When these photos were taken, there were actually some laws in place about employing children under a certain age (12?), and there was also a social belief growing that children should not be working (similar to various other social movements such as abolitionism that more and more people adopted over time). The photographer, Lewis Hine (I researched him in grad school), was working for a progressive organization and specifically took the photos to go into propaganda pamphlets. These would be distributed to show middle-class folks the conditions poor children were working in so that they would be appalled and work against it or at least donate money. He would often do it clandestinely, especially in places like factories where the managers could control who was allowed in. He would pretend to be an inspector, and to be taking photos of the machines, but make sure children were in the shot. Sometimes he would even sneak the camera in (difficult with the size of cameras at the time), then set it up once inside and take his photos. The factory owners therefore must have known they were doing something unsavory by employing children or they wouldn't have tried to hide it.

As an aside, he was an amazing photographer. He took other pictures as well, but his child labor photos are definitely the most well known.

yeah, but I think in American society there is a social taboo for children working in jobs, don't you think? I am glad that children no longer work. They don't have the mental, emotional, or physical maturity required for jobs. Sadly, many children still work in other parts of the world...

A good book about children labor is Love and Toil.

That's ridiculous. Signing the Convention on the Rights of the Child has no bearing on whether or not any nation actually treats their children well. Just check out Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Is this because in the USA many people believe that parents have complete authority over their children, and children's rights might contradict that? People seem to get up in arms about things like parental notification laws for minors getting abortions, and whether schools or parents have the responsibility of teaching children about sex, etc.

Political stances aside, I have to say that living in a country in which compassion and a certain repulsion for stratified and socially sanctified class differences is an amazing thing. The USA has its faults. Every human being and institution, of course, has faults. There is no perfect society, and there is no political standpoint that offers perfect solutions. Life on this planet is too complex, the variables and expediencies and the very fact and constant pressure of survival all make things too urgent, too complicated for any real, satisfying solution. And the very mention of "rights" amuses me. In real life, there are no rights at all. The US government, in the person of the constitution, defined "rights" for its people and guaranteed them (as far as anything in this world can be guaranteed) - these are not "rights" that the planet and its systems recognize. They are not even rights that individual, raw human nature recognizes. We live in a glass house with these rights, and throwing bricks at each other, in that case, seems less than wise.

In this way, I have to say that children have no natural rights. They have to eat to stay alive. And they have to be kept from freezing or harming themselves. We are lucky that in most (?) instances of human natural behavior, parents, at least, feel compelled to take responsibility for these things. But we have to understand that in times of poverty, where the next meal is a hoped for luxury rather than an entitlement, every hand that can turn a buck (a cent?) has had to do it, survival being the bottom line. I don't think that most of us, reading and writing in this venue, have even the faintest understanding of this kind of life. And most of us have no idea how the meat we eat was processed, or how our Nike shoes were put together.

Again, life is complex. If I buy a mutual fund, I look more at its return numbers than I do at its investments - not because I don't care, but because I have children, myself - and neighbors and tax problems and animals and a property to keep up and extended family and talents - and all those things demand my focus. Once, when the investment strategy of one of my retirement funds came to my attention, I realized that I was making money off of things that I not only don't support, but hate. And I dumped it all. With a certain amount of shame, I admit I still didn't have the luxury of examining the others closely - and certainly not closely enough to know whether even the most seemingly innocuous companies were wholesome in their behind-the-scene practices. It would have been another full-time demand on my time and resources, and my children and family and neighbors were more important.

So I had to choose to live my own life in the best way I could - doing things honestly. Delivery a product that was built in an honorable and quality way. Treating people with fairness and respect. Making myself the best kind of investment I could, even when it cost me not to cut corners. The fact that I live in the US has allowed my life beauty and some peace - and enough ease to tempt me into thinking that this life is and should be normal, and that all other, less fair, less convenient or kind lives are somehow a perversion of an easily attainable healthy pattern. I feel, in short, entitled.

I am, in other words, as a citizen of the world, naive. But in saying that, I am also grateful for being able to live amongst people who have come to believe in childhood, and who are willing to protect it. That some of them are taking things ridiculously and dangerously far in this bent is not unexpected. That some of them like to throw around the word "rights" like some kind of word of power is also not unexpected. Worrisome and dangerous, but not a surprise. Just more of our efforts, as still an adolescent global community, to try and find balance. We will take hurt from the mistakes, but perhaps we will grow wiser.

Perhaps.

I think what strikes me as the most poignant about these pictures is the harsh nature of the work these children are doing. If we posted pictures of a young girl or boy helping their mother darn clothes at home for her income, it wouldn't be as shocking. I think that the point is that the nature of the work itself was oppressive to children -- and probably to anyone who was required to work those jobs. Extending the requirements of education into the late teens means that children need to spend more time studying than working in order to compete later in life. Before the standardization of things like secondary school, children used to work alongside their family members after they learned to read without suffering extreme reductions in earning potential.

It's funny that although the extreme abuses of child labor have become a thing of the past for American children, the stratification of child labor continues to haunt future opportunity. Even in college, I see that the students that come from wealthy families don't work and have the time to become presidents of impressive extra-curriculars. Students working to cover their rent don't have that opportunity, and thus, don't measure up when they apply to post-undergraduate programs. The same thing played out in high school. The teens that had to work after school missed out on opportunities like student council and sports, and lost the leg up on applications and scholarships to wealthier peers.

What makes child labor so immoral isn't the idea that children are working. In and of itself, there's nothing wrong with that. When it starts to be a moral problem is when the working conditions are horrible or when the opportunity cost for working means that they are missing out on important opportunities to elevate their future development or earning potential. The state of labor for teenagers and college students in America has eliminated the poor working conditions -- for the most part -- but it hasn't eliminated the steep opportunity cost.

