JF Ptak Science Books Post 1834
"There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work." --Lewis Hine, 1908
This is an appraisal of the working conditions of children in 1934--a third of the way through the century, thirty years before the 'sixties, not horribly long ago, not of a Dickensian era, not even a Sinclair-Lewis-ian one. Recent. The author, Dorothy Kenyon--1888-1972, a feminist, civil rights lawyer, judge, maverick, speaker, activist, and all around force of nature who stood strong and firm and tall while being accused of Commie blather by Joe McCarthy--made a very strong case for people to take a close look at the still-dismal conditions of child labor in the U.S.
Exposing the conditions of children, young child, hard at work in 40-75 hour a week jobs may belong to the documentarian photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940), whose long series of images made between 1908-1917 (and working for the National Child Labor Committee) depicted the varied working conditions of some of the 2 million kids under the age of 16 working in the U.S. He made photographs, and photographs to this generation of American newspaper and magazine reader were still relatively new-ish, half-tones coming into wide use only in the 1890's, making short work of speculation.
Hine--who gives us the quote to lead this short post--was a school teacher and sociologist who was extremely aware of the plight of the children around him--well, children, and immigrants, and laborers; people without voices, or representation, poor working people. He was a pioneering photographer whose images of these classes of people were revolutionary, a tremendously important documentarian of a societal symptom that was pretty much misdiagnosed, or at least was chosen as something to not be seen. That was hard to do when you had actual photographs of the grim situation.
[This could've been my grandmother. At about this same time. }
["Addie Card, 12 years. Spinner in North Pormal (i.e., Pownal) Cotton Mill. Vt.", 1910"]
Hine also made some of the most iconic labor images in American history, a vastly under-appreciated heroic figure during his lifetime.
Now, getting back to Judge Kenyon, back in 1934: in the pamphlet Manufacturers' Child Labor Program (published by the National Consumers' League), she makes a short and quick and statistic-=laden plea for the better treatment of children. For example, she relates that among working children, in the 48 states of the United States in 1934, only 14 required medical certificates for children under 16 years to work 40+ hours per week.
Educational requirements for work--even though they existed at this point--were not terribly advanced: 8 states required 8th grade educations for children under 16; 2 required 7th grade, 8 required 6th grade, 6 required 5th; and 17 having none specified. For work in the mines, it was slightly better, with 35 states requiring children to be at least 16 to go underground; 7 needed the children to be 14, and 6 had no minimum.
The work week was very difficult, still: 35 states legislated no more than 48 hours for the 16 year olds, 7 allowed 51-54 hours, 4 were at 44 hours; in the meanwhile, South Carolina allowed 55 and Georgia 60 hours per week for work by children of 16 years.
Things have certainly gotten better in this country; I'm not so sure about the developing world, where free fast food toys are produced for millions of our kids, not to mention high-end outdoor wear now taken offshore, and sneakers, and dolls, and plastic cups, and all the rest.
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