In October 1952, during a famine in northern Namibia, an Ovambo woman named Helvi Kondombolo filed a complaint with colonial officials, stating that her son, a contract laborer, had been living in the southern part of the colony for eight years and that she wanted him either sent back to the Ovamboland reserve or persuaded to send her money to buy food. Her complaint is unique in that the laborer in question was Sam Nujoma, now president of Namibia. And yet she was only one of dozens of women who filed similar complaints against men between 1948 and 1954 (National Archives of Namibia [NAN], Native Affairs Ovamboland [NAO] 93 and 94, file 42/2). In colonial southern Africa, European officials and African men often collaborated in efforts to control African women. These complaints represent a rare case in which European officials and African women collaborated to control African men.

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.”

The belief that the social class position an individual inherits at birth is not itself a prime determinant of subsequent personal achievement is a cherished part of American democratic tradition. Social historians attempting to measure whether the mobility opportunities so eagerly sought by immigrants were in fact realized have looked at the occupations of immigrant men and their sons. Evidence from such diverse areas as Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and New York City indicates that at the turn of the century many men did experience upward occupational mobility; some groups, notably blacks, did not fare as well as did white immigrants, and not all white immigrants experienced the same rates of occupational improvement (Bodnar et al. 1982; Lieberson 1980; Model 1988; Thernstrom 1964, 1973; Zunz 1982). This essay turns to the first decade of the twentieth century to explore some of the factors contributing to socioeconomic mobility.

Sociological and social historical approaches to the study of legal transformations have traditionally been marked by a focus on external “social” factors, such as industrialization, class conflict, and social movement activity, that causally determine the form and content of law (Hurst 1956; Friedman 1973; Gordon 1975; Hagan 1980; Humphries and Greenberg 1981; Chambliss and Seidman 1982; Chambliss and Zatz 1993; Kantor and Fishback 1994). More recently, interdisciplinary scholarship on law and society has criticized this view for narrowly reducing law to formal structure—organizational procedures and textual rules—and for its image of unidirectional causation running from society to law (Gordon 1984; Harrington and Yngvesson 1990). The result of this critique has been a growth in interpretive research on law emphasizing ideological analysis of law and depicting relations between law and society as constitutive (Milner 1989: 633).

Extant literature on vocational reforms gives the impression that they, like other educational reforms, resulted from a consensus between northern industrialists and professional educators (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 1976; Cohen 1968; Cremin 1961; Cuban 1982; Fones-Wolf 1983; Kett 1982; Powers 1992; Tyack 1981 [1974]). If national educational reforms reflected national economic interests, we should expect twentieth-century federal vocational legislation to reflect the interests of an increasingly industrialized national economy. By the same token, regionally specific economic interests should find their reflection primarily in local educational practice. This view rests on the assumption that a “national economy” has existed and that federal policies have not reflected sectional economic interests. In reality, southern sectional interests have shaped a variety of economic and social policies, ranging from post-Reconstruction child labor and compulsory education laws to New Deal policies such as the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the 1935 National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, welfare policy, and the 1935 Social Security Act establishing old-age security and unemployment compensation (Alston and Ferrie 1985; Bensei 1984; Lieberman 1995; Quadagno 1988, 1994; Shulman 1991; Skocpol 1995).