I've always found the loopholes in American attitudes (more so than in laws) about child labor intriguing. Like, having children do economically productive work on a family farm wouldn't cause most people to bat an eye -- in fact, our school calendar, with its long break during the summer months, is pretty much predicated on the idea that this will happen. Similarly, it's not unusual or particularly shocking for kids to work at family-owned stores or restaurants -- there's an Italian restaurant here in Baltimore where at one point the maitre d was the owners' 12-year-old son, and he always seemed to be having a grand time playing grown-up.

Of course, there's a visceral difference between these examples and sending your kid to work in a factory, but it's hard to draw an objective hard and fast line. I suppose the assumption is that work being supervised by family members will be easier, or less prone to abuse, though of course that isn't necessarily the case.

As a side note, the pics of the newsies reminds me that newspaper delivery was one kind of child labor that was totally socially acceptable in the U.S. until fairly recently. I had friends in junior high in the '80s who not only delivered papers but (and this is what really shocked me in retrospect) had to pay in advance for the papers and then hound subscribers for the money! I'm guessing this doesn't happen anymore? We pay our newpaper bill online and it's delivered by an adult who drives a van.

As someone with some experience in childhood education, I'm particularly interested in how employers managed children. I know the threat and delivery of corporal punishment was likely part of the coercement of labor out of the young, but, well, kids will be kids - they're curious, mischievous, and they have short attention spans. I grew up in a school system that delivered beatings if you were out of line, but we still got out of line a hell of a lot. How would you manage a factory full of them?

My grandmother lived in the village. When she was 3 years old she had to take care of animals and her 1 year old brother, while the parents were absent, working on the field. 2 years later she also had to cook. And in spite of being curious and prone to experimentation as every child, she did not get herself or her little baby-brother killed. She was responsible and knew things were serious and depended from her - even though she couldn't speak well enough, think with abstract concepts or understand everything she saw.

Same goes for a child in the ghetto that a journalist found recently; 8 year old girl taking care of 4-5 smaller brothers and sisters, while the mother has abandoned them. This girl did the shopping, cooking, cleaning, had a very practical attittude to life problems and was responsible for her actions even though she did not know almost anything about the big world outside her district.

Today the attittude is that children are stupid and cannot handle even the simplest of tasks (especially those that would show they're an independent person). These photos prove that unlike what some people today think, children ARE capable of working and being responsible. Many of the negative sides of children behaviour (being "mischievious", rebellious etc., as mentioned above) comes from the fact that they're controlled and live in a fake environment. I don't know how things are in the USA, but I'd compare bullying in a school with bullying in a prison, a concentration camp, or another place, where people have no rights as persons.

There a restaurant here in New Orleans that I won't go to anymore because they have their eight or nine year old daughter working there. Ok, it would be cute at maybe 6 or 7 pm to have a little girl come greet you and take your drink order, except when you want beer not apple juice and it's really 9 pm (when she should be in bed or doing homework) and you realize there is no other wait staff because her parents seem (to me) to be too cheap to actually pay adults to do this job. Then it just feels creepy.

There's still child labor in the US, go to the central valley in California, Usually agriculture related work by Latino kids from emigrants families, wondering why California oranges are so cheap?.

"Hundreds of thousands of child farmworkers are laboring under dangerous and grueling conditions in the United States, Human Rights Watch charged in a report Fingers to the Bone: United States Failure To Protect Child Farmworkers.

The international rights group found that child farmworkers often work twelve- and fourteen-hour days, and risk pesticide poisoning, heat illness, injuries and life-long disabilities. The vast majority of child farmworkers are Latino"

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2000/06/19/abusive-child-labor-found-us-agriculture

http://www.stopchildlabor.org/USchildlabor/fact1.htm

Do you have child carers in the US? In the UK I often hear of the thousands of children who work practically full-time around school to care for their disabled relatives. It's not the same as being exploited in a potentially dangerous factory but it takes up all their time and energy and places huge responsibilities on the children.

http://www.coastkid.org/si-cc.html

Poor things, they had no shoes.

Part of me wonders why these images come across as shocking. Is it because the children are white? We're used to seeing images of children, even today, working in factories abroad in less privileged countries. Perhaps it lives in the same realm as being desensitized to images of POCs starving as opposed to whites.

I believe all of these images are from the National Child Labor Committee collection held by the Library of Congress. There are over 5,000 images in the collection, you can view them in high quality through http://memory.loc.gov/pp/nclchtml/nclcabt.html .

They are in the public domain, contrary to copyright asserted by History of Place.

Interesting! I'm not sure selling newspapers is exactly the same as working in a dangerous factory, though. But of course, that all depends on the other conditions the child is working under: selling papers for an hour after school or during summer vacation isn't the same as selling papers for ten hours a day and NOT going to school. Also, if the kid is six rather than, say, twelve, that makes a difference, as does age twelve from age sixteen.

In every city where I've lived, I've seen children and teens selling candy bars, and occasionally I'll buy from them, although I really wish they would find out where to buy them wholesale so they didn't have to sell them for $2 each. Still, as long as it doesn't interfere with school or playtime and the kid isn't being FORCED to work to support his family or something, I think youthful entrepreneurship is generally a good thing.

I'm doing History Fair with my school, and this is a great source for my project. But in order to use I need the author and/or the place it was created. If you could give me the title or editor aswell, that would help me a lot. Thank you! :)

im making a newsletter over child labor in america and this helps out alot

 i llike this sit e im doing a project on child labor  and i think it would hep me alot on who what where when and why especialy my pictues to  i realy like this site and its verry interesting

this topic is really undeniable even US is one of the wealthiest country we had.

Awesome pictures I will use them on my report. Thank-you