Reference
- Child LaborChild labor, long a feature of American rural life, grew enormously and changed character with the industrialization of the late nineteenth century. On farms and in coal mines, on city streets and in tenements, in mills and canneries, almost 2 million children, some as young as five and six years old, worked long hours for a pittance, often under harsh conditions.
In response, some people began to fight the evil of child labor. In 1901, Edgar Gardner Murphy, a clergyman, organized the Alabama Child Labor Committee, the first organization of its kind in the United States. A year later, Florence Kelley, Lillian Wald, and Robert Hunter created the New York Child Labor Committee. In the early twentieth century, twenty-eight states restricted child labor by law, but most of the laws were vaguely worded, full of exemptions, and laxly enforced. To achieve better enforcement of these laws on a national basis, reformers in 1904 created the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). The NCLC, under the leadership of such reformers as Felix Adler, Samuel McCune Lindsay, Alexander McKelway, and Owen R. Lovejoy, led the fight against child labor...
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference is an easy-to-use tool for starting research. Gather background information on your topic from hundreds of full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as 500,000+ images and audio files and over 1,000 videos.
Perspectives
Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution
This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship, and the duration of schooling. The classic era of industrialization, 1790-1850, apparently saw an upsurge in child labour. While the memoirs implicate mechanization and the division of labour in this increase, they also show that fatherlessness and large sibsets, common in these turbulent, high-mortality, and high-fertility times, often cast children as partners and supports for mothers struggling to hold families together. The book offers unprecedented insights into child labour, family life, careers, and schooling. Its images of suffering, stoicism, and occasional childish pleasures put the humanity back into economic history and the trauma back into the industrial revolution.
Children of the Labouring Poor
Chronicling the contributions children made towards their families' livelihoods in hard times, this detailed record catalogs the high price children had to paysacrificing their health and educationwhile employed in agriculture, chimney sweeping, straw-plaiting, silk-throwing, papermaking, and brick making in 19th-century Hertfordshire, England. This enlightening history demonstrates that the poor conditions in factories and mills, as well as in household chimneys, contributed to the many diseases and injuries that afflicted these young laborers. While there are examples of innovative manufacturers such as John Dickinson, who built respectable housing for his employees, the overall picture that emerges during this period is one in which Hertfordshire's children arduously struggled to make ends meet.
Child Labor: An American History
Despite its decline throughout the advanced industrial nations, child labor remains one of the major social, political, and economic concerns of modern history, as witnessed by the many high-profile stories on child labor and sweatshops in the media today. This work considers the issue in three parts. The first section discusses child labor as a social and economic problem in America from an historical and theoretical perspective. The second part presents child labor as National Child Labor Committee investigators found it in major American industries and occupations, including coal mines, cotton textile mills, and sweatshops in the early 1900s. Finally, the concluding section integrates these findings and attempts to apply them to child labor problems in America and the rest of the world today.
Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England
The purpose of this collection is to bring together representative examples of the most recent work that is taking an understanding of children and childhood in new directions. The two key overarching themes are diversity: social, economic, geographical, and cultural; and agency: the need to see children in industrial England as participants - even protagonists - in the process of historical change, not simply as passive recipients or victims. Contributors address such crucial subjects as the varied experience of work; poverty and apprenticeship; institutional care; the political voice of children; child sexual abuse; and children and education. This volume, therefore, includes some of the best, innovative work on the history of children and childhood currently being written by both younger and established scholars.
America and Lewis Hine
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window
An hour long documentary about pioneer photographer Lewis Hine, who documented child labor and the building of America from 1900-1940. Hine's work helped establish child labor legislation and is an important part of our national heritage.
Yearning to Breathe Free
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowThe newly unveiled Statue of Liberty is a symbol of all that is best in America, inspiring a time of reform and compassion. Mother Jones brings the child labor issue to the forefront of the nation's consciousness, and Jane Addams, America's first social worker, creates Hull House. Ida Tarbell exposes the abuses of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company.
Family Labor Evolves into Factory Work
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowIndustrialization was not just a helpful force but also a disruptive one. In fact, many scholars believe it led to the breakdown of the working class family structure. Investigate what this meant for families, including the destabilization of wages, the gendering of occupations, the worsening of working conditions, and the rise of our modern ideas of class consciousness.
Online Articles
- PARENTAL ALTRUISM AND SELF-INTEREST: CHILD LABOR AMONG LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN FAMILIESIntergenerational relationships within late nineteenth‐century industrial families are analyzed using several large‐scale, contemporary household surveys. Nonaltruistic behavior by parents was pervasive. Even among families with positive assets, child labor was common in certain industrial settings, suggesting that child labor (or nonschooling) did not simply reflect parental borrowing constraints. Neither did physical asset transfers offset human capital losses among working youth. A quantitative estimate of parental nonaltruism is derived from an equilibrium labor market model: approximately 90 percent of all child earnings was implicitly competed away through lower adult wages as families migrated to areas with abundant child labor opportunities.
- Policy Entrepreneurs and the Origins of the Regulatory Welfare State: Child Labor Reform in Nineteenth-Century Europendustrial child labor laws were the earliest manifestation of the modern regulatory welfare state. Why, despite the absence of political pressure from below, did some states (but not others) succeed in legislating working hours, minimum ages, and schooling requirements for working children in the first half of the nineteenth century? I use case studies of the politics behind the first child labor laws in Germany and France, alongside a case study of a failed child labor reform effort in Belgium, to answer this question. I show that existing structural, class-based, and institutional theories of the welfare state are insufficient to explain why child labor laws came about. Highlighting instead the previously neglected role of elite policy entrepreneurs, I argue that the success or failure of early nineteenth-century child labor laws depended on these actors' social skill, pragmatic creativity, and goal-directedness.
Children of Labor: A Finnish-American History
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowFeatured at the 1977 New York Film Festival, CHILDREN OF LABOR is the story of how Finnish immigrants came into contact -- and conflict -- with industrial America. Three generations of Finnish-Americans recount how they coped with harsh realities by creating their own institutions: churches, temperance halls, socialist halls, and cooperatives.