{"id":7017,"date":"2016-03-22T09:47:01","date_gmt":"2016-03-22T14:47:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maxwellhalsted.publish.uic.edu\/?page_id=7017"},"modified":"2020-11-27T15:07:28","modified_gmt":"2020-11-27T21:07:28","slug":"child-labor","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/maxwellhalsted.uic.edu\/home\/girls-mothers-children-everywhere\/child-labor\/","title":{"rendered":"CHILD LABOR, CHILD BONDAGE: WHY CHILDREN WORK?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greater than other grievances within industrial capitalism, the protest against child labor energized reformers across the spectrum of movements. Saving innocent children from exploitation of their labor (and their absentee immigrant mothers working outside the home) touched an emotional hot-button in middle-class reformers committed to the domesticity of the family home, the stay-at-home nurturing “mom.” \u00a0As early as the 1840s, “mom and apple pie” invoked typically wholesome American values with universal appeal, “home sweet home.”<\/p>\n

Surrendering to impulses for momentary excitement and thrills, delinquent and truant children escaped the schooling an educated class regarded as necessary for citizenship and productive lives. The nation must protect “its most precious asset,” wrote Florence Kelley, “the young children who will be the nation when we of the present generation are gone.” Restraining\u00a0the evils of child labor, and the business interests profiting from it, reached large audiences with a broad humanitarian appeal.<\/p>\n

By way of contrast, the earlier \u00a0reform movements focused on improving the material environment–housing reform, street sanitation, \u00a0occupational disease. \u00a0They relied for evidence largely upon scientific “expertise” and professional studies. Evidence pointing to long-term damage to the child’s capacity for growth and maturity was more difficult to explain, especially to many recent immigrants who responded that the hard work and obedience to family and bosses good enough for their kids was good for everyone. Reformers often appeared as privileged elite white folk\u00a0with protected childhoods and family supported high school and college educations now meddling in the very different lives of inner city immigrant residents.<\/p>\n

Indeed, child labor was an age-old phenomenon. What then was the fuss about? Working or laboring children on subsistence farms in local agriculture had been the historical norm for centuries. In early modern cultures the child, “a small adult,” had the demographic probability of not surviving to adulthood. The reasoning was that procreating adults, not children, in groups under population duress could always produce additional expendable children replenishing the family and the labor force.<\/p>\n

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What changed was that industrial cities in 19th century Britain now brought graphic literary attention to the bleak plight of impoverished laboring children from the lower ranks and classes. Millions of poor children (with parents often in debtor\u2019s prison) below the age of sixteen worked excessive hours for meager piece wages under dangerous insanitary conditions for punitive bosses in mines and manufacturing, in home sweating production, as domestic servants and apprentices, in street trades and sex trades. In\u00a0the industrial employer’s bottom line, expendable child labor was cheaper than longer-term investment in labor-saving machinery and occupational-safety equipment.<\/p>\n

In 1900, according to U.S. census numbers, 22% of the white male workforce fell into the 10-15 years range, and 46.4% of the non-white male workforce. Corresponding, 10.2% of the white female workforce fell in the 10-15 years range, and 30.1% of the nonwhite female workforce. Up to two million white children were at risk of exploitation, from the perspective of the child labor reformers. Non-white children received little if any notice. \u00a0 bjb<\/p>\n

INTRODUCTION<\/h3>\n