Florence Kelley & The Machine

How Women Took on The Industrialized Food System and Won

Once upon a time, a man named Upton Sinclair wrote a book called The Jungle, and everyone read it, and babies stopped dying from rancid meat and formaldehyde-laden milk because those in government realized out of the goodness of their hearts that they should regulate the food industry.

And everyone lived happily ever after.

The End.

---

Or so goes the male fairytale of how the FDA was born. But while Upton Sinclair may have been in the delivery room of justice, it was women doing the actual labor to force the government to prevent industrial food corporations from literally killing people for profit.

Yet it is the proliferation of this myth that erases the essential work of women and allows for a small group of men in the current administration to roll back so many of their hard-won victories that leave us, the consumer, once more exposed to the avarice of the industrial food system.

The real story goes like this:

In 1889, social reformer Jane Addams and businesswoman Josephine Lowell met eye to eye over what they both saw as the most significant impediment to American freedom from their opposite sides of the economy:

Corporations were absolutely fucking people over in every way.

Corporations were perfectly happy to take a child, put her on a factory floor, expose her to any number of industrial hazards, and then throw her out on the street when, say, all her fingers were cut off by a meat slicer.

Corporations were also pleased as punch to pay her mother a substandard wage that provided her just enough to eat but not anywhere near enough to refuse the unwanted sexual advances of a manager. Keeping her on the factory floor for 12 hours a day also ensured she’d be too tired to raise her voice against her own exploitation.

And corporations were just fine with selling rancid meat, milk laced with formaldehyde, and a myriad of products generally packed with rat shit.

Make no mistake - exploitative working conditions and substandard or even deadly products were, and are, interconnected because by pushing their employees up to, if not past the point of wage slavery, corporations effectively void the possibility of a whistleblower capable of exposing their collective corruption.

Seeing this vicious circle of worker exploitation and consumer harm clear as day, Addams and Lowell founded the National Consumers League. Having built a weapon made specifically to fire at industrialized corruption, they loaded it with a mammoth shell by appointing Florence Kelley as its executive director (then called general secretary).

Immediately, she began to pop off.

The daughter of a progressive congressman and the niece of Quaker Sarah Pugh, who helped popularize sugar and cotton boycotts as a way to oppose slavery, Kelley grew up in a culture where justice and freedom for all were ideals to not only aspire to but work for. Over 17 years, Kelley poured her all into the work of the NCL, building over 64 chapters across the country to help monitor working and production conditions in America’s factories. She pushed for legislation to shorten working hours, raise the minimum employment age, and implement workplace safety measures.

She also created the “White Label” that certified that goods were produced following minimum fair labor standards and were free of child labor. One of the first of its kind, this ingenious campaign empowered consumers to choose not to exploit children through their purchases while also implicitly making them aware that many corporations were evil as F.

Finally, under her leadership, the NCL created powerful campaigns to educate the public about unfair and injurious working conditions across all industries, including the food industry.

When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1905, it was not the first time American consumers or elected officials had heard about the unfair working conditions and disgusting products of the meat processing industry. Instead, Kelley and the NCL’s predominantly female staff had sown the political landscape with information and action around the issues his book so deftly addressed.

The Jungle functioned as the spark of public imagination that allowed people to see a different world within the field of possibilities created by women.

Nor was it Upton Sinclair who actually got the legislation passed regulating the food industry.

That, again, was THANKS TO FLORENCE KELLEY, along with thousands of other women who tirelessly advocated for change.

Strategically seizing on the firestorm around The Jungle, Kelley directed the NCL’s local chapters around the nation to investigate safety conditions in food production as part of their advocacy for the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which effectively established the contemporary Food and Drug Administration.

In the past, the FDA has been instrumental in protecting public health by regulating food and pharmaceutical products.

So, what has the FDA done for you lately?

Remember when companies could make cotton candy-flavored vape liquid marketed to teens and tweens? Yeah, that’s illegal now, thanks to the FDA.

How about old-school tobacco warning labels? FDA.

Have you ever thrown out some lettuce because you heard about an E. coli outbreak and didn’t get sick? You guessed it, FDA.

And how about the regulations of listing side effects of pharmaceuticals? Right again. FDA.

All of this was catalyzed largely thanks to a LIFETIME of work by Florence Kelley, who didn’t stop with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act but kept working on behalf of workers and consumers until the day she died on February 17, 1932.

And we don’t even know her name. In fact, finding information about her and her work is exceptionally difficult, and much of it remains unpublished in her archive (thank goddess it exists) at The New York Public Library (please, someone, write her biography).

All of this brings us to our present moment.

Power stems from the continuation of history. If you erase the history, you destroy the possibility of the next generation carrying that work forward.

This is why the Trump administration exerts so much effort in trying to disappear women’s history. They know that if we are made unaware of our power, we cannot continue to exercise it.

As Florence Kelley said herself: “The most dangerous creature on earth is a woman who knows her worth.”

This is nothing new. The patriarchy has always premised its control of women on the erasure of their past and, in that, their personhood. Now, at the very moment when women’s history is finally and for the first time being written on a large scale, the Trump administration’s attempts to destroy it are as blatant as they are grotesque.

The motive and means are made manifest in RFK Jr.’s rapid destabilization of the FDA: The heritage of women’s work that would have otherwise been a buttress both in history and in the present moment has been knocked down stone by stone until the tower of the FDA - like so many other institutions - stands wavering in the wind, wholly unsupported where once it stood strong.

So where do we find ourselves in this present deprived of the history of women in food and drug safety?

Under the Trump Administration, the FDA covered up a massive E. Coli outbreak that killed one person and sickened dozens, including a 9-year-old boy who almost DIED from kidney failure.

Meanwhile, RFK plans to FIRE 3,500 employees, weakening the agency’s capacity to alert the public to future outbreaks and collect data about them.

And, a recently appointed FDA commissioner is - wait for it - questioning the efficacy of Covid vaccines.

Government oversight of food and drug safety and the humane working conditions that go hand-in-hand were not easily won. These took the generational work of reformers - especially women to accomplish, for all our sakes. Now, the last vestiges of their legacies are being erased in front of our eyes without us even knowing they are to thank - and precisely because we never knew these women were the reason we had food protections in the first place.

In thinking about this, I am again reminded of Abigail Adams’ famous phrase, “Remember the ladies.” It strikes me that she might have meant this not as a plea, but as a warning since again and again when we forget the women, it is at our own peril.

It’s time to remember Florence Kelley and reclaim the truth about who really built consumer safety in America.