Kids at Work

• Zelizer: “The conflict over the propriety of child labor between 1870 and 1930 in the US involved a profound cultural disagreement over the economic and sentimental value of young children” (emphasis mine).

• Today we’ll look at some key images from this “cultural disagreement,” and talk some more about its parameters.

• In a pluralistic society, who decides the shape of an “ideal childhood”?

Farm labor in the 19th c: pulling weeds, tending livestock, milking cows, churning butter, feeding chickens, harvesting crops

City labor: Errands, scavenging, newsboys, “outwork”

Sony Handicam

Nintendo (Italy)

Anne Geddes’ sentimentalism

“Hurry up” (L) (1909) vs “Mennen’s” (1898)

Elizabeth Shippen Green (L) (1871-1954); Jessie Willcox Smith (R) (1863-1935)

Jessie Willcox Smith, ad for Ivory Soap, 1902

Elizabeth Shippen Green, ad for Kodak, 1906

Jessie Willcox Smith, cover for The Bed-Time Book (Helen Hay Whitney), 1907

Jessie Willcox Smith, promotional poster for the children’s book industry

Elizabeth Shippen Green, Frontispiece, The Book of the Child (1902)

Jessie Willcox Smith cover, March 1921

What is it with kids & pumpkins?

Lewis Wickes Hine, 1874-1940

“Italian family making artificial flowers in a New York tenement apartment,” 1908

“Breaker Boys,” 1911

“Lincolnton [NC] Spinner Girl,” 1908

Manuel, shrimp-picker, 5 years old, Biloxi, MS, 1911

Group of oyster shuckers, Dunbar, LA (1911)

Child picking cotton (TX), 1912

“Making Human Junk” (Child Labor Bulletin 3, 1914-1915)

Present-day resonances

• Apple’s Chinese manufacturers • Gingrich’s plans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-gWP4xA2TM

References • George Dimock, “Priceless Children: Child Labor and the Pictorialist

Ideal,” in Priceless Children: American Photographs 1890-1925 (Greensboro, NC: Weatherspoon Art Museum, 2001), 7-22.

• Russell Freedman, Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor (NYC: Clarion, 1994).

• Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998).

• Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)

• Holly Rosenkrantz, “Newt Gingrich Leads Push to Ease Child-labor Laws,” Sfgate.com, Tuesday, December 20, 2011

• “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” “This American Life,” air date 1.06.12, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/transcript