Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T01:39:10.309Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Family Income and Child Labor in Carolina Cotton Mills

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Philip M. Holleran
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One-fourth of all workers in southern cotton mills in 1899 were under 16 years of age. Why did so many children work in cotton mills and other factories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Many millworkers believed that “if the employers would give their hands better wages, . . . the help could then support themselves better and be able to school their children” (North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics 1892:172). As it was, “at the present rate of wages paid, large families are compelled to put all their children in the mills in order to support the family” (ibid.: 287). Child labor would be reduced or eliminated if parents could “demand wages sufficient to keep [their children in school] and take care of the family without the help of the little ones” (ibid.: 351). Turn-of-the-century labor reformers agreed that low wages forced many families to send their children to work. Alexander McKelway (1913), for example, southern secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, called low cotton mill wages “our modern feudalism,” while Edith Abbott (1908: 36) suggested that child labor was the result of an “insufficiency of the man’s wages.”

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , Fall 1997 , pp. 297 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1997 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, E. (1908) “A study of the early history of child labor in America.” American Journal of Sociology 14: 15–37.Google Scholar
Angus, D., and Mirel, J. (1985) “From spellers to spindles: Work-force entry by the children of textile workers, 1888-1890.” Social Science History 9: 123-43.Google Scholar
Carlton, D. (1982) Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Davidson, E. (1939) Child Labor Legislation in the Southern Textile States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Dublin, T. (1979) Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Fraundorf, M. (1979) “The labor force participation of turn-of-the-century married women.” Journal of Economic History 39: 401-17.Google Scholar
Goldin, C. (1979) “Household and market production of families in a late-nineteenth-century American city.” Explorations in Economic History 16: 111-31.Google Scholar
Goldin, C. (1981) “Family strategies and the family economy in the late nineteenth century: The role of secondary workers,” in Hershberg, T. (ed.) Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press: 277–310.Google Scholar
Goldin, C. (1990) Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gratton, B. (1996) “The poverty of impoverishment theory: The economic well-being of the elderly, 1890-1950.” Journal of Economic History 56: 39–61.Google Scholar
Haines, M. (1979) “Industrial work and the family life cycle, 1889-1890.” Research in Economic History 4: 289–356.Google Scholar
Haines, M. (1981) “Poverty, economic stress, and the family in a late-nineteenth-century American city: Whites in Philadelphia, 1880,” in Hershberg, T. (ed.) Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press: 240-76.Google Scholar
Hall, J., Korstad, R., and Leloudis, J. (1986) “Cotton mill people: Work, community, and protest in the textile South, 1880-1940.” American Historical Review 91: 245-86.Google Scholar
Hall, J., Leloudis, J., Korstad, R., Murphy, M., Jones, L., and Daly, C. (1987) Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Holleran, P. (1993) “Child labor and exploitation in turn-of-the-century cotton mills.” Explorations in Economic History 30: 485–500.Google Scholar
Holleran, P. (1996) “Explaining the decline of child labor in Pennsylvania silk mills, 1899–1919.” Pennsylvania History 63: 78–95.Google Scholar
Horan, P., and Hargis, P. (1991) “Children’s work and schooling in the late-nineteenth-century family economy.” American Sociological Review 56: 583-96.Google Scholar
Jones, J. (1913) “Child labor and low wages.” Child Labor Bulletin 2: 52–55.Google Scholar
Kessler-Harris, A. (1982) Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Killingsworth, M. (1981) “A survey of labor supply models: Theoretical analyses and first-generation empirical results.” Research in Labor Economics 4: 1–64.Google Scholar
Kingsbury, J. (1913) “Child labor and poverty: Both cause and effect.” Child Labor Bulletin 2: 27–34.Google Scholar
Kohn, A. (1907) The Cotton Mills of South Carolina. Columbia: South Carolina Department of Agriculture, Commerce, and Immigration.Google Scholar
Markham, E., Lindsey, B., and Creel, G. (1914) Children in Bondage. New York: Hearst’s International Library.Google Scholar
McHugh, C. (1988) Mill Family: The Labor System in the Southern Cotton Textile Industry, 1880-1915. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McKelway, A. (1913) “Child wages in the cotton mills: Our modern feudalism.” Child Labor Bulletin 2: 7–16.Google Scholar
Newby, I. (1989) Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persistence, 1880-1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics (1892) Fifth Annual Report. Raleigh.Google Scholar
North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction (1910) Biennial Report for 1908–1909 and 1909-1910. Raleigh.Google Scholar
Pencavel, J. (1986) “Labor supply of men: A survey,” in Ashenfelter, O. and Layard, R. (eds.) Handbook of Labor Economics. New York: North-Holland: 3–34.Google Scholar
Pindyck, R., and Rubinfeld, D. (1991) Econometric Models and Economic Forecasts. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Preston, S., and Haines, M. (1991) Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late-Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Quinney, V. (1982) “Childhood in a southern mill village.” International Journal of Oral History 3: 167-92.Google Scholar
Rotella, E. (1980) “Women’s labor force participation and the decline of the family economy in the United States.” Explorations in Economic History 17: 95–117.Google Scholar
Rotella, E., and Alter, G. (1993) “Working-class debt in the late-nineteenth-century United States.” Journal of Family History 18: 111-34.Google Scholar
Rubin, L. (1976) Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Smuts, R. (1959) Women and Work in America. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Tentler, L. (1979) Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900-1930. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Trattner, W. (1970) Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1902) Twelfth Census of the United States. Vol. 9, Special Reports on Selected Industries. Washington, DC: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1905) Census of Manufactures. Part 3, Special Reports on Selected Industries. Washington, DC: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1907) “Child labor in the United States.” Census Bulletin 69.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1914a) Thirteenth Census of the United States. Vol. 4, Occupation Statistics. Washington, DC: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1914b) Thirteenth Census of the United States. Vol. 10, Reports for Principal Industries. Washington, DC: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of the Interior (1907) Annual Report of the Commissioner of Education. Washington, DC: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Senate (1910a) Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States. Vol. 1, Cotton Textile Industry. Washington, DC: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Senate (1910b) Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States. Vol. 6, The Beginnings of Child Labor Legislation in Certain States: A Comparative Study. Washington, DC: GPO.Google Scholar
U.S. Senate (1910c) Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the United States. Vol. 7, Conditions under Which Children Leave School to Go to Work. Washington, DC: GPO.Google Scholar
Walters, P., and Briggs, C. (1993) “The family economy, child labor, and schooling: Evidence from the early-twentieth-century South.” American Sociological Review 58: 163-81.Google Scholar
Zelizer, V. (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar