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Bibliography

Bibliography

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years At Hull House. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1971.

Roberts, Peter. Anthracite Coal Communities: A Study of the Demography, the Social, Educational and Moral Life of the Anthracite Regions. New York: The MacMillian Company, 1904.

“Child Labor as Seen by a Child” New York Times 5 August 1913

“Child Labor Board Asks Aid of States.” New York Times 28 February 1917

“Child Labor in the South.” The Public 11 May 1908

Ewing, Quincy. “The Child Labor Iniquity.” The Public 9 October 1906

“Child Labor Law Evaded.” New York Times 6 October 1901

“Children’s Labor Leads to “Dead Ends” in Trade Without Promotion.” New York Times 4 December 1913

Children Out of Mills: New Bay State Law Bars Doors to Them or Limits Their Hours.” New York Times 3 September 1913

“The Story of My Cotton Dress.” The Child Labor Bulletin August 1914

Topic of Paper

The broad issue that my paper will discuss is the extent to which efforts during the Progressive Era succeeded in improving working conditions for children. The topic paragraph for my paper is as follows:

At the beginning of the Progressive Era, children were often required to work long hours in factories, mills, and mines under unsafe conditions for exploitative wages that were less than those compared to adults. The Progressive Era brought many reformers who set out to end the abuses of child labor and to force businesses to make improvements, such as reducing the number of hours that children could be required to work and protecting children from working with dangerous machinery and from other workplace hazards. The reformers succeeded in informing the public of deplorable workplace conditions for children and, to various degrees, in getting laws passed to improve these conditions. However, progress was slow in getting industries to voluntarily make improvements that cost them money, and the laws that were enacted were often poorly enforced or overturned by the courts. Nevertheless, the reformers provided a valuable service by turning the country’s attention to the injustices of child labor and in laying the groundwork for substantial improvements in the future.

Ten Subjects

1. Children in the post-war south.
2. Immigrant urban Children
3. Desegregation of the schools
4. Child Labor
5. Children in Wartime
6. Violence on T.V. and children
7. Children in the movies
8. Children of alcoholic parents
9. Kids and gangs
10. Children of third world countries

Three Readings

The three readings that I found the most interesting were “Unlearning Black and White: Race, Media, and the Classroom,” “Child Abuse and the Unconscious in American Popular Culture,” and “From Useful to Useless: Moral Conflict over Child Labor.”
In the first reading, I found the fact that school desegregation was a catalyst for further civil rights movements interesting because there were so many other social ills that were as, or even more, important. However, it does make sense because education is the key to overall advancement. For the second reading, I found it amazing that there were only a few programs dealing with child abuse, and that it was only after it was “discovered” in the 1960’s that an outpouring of programs dealing with the issue came into being. The third reading was interesting to me because I did not know that there was huge opposition to child labor laws, not just from factory owners, but from other groups as well. For instance, states’ rights groups feared a federal child labor law, some religious groups pointed to the bible as evidence that children should work, and some people just felt that “child labor was safer than child idleness.” It is therefore not hard to believe that a federal child labor law was not passed until 1938.

Probably the easiest of these topics to do a paper on would be “Unlearning Black and White.” There would probably be a lot more concrete information concerning race issues than there would be concerning child abuse or child labor, considering that race is a major and long lasting issue in American history.