Florence Finch Kelly

• Florence Kelley
• Born: March 27, 1858
• Died: December 17, 1939

Journalist, feminist, and youthful radical turned mainstream liberal, was born in Girard, Illinois, the youngest of eight children—six sons and two daughters—of James Gardiner Finch and Mary Ann (Purdom) Finch. The Finch family, after living on a succession of farms in Illinois, moved to Kansas when Florence Finch was eleven. Her father was apparently a restless, almost rootless, man, and the Finches, as Kelly later recalled, rarely lived in the same house continuously for longer than two years. As a farmer, James Finch was at least modestly prosperous, owning his own land and providing adequately for the family. He disapproved of education for women, however, and refused to pay his daughter’s high school tuition. Defying him, she worked her way through the courses necessary to obtain a teaching certificate, then taught for two years to pay for college tuition. Entering the University of Kansas at nineteen, she was graduated in 1881.

Armed with her degree, some journalistic experience, and ten dollars, Florence Finch left Kansas for Chicago. After a brief stay, she moved to Boston in late 1881, obtaining work at the Boston Globe. Her fellow-workers at the Globe included Allen P. Kelly, her future husband, and Benjamin F. Tucker, who converted her to anarchism. Tucker, who had begun publication of the individualist anarchist journal Liberty in 1881, attracted a lively group of intellectuals and writers as contributors.

Although her autobiography, written some forty years after she had left the movement, presented a carefully restrained version of her years as an anarchist, her articles in Liberty from 1884 through 1888 offered a different view of Kelly: an implacable feminist and nonviolent radical. In the eighties she saw anarchism as a force that would eventually create “a world made up of equal individuals regardless of sex.”

Feminism and a powerful if imprecise sense of social justice had brought her into the anarchist movement. In addition to her articles for Liberty, Kelly also wrote two anarchist novels: Frances (1889) and On the Inside (1890). Of her other novels, the three most important are With Hoops of Steel (1900), The Delafield Affair (1909), and Rhoda of the Underground (1909). The first two are local-color stories, set in New Mexico; With Hoops of Steel has a complex plot based on a real murder, and The Delafield Affair is a complicated tale of revenge and mistaken identity, with an orphaned hero whose close friend turns out to be the very enemy he seeks. Rhoda of the Underground, which is set immediately before and during the Civil War, is the story of a love affair between an abolitionist young woman from the North and a slaveholding southern man.

At the time of Kelly’s involvement in the anarchist movement, her major personal goal was to work as an equal with men in a journalistic career. Anarchist-feminists, who demanded absolute economic equality, full sexual freedom, and liberation from women’s traditional nurturing function, appealed to Kelly at a time when her ambition was rewarded by a salary half that of her male coworkers and her assignments often consisted of fashion stories. Keenly competitive, sexually open, and intellectually skeptical, Florence Finch, despite her friendship for mainstream women’s rights activists Lucy Stone, Henry B. Blackwell, and Alice Stone Blackwell, took her feminism to the anarchists. She became disenchanted with the anarchists by 1890 however. Male anarchists’ amusement at the demands of their female comrades for full economic parity caused her to doubt the commitment of the men to a liberated humanity. She also came to believe that the anarchist solutions to the problems of industrial capitalism were unworkable and that they emphasized the autonomy of the individual at the expense of the human need for community.

Personal experiences may also have played a role in her dissatisfaction with anarchism. On December 9, 1884, she had married fellow-journalist Allen Kelly. Having left the Globe to work for The Troy (New York) Morning Telegram, she moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, in November 1884 to become co-owner, with Allen Kelly, of The Lowell Bell, a weekly. Florence Kelly had married somewhat reluctantly, fearing (accurately, as it turned out) that wifehood would result in a diminution of her career possibilities. By the late 1880s she had retreated from full-time work in her profession, and to a large extent from the world of masculine competition. The Lowell Bell failed in the spring of 1885, and both Kellys took jobs at The Fall River (Massachusetts) Globe. Resigning in the fall of 1885, Florence Kelly gave birth in November to their first son (who died some time in the late 1880s). From 1885 until 1906 she freelanced and worked part-time in journalism, wrote short fiction, and published several novels, as her husband’s career took her to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Australia, and New Zealand. In 1895 the Kellys had a second son, Sherwin Finch. In 1903, Florence Kelly and her son moved to New York. Although she traveled with her husband to New Zealand and Australia in 1905, from 1903 until her death she lived permanently in New York. Allen Kelly remained in Los Angeles, where he died on May 16, 1916.

In 1906, at the age of forty-eight, Kelly resumed full-time journalistic work, on The New York Times Book Review. Enrolling her son in the city’s Ethical Culture School beginning in 1903, and sending him to boarding camp in the summer, Kelly combined parenthood and career. She remained at The New York Times for thirty years. During those years she retained her feminist views, but politically she moved toward the Democratic party. Taking a leave of absence from the Times in 1916, she campaigned for Woodrow Wilson in Kansas. In 1919 she published What America Did: A Record of Achievements in the Prosecution of the War, in which she lauded the hysterical vigilantism of the American Protective Association and defended the assaults on the civil liberties of the war’s opponents as necessary countermeasures to German propaganda. In the 1930s she became a supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Retiring from The New York Times in June 1936, Kelly began her autobiography, Flowing Stream, which was published in 1939. In this work, she demonstrated the continued sway of her radical past. During World War I she, in company with other former radicals and many reformers, had approved American repression of civil liberties; nevertheless, although such an endorsement cast doubt on the depth of her commitment to social justice, it did not constitute a permanent estrangement from her liberal principles. She remained a determined feminist, a believer in equality, and a confident exponent of the ability of ordinary men and women to make sound political judgments. She acknowledged the long-term influence of the anarchists, asserting that they had helped her to develop tolerance, a skeptical attitude toward conventional ideas, and a lack of reverence for tradition. Kelly died at eighty-one, shortly after the publication of her autobiography, in New Hartford, Connecticut.

Kelly’s autobiography, Flowing Stream (1939), is a major source of information on her life. Her views during her anarchist years can be found in her columns for Liberty, especially from 1884 through 1888, written under the initials FF and FFK. In addition to her anarchist novels, she wrote other fiction; Rhoda of the Underground (1909), is perhaps the most memorable. What America Did (1919) demonstrated her wartime political views. There are letters from Kelly to the University of Kansas Alumni Association at the University of Kansas. She has a biography in E. T. James, Notable American Women (1971). M. S. Marsh, Anarchist Women (1981) considers her anarchist career. Her obituary appeared in The New York Times, December 18, 1939, and The Lawrence (Kansas) Journal, December 18, 1939. Allen Kelly’s obituary is in The New York Times, May 17, 1916.