Child
labor laws were a result of industrialization and manufacturing; which
commenced in the United States long before the Gilded Age. However, after the
Civil War concluded and the Free States claimed victory, the free labor system—so
predominant in the North—began to spread across the nation. Issues with child
labor and related legislation arose in the North during the antebellum period;
and it was magnified in the Gilded Age, as the industries multiplied and child
labor grew.
Children
have worked right alongside of adults for thousands of years. They hunted and
gathered with their nomadic families; and children planted seeds and harvested
crops in agrarian societies. For many, this was the best education that they
could obtain; since they would do the same work to provide for their families.
The industrial revolution not only changed world markets, but they also changed
the face of labor.
Industrialization
in America employed men, women, and children. Even the United States’ first
secretary of treasury, Alexander Hamilton, remarked on the worth of children
laborers, in his “Report on Manufacturers,” that “children are rendered more
useful…by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be.”
The factories and mills hired children especially to work the jobs that were
easier for their little hands and bodies to do. Like female laborers, the
children also did not receive equal pay. When children labored “in piecework,”
their employers often paid them “by the item rather than the hour.”
By 1880, the United States census recorded that there were “1.18 million
children between the ages of ten and fifteen” working in America.
Every ten years, the number increased; and by 1910, there were over two million
child laborers in America.
However, 72 percent of that group of child laborers was comprised of “farm kids,”
with the majority of them working on family farms.
Despite the minority number of children working in industrial industries, great
attention was brought to the work conditions that they labored under through
concerned reformers.
Even
though slavery was abolished through the Thirteenth Amendment, slave-like
treatment of free laborers was not also eradicated by that legislation.
Laborers during the Gilded Age complained that they were treated like animals,
“like slaves, like prisoners.”
Some complained that they had no “free time;” while others swore, had they
known how they would have been treated in their industry, they “would never
have come here.”
Children were part of this
labor force, and were exposed to the same harsh working conditions as everyone
else. However, these situations were not going unnoticed by concerned
Americans. Gilded Age authors took to their pens to write compelling stories to
highlight the oppressed worker. One story had a concerned citizen confront the
father of one child laborer and told an alarming story: “He was out so late
about the streets, Mr. Mell. He uses tobacco as most children use candy. And a
child of that age ought not to be in the mills, Sir, he ought to be at school!”
The
media, popular culture, and the cry of the reformers pushed local, State, and
Federal governments to enact laws to protect the children from abuse.
Restrictions on child labor that had its seeds in Massachusetts starting as far
back as 1866, intensified during the Gilded Age.
By 1900, there were “twenty-eight states [that] restricted child labor.”
The restrictions varied from State to State, but efforts were being made to
improve the lives of American children. For example, the age limit in
Washington State to allow a child at “begging, peddling, or selling any
article, or singing or playing musical instrument for gain on street,” was
placed at ten years of age.
A sixteen year old in Vermont that had completed 9th grade could work “during
school hours” on the railroad, at a mine, in a factory, a quarry, “in hotels,
bowling alleys, or messenger service.”
In Utah, a person had to be twenty-one before they could deliver “messages or
goods to immoral resorts, or other objectionable places, and in manufacture,
selling or handling intoxicating liquors.”
