included in this project, allowing examination of the conflict's impact on the successes and failures of the birth control movement.