children in home and factory "sweatshops". In 1892, Kelley conducted a survey of Chicago's slums at the request of U.S. Commissioner of Labor, Carroll D. Wright,., after Henry Demarest Lloyd recommended her. The survey uncovered children from three-years-old working in "overcrowded tenement apartments". The survey also revealed women overworked past exhaustion, workers risking pneumonia, and children with burns. Related Congressional hearings led to the growth of reform interest within Illinois, which Kelley joined in organizing. She became a leader in a coalition of labor and civic groups to campaigning on behalf of the reform legislation. She and her allies brought state legislators on tours of sweatshops. Later in 1892 Kelley proposed investigating the "sweating system", "the practice of contracting out work to homes of the poor," in Chicago to the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics. She persuaded the bureau to hire her as a Special Agent to investigate the labor conditions of Chicago's garment industry. In her report, she described research that discovered employees working up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week with some wages that are not high enough to support the family. The coalition campaign and Kelley's research led to new state labor reform legislation in 1893. The Illinois legislature passed the first factory law limiting work for women to eight hours a day and prohibiting the employment of children under the age of fourteen. These protective labor laws are sometimes identified as the start of the Progressive Era in social reform. As part of the implementation of the reforms, Kelley became the first woman to hold statewide office when Governor Peter Altgeld appointed her to the post of Chief Factory Inspector for the state of Illinois, a newly created position and unheard-of for a woman. She chose five women and six men to assist her. Hull House resident Alzina Stevens served as one of Kelley's assistant factory inspectors. In the course of her Hull House work, she befriended Frank Alan Fetter when he was asked by the University of Chicago to conduct a study of Chicago neighborhoods. At Fetter's motion, she was made a member of Cornell's Irving Literary Society as an alumna, when he joined the Cornell Faculty. Kelley was known for her firmness and fierce energy. Hull House founder Jane Addams' nephew called Kelley "the toughest customer in the reform riot, the finest rough-and-tumble fighter for the good life for others, that