Child Labor
was and is still an existing practice in the world today. Manuel, a five-year old worked at a seafood cannery in Biloxi, Mississippi, with a shrimp pail in each hand and a mountain of oyster shells behind his back. He is typical for thousands of working children in the years before the civil war, especially the turn of the century. America's army of ers had been growing steadily for the past century. The nation's economy was expanding. Factories, minds and mills needed plenty of cheap labor. Around 1911, more than two million American children under the age of 16 years of age were a regular part of the work force. Many of them worked twelve hours or more a day, six days a week, ...
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and twelve-year-olds on factor night shifts. Across the country, children who should have been in school or at play had to work for a living.
By the early 1900's, many Americans were calling "child slavery" and were demanding an end to it. They argued that long hours of work deprived children of an education and robbed them for useful lives as productive adults, promised a future of illiteracy, poverty and continuing misery.
Besides, reformers said, children have certain rights. Above all, they have the right to be children and not breadwinners. Lewis Hine, a schoolteacher and photographer, was one of those early reformers. He felt so strongly about the use of children as industrial workers that he quit his teaching job to become an investigative photographer for the National Committee (NCLC).
Hine carrying a simple box camera traveled back and forth across the country, from sardine canneries of Maine to the cotton fields of Texas. He took pictures of kids at work, ...
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was fighting for strict laws and effective enforcement. Founded in 1904, it was a militant organization made up of men and women who believed that a healthy, happy, normal childhood was the rightful heritage of all children.
The NCLC wanted to ban the employment of children under fourteen years of age in most occupations, and under sixteen in dangerous trades such as mining. For all children, the NCLC demanded an eight hour day, no night work and mandatory work permits based on documentary proof of age. The NCLC also wanted compulsory school-attendance laws, but they didn't put much effort into it. It was hard enough to get honest child-labor laws passed and obeyed.
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Child Labor. (2007, August 21). Retrieved December 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Child-Labor/69912
"Child Labor." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 21 Aug. 2007. Web. 23 Dec. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Child-Labor/69912>
"Child Labor." Essayworld.com. August 21, 2007. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Child-Labor/69912.
"Child Labor." Essayworld.com. August 21, 2007. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Child-Labor/69912.
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