In the last couple of years, Americans have rediscovered child labor. The Nation reported that “Child Labor is Back—And It’s as Chilling as Ever” and the New York Times declared a “New Child Labor Crisis in America.”[1] But, as I argue in my recent JAH article, the United States never completely abolished child labor.[2] After the passage of federal limitations on child labor during the New Deal, policymakers failed to address the flagrant exploitation of migrant child farmworkers and reframed other kinds of employment as good for young people’s development. In fact, as I argue, by the mid-1950s, organizations like the National Child Labor Committee, which had once been wholly committed to maintaining strict state child labor laws, began to argue that young people needed employment to learn responsibility and achieve personal fulfillment. By the 1960s, poverty warriors had little to say about child labor at all and the War on Poverty’s most prominent programs were ones that provided jobs to poor youth.
My first book examined labor reformers’ attitudes toward domestic workers in the Progressive Era.[3] My research on child labor thus began with a simple interest in what happened to those Progressive reformers after World War II, especially the women who had been the most committed advocates of child labor prohibitions. I had read the work of scholars like Linda Gordon and Landon R. Y. Storrs and so I understood that Progressive women experienced marginalization by the late 1940s, but I realized I had no idea what had happened to the Children’s Bureau, the federal agency staffed and run by Progressive women who were interested in issues related to women and children in the early twentieth century.[4] I knew Hull House, America’s most famous settlement house, was no longer a major institution in Chicago but what exactly happened to it?
What I discovered was not just a fading away of institutions that had outlived their historical moments—in the space of ten years, over the course of the 1960s, Progressive women’s institutions were destroyed one by one. In 1961, Chicago’s Hull House shut its doors and was partially bulldozed to make room for a University of Illinois building project.[5] By 1963, the University had already decided to turn what remained into a museum.[6] By 1969, the Children’s Bureau, the historic government outpost for Progressive women specializing in child welfare, had been split among various agencies in the federal government. The records of the Children’s Bureau after 1950 had been sent to the National Archives directly from the Bureau’s file drawers without much processing, still arranged by the Children’s Bureau’s baroque decimal point filing scheme. Indeed, while looking through the Children’s Bureau’s records at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, I came across a plastic fork stuck between the pages. The Children’s Bureau had been a cornerstone of what Robyn Muncy once called the early twentieth-century “female dominion in American reform.”[7] By the 1960s, it seemed, institutions devoted to the protection of women and children in the United States had vanished or, in the more precise phrasing of former Children’s Bureau chief, Martha May Eliot, been “dismembered.”[8]
What, I wondered, was the cost of losing a generation of Progressive reformers and their institutions? As I argue in the JAH, the disappearance of women’s Progressive institutions was connected to a widescale rejection of policies designed to protect women and children from labor exploitation after World War II. Protective labor policy had been a central ethos of Progressive women’s institutions. In contrast, as liberals entered government in the 1950s and 1960s, they expressed few concerns about labor exploitation, insisting that employment was essential to young people’s maturation. Progressive women, who continued to advocate for strengthening child labor laws, were maligned as old-fashioned and overprotective. By the 1960s, many of those women had died or retired.
Despite this, I was surprised to find that there was not much secondary literature that addressed child labor after World War II. Though some scholars found incidents of child labor after World War II, especially in commercial agriculture, very few treated child labor as a discrete political problem of the era.
But I had an inkling that this was not the only story. Agricultural labor notoriously exploited children well after the passage of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. A 1959 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, Child Workers in Agriculture, found close to 500,000 children under fifteen years old working for pay on farms. These child laborers represented 18 percent of the commercial agricultural workforce.[9] Of the estimated 227,000 child agricultural workers between 10 and 13 years old, about a third worked thirty-five or more hours a week.[10] As one historian has noted, careful viewers of Edward R. Murrow’s documentary, Harvest of Shame, might have caught glimpses of children at work in the fields even though many child workers hid during the documentary shooting because they were not supposed to be working during school hours.[11] Even as child labor had not gone away, the discourse around child labor had completely transformed.
As I gathered sources related to issues Progressive women traditionally cared about, including juvenile delinquency, childcare, child labor, and welfare, I started to find school principals, newspaper reporters, local judges, and even some federal officials arguing that one cause of juvenile delinquency was too-strict child labor laws. At Rutgers University Libraries, the regular stacks held several shelves full of transcripts of the New Jersey Juvenile Delinquency Study Commission hearings. These enormous tomes of type-written transcripts had been bound and sent to Rutgers as an official New Jersey State Depository. In testimony after testimony, witnesses in education, in the juvenile justice system, and in state government argued that child labor laws were standing in the way of sending idle teenagers out to work. Curiously, few of the older women in child welfare circles or in women’s voluntary organizations, like the National Consumers’ League or the National Child Labor Committee, testified in these hearings. As a historian who had long worked on the Progressive Era, I felt like a time traveler examining the 1950s documents, surprised to find organizations familiar to me missing among its records.
