Crossing the doorsteps for social reform

The social crusades of Florence Kelley and Ellen Richards

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4885347
AutoresGabrielle Soudan (University of Lausanne, autor de correspondencia), David Philippy (0000-0001-8233-2129, CY Cergy Paris Université, autor de correspondencia), H Maas (0000-0002-5094-0477, University of Lausanne, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen34
Número4
Páginas501-525
Fecha de publicación2021-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScience in Context (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0269-8897 • E-ISSN: 1474-0664
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0269889723000091
PMID37690984
OpenAlexW4386585800
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas19

ArgumentThis paper contrasts the research strategies of two women reformers, Florence Kelley and Ellen Swallow Richards, which entailed different strategies of social reform. In the early 1890s, social activist Florence Kelley used the social survey as a weapon for legal reform of the working conditions of women and children in Chicago's sweatshop system. Kelley's case shows that her surveys were most effective as "grounded" knowledge, rooted in a local community with which she was well acquainted. Her social survey, re-enacted by lawmakers and the press, provided the evidence that moved her target audience to legal action. Chemist and propagator of the Home Economics Movement Ellen Richards situated the social problem, and hence its solution, not in exploitative working conditions, but in the inefficient and wasteful usage of available resources by the poor. Laboratory work, she argued, would enable the development of optimal standards, and educational programs should bring these standards to the household by means of models and exhibits. With this aim, she constructed public spaces that she ran as food laboratories and sanitary experiments. Kelley and Richards thus crossed the doorsteps of the household in very different ways. While Florence Kelley entered the household to change the living and working conditions of the poor by changing the law, Richards flipped the household inside out by bringing women into hybrid public laboratory spaces to change their behavior by experiment and instruction

Argument (complex analysis · Political science · Social reform · Sociology · American History and Culture · Law