Daily Inspiration Quote by Florence Kelley

“Complete revolution” is doing strategic work here: Kelley isn’t merely describing a shift in workplace etiquette, she’s staging a victory narrative meant to shame laggards and stiffen spines. Writing as a Progressive Era activist who lived inside the machinery of labor reform, she frames unions’ change of heart toward women as swift, measurable, and inevitable. Two generations is long enough to feel historic, short enough to feel actionable. It’s an argument for momentum.

The context matters because early trade unionism often treated women workers as a problem to be contained: undercutting wages, “unorganizable,” a threat to the male breadwinner bargain. Kelley signals that the old stance wasn’t just misguided; it has been overturned. The passive construction - “there has been” - smooths over the messy infighting and exclusion that made this “revolution” hard-won. That’s the subtext: progress is real, but fragile, and it required organized pressure, not moral enlightenment.

Kelley also knows how to speak to labor’s self-image. By presenting unions as capable of moral evolution, she offers them a flattering role in modernity’s story. It’s a carrot and a cudgel: you’ve changed, so keep changing. And it quietly reframes women workers from outsiders to legitimate members of “their trades,” a possessive claim that insists women belong in the category unions police.

Underneath the optimism sits a warning: if attitudes can flip in two generations, they can flip back. The revolution Kelley names is less a finish line than a precedent - proof that solidarity is a political choice, not a natural instinct.