Since I was already there, I headed to the basement of the Rutgers Library to Special Collections to put in a call slip for Mary Dyckman’s papers. Dyckman was the president of the Consumers’ League of New Jersey and outspoken on the state’s labor issues, particularly child labor. As I looked through Dyckman’s papers, I found correspondence between Dyckman and the Juvenile Delinquency Study Commission. She had, in fact, testified before the Commission in 1955 and had presented a chart showing that the rate of juvenile delinquency was positively correlated to the number of youth employment permits the state had issued.[12] During the hearing, juvenile court judge David Nimmo insisted again and again that she was wrong and that her own chart showed the opposite of what she said it did, contending that juvenile delinquency increased when young people were unemployed.[13]
Two years later, when the Commission held another (their 16th!) hearing on juvenile delinquency, Dyckman was invited to the hearing, but not to testify. Across the top of the hearing invitation, Dyckman had scrawled, “as you see we are not invited to speak—only listen!”[14] Her response to the Commission’s invitation positively dripped with sarcasm. She wrote that it was “quite clear that this is not a hearing where I am invited to speak and I am sure that I shall enjoy listening to your program all the more for that reason.”[15] She enclosed a copy of her previous testimony and her chart, but she must have realized that this was a weak response. Throughout the hearings, meanwhile, school principals and other witnesses seeking to weaken child labor restrictions argued that child labor laws overprotected young people. This gendered rhetoric echoed widespread 1950s cultural criticism of mothers, epitomized by Phillip Wylie, who accused overprotective mothers of producing effeminate men and juvenile delinquents, birthing a veritable “generation of vipers.”[16] Thus, older women like Dyckman, who had long championed the protection of children from labor exploitation and had once been widely considered experts on child welfare, were no longer even invited to participate in conversations about child labor and juvenile delinquency.
I experienced another surprise when I ordered the microfilm records of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). The NCLC had been stalwart opponents of child labor, committed to investigating conditions for child workers across the country and lobbying state governments to maintain or strengthen their child labor laws. I expected to find the NCLC continuing their traditional mission, albeit with waning influence. Instead, I found something much more interesting: in 1955, as I noted in my JAH article, the NCLC changed its name to the National Committee for the Employment of Youth.
The scholarship that mentioned this name change tended to write it off as evidence of the American triumph over child labor. One history of the National Child Labor Committee argued that although not entirely gone, abusive child labor had largely been “wiped out” by 1950 and another scholar characterized the 1940s as a period of “final victory” over child labor.[17] But I knew child labor still existed in the 1950s. On closer inspection, the NCLC’s correspondence minimized child labor as a social problem and focused instead on promoting work opportunities for children as a means of developing maturity, responsibility, and independence. Pursuing youth employment represented a genuine about-face for the nation’s preeminent anti-child labor organization, but it was rhetoric I saw everywhere, especially as older Progressive women died, retired, or were pushed out of leadership positions. As new leadership took over the NCLC, its mission fundamentally changed to promoting work experience for youth.
Once I saw rhetoric in the NCLC’s papers about work offering young people a path to responsible adulthood, I began to see it everywhere. It was a thread that, once pulled, led me through 1950s debates about juvenile delinquency to jobs programs championed by antipoverty warriors in the 1960s. The ubiquity of this rhetoric appeared to make jobs programs the obvious tool for addressing young people’s poverty—but in choosing that tool, government officials necessarily foreclosed other policy options. Meanwhile, as Progressive women’s institutions were demolished and older women child labor reformers, like Mary Dyckman, were shut out of child welfare conversations, there was no one left to counter this commitment to employment as the best policy solution for poor youth. Thus, while many Americans today probably view these as abhorrent stories about teenagers and children working the nightshift in slaughterhouses or missing school to work construction, organizations like the Children’s Bureau and the National Child Labor Committee, which had historically called the nation to account for such abuses, are, unlike child labor itself, truly gone or fundamentally transformed.
Vanessa May is an associate professor of history at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870–1940 and is working on a book on maternalists and the welfare state after World War II.
[1] Steve Fraser, “Child Labor in America Is Back—And It’s As Chilling as Ever,” Nation, July 13, 2023; Sabrina Tavernise, “A New Child Labor Crisis in America,” March 9, 2023, in The Daily, produced by Nina Feldman and Will Reid for the New York Times, podcast, MP3 audio, 33:50, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/podcasts/the-daily/migrant-child-labor-america.html.
[2] Vanessa May, “‘It Will Be Our Job to Make Them Workers’: Child Labor and Youth Employment in Postwar America,” Journal of American History, 110 (Dec. 2023), 474–96.
[3] Vanessa H. May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870–1940 (2011).
[4] Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (1998); Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (2003).
[5] “Hull House Faces Fight for Its Life,” New York Times, Feb. 19, 1961, p. 79.
[6] Eleanor Page, “Museum Projected: Seek $350,000 for Hull House,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 31, 1963, p. C1.
[7] Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (1994).
[8] Martha May Eliot to Eleanor Roosevelt, Feb. 10, 1961, box 19, folder 267, series V: The Children’s Bureau, Papers of Martha May Eliot, 1898–1975 (Schlesinger Library Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Mass.).
[9] U.S. Department of Labor, Labor Standards Bureau, Child Workers in Agriculture, leaflet no. 4 (1959).
[10] Bess Furman, “Farm Child Labor Abuse Scored; Law Urged to Help All Under 14,” New York Times, Feb. 7, 1959, p. 22.
[11] Mary Lyons-Barnett, “Postwar Improvements for Children Working in Commercialized Agriculture,” Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, 1 (Jan. 2004), 21.
[12] Mary Dyckman to Mr. Krantz, March 26, 1957, folder 8, box 3, Mary L. Dyckman Papers (Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, N.J.).
[13] State Juvenile Study Commission, “Seventh Public Hearing, Jersey City Medical Center, Jersey City, N.J.,” Nov. 30, 1955, unpublished transcript, p. 54–56, Government Documents Collection (Rutgers University Libraries).
[14] Alan S. Meyer to Mary Dyckman, April 1, 1957, folder 4, box 3, Mary L. Dyckman Papers.
[15] Dyckman to Dr. Albert E. Jochen, April 4, 1957, ibid.
[16] The term “generation of vipers” comes from Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (1942). See also Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), 74–75.
[17] Walter Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (1970), 225; John A. Filter, Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children (2018), 191.
