The Face of Child Labor

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/09/02/the-face-of-child-labor/



The Face of Child Labor

There are some images that in a single second, convey an entire era, silently speaking volumes in a way words can never do.

Such is the case with the famous Louis Hine photo depicting a thin, drawn, 12-year-old girl standing by her cotton mill in Vermont. The photo has become synonymous with U.S. child labor at the turn of the 20th century and stands for one of the greatest fights we have faced in the union movement—abolishing the work of children.

Hine, whose photographs of working people have become the gold standard for conveying the horror and hardship, dignity and determination of industrial-era workers, spent several years documenting workers in Pennsylvania coal mines, East Coast fisheries and New York tenement factories—many of them children.

It turns out the little girl at the cotton mill has a name—and a history. Addie Card’s real name was not known until very recently, when novelist Elizabeth Winthrop and researcher Joe Manning tracked through records in town offices, historical societies, funeral homes and Social Security death records. (For years, her last name was thought to be Laird.)

In the September issue of the Smithsonian Magazine (article not online), Winthrop describes how she uncovered a 1910 Census record listing a Mrs. Adalaid Harris as head of household, living with six orphaned or abandoned grnadchildren, including the Card sisters, Anna, 14, and Addie, 12.

Eventually, Winthrop and Manning met with two of Addie’s adoptive descendents. Writes Winthrop:

We learned that by the time she died, at 94, she was living in low-income housing and surviving on a Social Security check. “She didn’t have anything to give, but she gave it,” Piperlea Provost, her great-granddaughter, told us. “I would not imagine my life without Grandma Pat’s guidance.”

In 1900, more than 1.7 million of America’s children worked, an increase of more than 1 million over the previous three decades. According to historian Todd Postol:

Although 28 states had some child labor law on their books, statutes typically regulated only the ages and hours children could work; as long as these standards were not violated, employers could and did work minors as they saw fit. In lower Manhattan, girls suffered permanent spinal damage as they sat for long, uninterrupted stretches hunched over their sewing tables…And in the mills of the southeast, youngsters worked 12-hour days in deafening, lint-filled spinning rooms.

FULL story at link above.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/09/02/the-face-of-child-labor/

[Whoa_Nelly]

1. Link to many of Hines' photos along with descrips/comments

http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/childlabor/index.html

[Kailassa]

2. My daughter and I cried all evening when we "discovered"

Louis Hines heartbreaking photographs.

Here is another.



Louis Hine's photo of Pennsylvania coal miners in 1908

"Children . . . working every night at twelve-hour shifts . . . never see the blessed sunshine. They die like flies"

http://images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://www.louisville.edu/a-s/english/haymarket/goodson/essaypart3.html&h=240&w=498&sz=35&hl=en&start=12&tbnid=vc-iTfJZQLOuaM:&tbnh=63&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3DLouis%2BHine%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN

This is what Buschco want for the children of women who they have prevented having abortions.

[bumblebee1]

3. That could have been my step grandfather.

He was born in 1901. The above photo was taken in 1908. He started to work in the mines at the age of nine. His father passed away. He'd been a miner all of his life. He died in 1984 from black lung disease.