Children At Work: finding at Child Labor in the Victorian Age

Today, it isn't that uncommon for some children and teenagers to work. They may earn extra money by baby-sitting, doing yard work, or maybe even walking dogs. Others, once they go on to high school, may go to work in their local grocery store, malls, or food chains. However, in the Victorian Age, it wouldn't seem at all strange to see children as young as five or six, go to work full-time (sometimes sixteen hours a day!) in often dangerous conditions.

As you read, ask yourself questions. Why do you think children so young were working? What type of jobs do you do for extra money? What types of jobs did the Victorian Age children have to do? What would you do to help stop child labor? How do you think your life would be dissimilar if instead of getting an education, you had to go to work in a paper mill, or on an assembly line?

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Children At Work: finding at Child Labor in the Victorian Age

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Children—white and black, northern and southern—endured a vast and varied range of experiences during the Civil War. Children celebrated victories and mourned defeats, tightened their belts and widened their responsibilities, took part in patriotic displays and suffered shortages and hardships, fled their homes to escape enemy invaders and snatched opportunities to run toward the promise of freedom.

Offering a fascinating look at how children were affected by our nation's greatest crisis, James Marten examines their toys and games, their literature and schoolbooks, the letters they exchanged with absent fathers and brothers, and the hardships they endured. He also explores children's politicization, their contributions to their homelands' war efforts, and the lessons they took away from the war. Drawing on the childhoods of such diverse Americans as Jane Addams, Booker T. Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt, and on sources that range from diaries and memoirs to children's "amateur newspapers," Marten examines the myriad ways in which the Civil War shaped the lives of a generation of American children.

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During the first United States Census it was reported that the estimate of children working in 1870, equalled nearly 750,000. This only included children under the age of fifteen, and didn't count those children who were working on their house farms, or in the family's business. The estimate of children working prolonged to increase as new technology and the industry grew. What were some of the things that caused families to send their children to work? What about the employers that hired them?

Poverty

One mom in the Victorian Age, Mrs. Smith, was quoted as saying:

"I have three children working in Wilson's mill; one 11, one 13, and the other 14. They work regular hours there. We don't complain. If they go to drop the hours, I don't know what poor habitancy will do. We have hard work to live as it is.....My Husband is one of the same mind about it...last summer my husband was 6 weeks ill; we pledged practically all our things to live; the things are not all out of pawn yet... We complain of nothing but short wages...My children have been in the mill three years. I have no complaint to make of their being beaten...I would rather they were beaten than fined."

Another roadblock to change was that most habitancy thought that by letting children have jobs, it would serve to help the poor families to make more money.

There were many ways that children entered the workforce. Orphaned children were often sent to a distant mill or premise owner to be fed and cared for while working to earn their keep. Others were indentured, or sold to a business owner by their parents for a obvious estimate of years. Other, more fortunate working children lived with their families while working full-time.

Industrial Needs

While some premise owners and leaders of the industries spoke out against putting children to work so young, others hired children because they didn't have to be paid as much as adults did. Children were also hired for premise and mill jobs because many of the machines that they used were very small. Children were seen as the ideal candidates to work the machines, and to fix them when they were broken.

It's also foremost to remember that children were raised and treated differently in the Victorian Age. There were some employers who didn't think that there was whatever wrong with hiring young children to work. They believed that by hiring these children, the children would ultimately grow-up as responsible, hard workers.

However, as you will see in the next section, many of the jobs that children were hired for were often very hard, at times even dangerous.

Working for a Living

When teenagers go to work today, they can pick from many types of work. They can be cashiers, fry cooks, baby-sitters, front desk clerks, stockers or create their own lawn service. Children of the Victorian area didn't have these options.

So, what did these kids do for a living?

The most fortunate working children were hired on as apprentices for the major trades of the era. Some of these trades would include:

*Blacksmith

*Tinsmith

*Cooper

*Iron foundry

*Cobbler

*Lace making

*Leatherworking

While the children were still required to work, and sometimes required to work long hours, they were at least lucky adequate to be learning a profitable trade, which offered hope to them for their future.

Younger children might have started out working as road sweepers, "scavengers" or by selling newspapers. Scavengers were children who searched straight through trash, rubbish and refuse for items they could sell to junk stores, or even to their neighbors. Some of these items might have included pieces of rope, or metal scraps.

Still other children were put to work in more dangerous conditions.

Glass factories

Textile mills

Coal fields/mines

Cotton mills

Shipyards

These are only a few examples of the hard work children would face, sometimes working up to ninety hours a week!!

Sometimes the children who went to work and were often away from adult administration would fall into criminal activity. They would wind up involved in things like gambling, stealing, and sometimes even prostitution.

Making a Difference!!

Many habitancy worked very lard and hard to help protect children from being taken advantage of by the industries. Some key habitancy who fought to operate child labor were:

Charles Loring Brace - created the Children's Aid Society

Lewis Wikes Hine - photographer who exposed the child labor qoute to the collective at large

President Woodrow Wilson - created the Keating-Owen Act (see below)

Lord Ashley - created the Children's Employment Commission in 1842

Charles Dickens - wrote and spoke out against child labor. For more information, read Oliver Twist

Karl Marx - helped incite collective opinion

Michael Sadler - worked on the "Ten-Hour Movement"

Organizations that were involved in conference hold from individuals and law makers to operate child labor include:

"Short Time Committees"

The Children's Aid Society

The National Child Labor Committee

Progress was sometimes slow, but always encouraging. any premise Acts (1819-1878) were created in England, which increased the minimum age of children who were able to work. Along with the premise Acts, there was the "Ten-Hour Movement" which tiny shifts to ten hours, with a weekly limit of fifty-eight hours. Other laws in England that influenced the change of child labor laws included Lord Ashley's Children's Employment Commission (1842), which was followed by the Coal Mines Act in 1843. This Act stopped the Coal Mines from hiring women, or boys under the age of ten.

In America, activists joined together in groups and coalitions to work for labor law and reform, or change. They received a small victory in 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson created the Keating-Owen Act, which banned the interstate (between two or more states) sale of any items produced by child labor. However, this Act was later found to be unconstitutional. The real victory came in the year 1938, with the Fair Labor Standards Act. This Act created a national minimum wage and set the national working age to sixteen (eighteen if the job was dangerous). Children aged 14 and 15 were allowed to work under obvious conditions and fields of work, but only after school hours.

Because of the efforts of the Victorian habitancy and the new laws it created for the children of England and America, child labor isn't as large of a problem....for us. But child labor hasn't disappeared! according to some recent surveys and studies done by the International Labor Office, it was estimated that there are about 250,000,000 kids between five and fourteen working. Of these children, 120,000,000 are working full-time, often in dangerous conditions. Take some time to think of ways that you can help with the contemporary day global child labor reform!!

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