Florence Ledyard Cross Kitchelt papers

Florence Ledyard Cross Kitchelt was born in Rochester, New York, on December 17, 1874 to Frederick Holland and Jennie Ledyard (Wilcox) Cross. She attended Wells College in Aurora, New York, graduating in 1897 with an A.B. Throughout her early career Kitchelt was a social reform worker at a number of settlement houses in New York City and state. Immediately after college Kitchelt was a resident and volunteer worker caring for dependent and delinquent youth at the George Junior Republic in Freeville New York. She spent the next four years working for the College Settlement on the lower east side of Manhattan and its summer location in Mount Ivy, New York. In 1903 she was the head worker of an Italian American settlement called the "Little Italy House" in Brooklyn, New York. For a short time in 1904 she was a voluntary probation officer for women at the reformist Essex Market Court. From 1904 to 1905 Kitchelt worked at the Lowell House in New Haven, Connecticut.

After spending several months in Italy learning about the conditions from which her many immigrant cases came, Kitchelt returned to her hometown of Rochester, New York. In 1907 she opened "The Housekeeping Center" in an Italian neighborhood there, and the center operated under her supervision until1910. In June 1911, she married New York socialist agitator Richard Kitchelt.

By 1915 Florence Kitchelt had become a suffragette, continuing her work when she moved to New Haven, Connecticut three years later. There she became the Citizenship Director of the Connecticut League of Women Voters in 1920, and served as the Executive Director of the Connecticut branch of the League of Nations Association (CLNA) for twenty years beginning in 1924. During 1943 she was Chairman of the Connecticut Committee for the Equal Rights Amendment, a group she supported until 1956 when she and her husband moved to Ohio to live with Florence's sister Dorothy Zeiger.

Kitchelt was also a dedicated peace activist and worked with a variety of organizations to pursue pacifist goals, including thethe Connecticut Council on International Relations, the National Council for the Prevention of War, and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Throughout her lifetime, Kitchelt was an active socialist, pacifist, member of the Unitarian society, and author of several books of poetry, a prose work called The World's Work , and editor for the Rochester magazine The Common Good. She died in Wilberforce, Ohio, on April 4, 1961.