Child Labor In The 1800s

Child labor was a huge issue in the late 1800’s to the 1900’s. Children often worked through unfair, unhealthy, and unsafe. Children often worked hard for little pay. The children often contracted diseases and lost arms, hands and fingers in accidents and even died sometimes. Young workers had dangerous jobs like working in the coal mines. Kids during the 1820’s through 1920’s went on strike because working conditions were unhealthy, unfair and unsafe.

In the late 1800s, the Industrial Revolution was brought to the United States from Great Britain. The Industrial Revolution was a time period which brought people from the rural areas to the city. Most manufacturing took place in people’s homes using home-made tools, and basic machines. Henceforth, innovation was needed to speed the process of making clothes, enhancing the transportation system, better mass production of iron and more. On the other hand, child labor sprung up a big issue during that time. Children were underpaid, abused, had a very low education rate, but also had to work to support their family. Later, reformers and lawmakers tried to pass laws to stop, and help decrease the amount of child labor happening in their state, but that did not help much because as the inventors

The Industrialization had bloom during the late 1800s early 1900s. This big growth was a positive and negative impact in the United States history. This began the devastating practice of child labor. Children would work in factories for very long hours be paid very low wages or not even be paid. According to Harold Goldstein, ‘’it had been accepted as a norm, employment of young children gradually came to be viewed as harmful and exploitative in the United States.’’ The evolution of the United States Industrialization began child labor, which forced children to live very different lives than children live today.

As the rate of industrialization in America grew during the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, child labor became more and more common. The rapid growth of the economy and the vast amounts of poor immigrants during the Industrial Age in America justified the work of children as young as the age of three. By 1900, over two million children were employed. However, the risks of involving child labor greatly outweighed the positives; child labor was inhumane, cruel, and caused physical deformities among children. Children typically worked in coal mines, mills, and factories which contained many life-threatening hazards.

Regarding politics, the Industrial Revolution greatly impacted the world by establishing child labor laws and supporting imperialism. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, children as young as six years old were working in factories. Conditions were exceedingly harsh; they worked very long hours around extremely dangerous machinery at a premature age (Doc 4b, Byerly). Do to the lack of child labor laws, children were put at high risks of growth defects and their fingers being dismembered by machines. Because of these conditions, the first child labor law was enacted in 1819. The Factory Act of 1833 made it illegal to hire children under the age of 9, and children at ages 10 through 12 could work for the maximum of eight hours. For this

Child labor was a great problem in the Industrial Revolution. Factory owners usually hired women and children rather than men. They said that men expected higher wages, and they suspected that they were more likely to rebel against the company. Women and children were forced to work from six in the morning to seven at night, and this was when they were not so busy. They were forced to arrive on time and they couldn’t fall behind with their work because if they did they were whipped and punished. Child labor was a great concern in the Industrial revolution but very few people did something to stop it.

Child labor was another problem presented at this time. At the rate they were going back in 1900, 26% of boys between ten and fifteen were already working, and for girls it was 10% (Background Essay). Child labor was increasing as fast as the children working were dying. An example of this tragic scenario was Dennis McKee, a 15-year-old boy who was smothered to death by coal (Document B). This boy had a family, and that family had to deal with the loss of their son, all to the fault of an industry that thought to use young, able-bodied boys for their work was a fantastic idea.

During the Eighteenth and the early Nineteenth centuries, Child labor was a major part of the industrial revolution, especially in Great Britain where child labor was a large part of the working class and soon became a social and political problem/issue. In late Eighteenth century child labor became a necessary thing for the working class and society of Britain and other countries such as modern day Germany and America. Children were hired because they could do jobs the adults simply couldn 't do because of their sheer size and incapability to do certain things like clean chimneys and fix the machines in the

Working conditions in industries were not safe for the working people. Many industries required work for long hours of physical labor. In the workplaces it was often hot, steam engines contributing, and machinery was not always fenced off (Working Conditions in the Industrial Revolution). Workers had the potential to get caught in the machines because they were exposed. Children were employed to move between these dangerous machines as they were small enough to fit between tightly packed machinery (Working Conditions in the Industrial Revolution).

Hine shows the acts enacted by the child workers, top help regulate and subjugate the parts and motors for the industrial machine, (Doc. 8). These motors, would tediously be replaced and worked upon, as the child workers used the necessary equipment to do the job, however most horrid and unsafe in design. The equipment used by the children, would have unsafe part, which would be harmful for limbs and the necessary body parts to live a daily life, and until later have no safety laws to restrain the uses on unsafe work equipment. Continuing on Hine’s photograph the children standing on milk cartons, waiting as the day goes away, they work hard and strong as their brittle bones begin to decay from the strain of the perilous hours, low control over labor makes the pain grow everlasting

Michael Sadler wanted to really bring in the spotlight the horrible things that were going on in Britain. He interviewed over 80 children working in these mills and their stories are devastating. Most stories are the nearly the same, a very far journey to get to their mills/factories where they work, many of the children started working at 6 years old, barely any lunch breaks, and the list goes on and on. Sadler interviewed one woman named, Elizabeth Bentley, she had been working at a factory since the age of six; Sadler wrote, “Could you eat your food well in that factory? –No, indeed I had not much to eat, and the little I had I could not eat it, my appetite was so poor, and being covered with dust; and it was no use to take home, I could not eat it, and the overlooker took it, and gave it to the pigs” (Sadler 6).

The jobs children did depended on their how old they were and their gender. Children in the US worked in large mines, glass factories, home industries, messengers, and more. The children here were treated like slaves. They did not get paid much at all. They also had to work all day long in the 1800’s.

At this time in history, there were “two million children under the age of sixteen” working to provide for their families, and some kids beginning labor at the tender ages of “six and seven years (in the cotton

The factories they worked in were sometimes in poor condition. Somethings would fall from the roof injuring little kids or even adults. In the 1800’s children were forced to work in factories by their parents there was lots of poverty back then and it was not a good time era to live in. The

1. How do these testimonies present the realities of child labor? Give specific examples. The testimonies give us a brief snapshot of the condition in which children worked.