Flower, Lucy Louisa

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Lucy Louisa Flower Soundex Code F460

Lucy Louisa Flower (1837–1921), a.k.a. "Lucy Flower"

When Lucy Louisa Flower saw that many abandoned or neglected children in Chicago were often arrested and jailed as adults, she declared that Chicago needed a special “parental court” for them. For years she and like-minded reformers, such as Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop, negotiated a legal and political landscape that was only partially open to women in order to achieve this goal. Her success came in 1899, when Cook County established the first Juvenile Court to hear cases of children under 16 years. Cities around the world followed Cook County’s lead in establishing juvenile court systems. Lucy Louisa Flower and her family lived at 1920 W. Wellington Avenue at the time.

Flower had been a reformer and schoolteacher when she and her family came to Chicago in 1873. She joined the Chicago Home for the Friendless and the Half Orphan Asylum and founded the Illinois Training School for Nurses, the first nursing school west of Pennsylvania. She was appointed to the Chicago School Board and elected a trustee of the University of Illinois. Her campaign for children’s rights led to the establishment of industrial schools for dependent boys in Illinois and the passage of a compulsory education law in 1889.

In 1911 the first trade school for girls in Chicago, located near Garfield Park, was named The Lucy Flower Technical High School.