Bessie has had eight “jobs” in six months. Obviously under sixteen, she has had to produce her “working papers” before she could be taken on. The fact that she has met the requirements necessary to obtain the papers, and that her employer has demanded them, is evidence of the advance made in New York State since we first became acquainted with the children of the poor. Bessie has had to prove by birth certificate or other documentary evidence that she is really fourteen, has had to submit to a simple test in English and arithmetic, present proof of at least 130 days’ school attendance in the year before leaving, and, after examination by a medical officer, has had to be declared physically fit to enter shop or factory.
No longer could Annie, the cobbler’s daughter, by unchallenged perjury obtain the state sanction to her premature employment. Gone are the easy days when Francesca’s father, defying school mandates, openly offered his little ones in the labor market. Yet we are far from satisfied. Bessie, though she meets the requirements of the law, goes out wholly unprepared for self-support; she is of no industrial value, and is easily demoralized by the conviction of her unimportance to her “boss,” certain that her casual employment and dismissal have hardly been noted, save as she herself has been affected by the pay envelope. Her industrial experience is no surprise to her settlement friends, for she is a type of the boys and girls who, twice a year, swarm out of the school and find their way to the Department of Health to obtain working papers. Bessie’s father is a phthisis case; her mother, the chief wage-earner, an example of devotion and industry. The girl has been a fairly good student and dutiful in the home, where for several years she has scrubbed the floors and “looked after” the children in her mother’s absence.
Tommy also appeared at the office with his credentials and successfully passed all the tests, until the scale showed him suspiciously weighty for his appearance. Inquiry as to what bulged one of his pockets disclosed the fact that he had a piece of lead there. He had been told that he probably would not weigh enough to pass the doctor. Talking the matter over with Mrs. Sanderson, I learned that the immediate reason for taking Tommy out of school was his need of a pair of shoes. The mother was not insensitive to his pinched appearance. A few days later Tommy was taken to visit our children at the farm, and it was pleasant to see that the natural boy had not been crushed. He devoured the most juvenile story-books and was “crazy” about the sledding. The self-respecting mother was not injured in her pride of independence by a little necessary aid carefully given; and though I have not seen Tommy recently, I am sure that neither he nor his employer lost anything because of the better physical condition in which he entered work after his happy winter at the farm.
This attempt to cheat the law by the very children for whose protection it was designed, and the occasional disregard of the purposes of the enactments by enforcing officials, suggest Alice’s perplexity when she encountered the topsy-turvy Wonderland.
It was about twelve years ago that a group of settlement people in New York gathered to consider the advisability of organizing public sentiment against the exploitation of child workers. The New York Child Labor Committee thereupon came into existence, under the chairmanship of the then head of the University Settlement, and that committee has since been steadily engaged in advancing standards of conditions under which children may work. Through legislative enactment and publicity it has endeavored to form public opinion on those socially constructive principles inherent in the conservation of children.
Of necessity child labor laws approach the problem from the negative side of prohibition. To meet the problem positively, the Henry Street Settlement established in 1908 a definite system of “scholarships” for children from fourteen to sixteen, to give training during what have been termed the “two wasted years” to as many as its funds permitted.
A committee of administration receives the applications which come from all parts of the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and preference is given to those children of widows or disabled fathers whose need seems greatest. Careful inquiry is made by the capable secretary to discover natural inclinations or aptitudes, and these are used as guides in determining the character of the instruction to be given. Three dollars a week—somewhat less than the sum the children might have been earning—is given weekly for two years, during which time they are under continual supervision at home, at school, and through regular visits to the settlement. They are looked after physically, provided with occasional recreation, and, in the summer time, whenever possible, a vacation in the country. The committee keeps in close touch with the educational agencies throughout the city, gathers knowledge of the trades that give opportunity for advancement, and, to aid teachers, settlement workers, parents, and children, publishes from time to time a directory of vocational resources in the city.[5]
Approval of this endowment for future efficiency comes from many sources, but no encouragement has been greater than the fact that, while the plan was still in its experimental stage, my own first boys’ club, the members of which had now grown to manhood, celebrated their fifteenth anniversary by contributing three scholarships; and that the Women’s Club, whose members feel most painfully the disadvantage of the small wage of the unskilled, have given from their club treasury or by voluntary assessment for this help to the boys and girls.
The children who show talent and those whose immaturity or poverty of intellect makes their early venture into the world more pitiful, have equal claim upon these scholarships.
Pippa was one of the latter. She was scorned at home for obvious slowness of wit and “bad eyes”; her mother deplored the fact that there was nothing for her to do but “getta married.” Pippa’s club leader’s reports were equally discouraging, save for the fact that she had shown some dexterity in the sewing class. At the time when she would have begun her patrol of the streets, looking for signs of “Girls Wanted,” the offer of a scholarship prevailed with the mother, and she was given one year’s further education in a trade school. After a conference between the teachers and her settlement friends, sample-mounting was decided upon as best suited to Pippa’s capacities. She has done well with the training, and is now looked up to as the one wage-earner in the family who is regularly employed.
One of the accompanying charts compares the wage-earning capacity of the boys and girls who have had the advantage of these scholarships with that of an equal number of untrained young people whose careers are known through their industrial placement by perhaps the most careful juvenile employment agency in the city.[6] The deductions that we made from the experience of the Henry Street children were corroborated by an inquiry made by one of our residents into the industrial history of one thousand children who had applied for working papers at the Department of Health. The employment-record chart was compiled from data obtained in that inquiry.
Comparative Weekly Wages of 72 Children Who Have Worked Four Years without Previous Training, from the Record of ⸺ Employment Bureau; and of Scholarship Children Who Have Had Two Years of Vocational Training.
Our connections in the city enable us occasionally to coax opportunities for those boys and girls for whom experience in the shop itself would seem best. Jimmy had lost a leg “hooking on the truck,” and his mother supposed that “such things happen when you have to lock them out all day.” In the whittling class the lad showed dexterity with the sloyd knife, and he was thereupon given special privileges in the carpentry and carving classes of the settlement. When he reached working age, one of our friends, a distinguished patron of a high-grade decorator, induced the latter to give the boy a chance. Misgivings as to the permanency of his tenure of the place were allayed when Jimmy, aglow with enthusiasm over his work, brought a beautifully carved mahogany box and told of the help the skilled men in the shop were giving him. On the whole, he concluded, “a fellow with one leg” had advantages over other cabinetmakers; “he could get into so many more tight places and corners than with two.”
The Typical Employment Record of One Child between the Ages of 14 and 16.
Bessie and Jimmy and Pippa and Esther and their little comrades stir us to contribute our human documents to the propaganda instituted in behalf of children. In this, as in other experiments at the settlement, we do not believe that what we offer is of great consequence unless the demonstrations we make and the experience we gain are applicable to the problems of the community. On no other single interest do the members of our settlement meet with such unanimity. Years of concern about individual children might in any case have brought this about, but irresistible has been the influence exercised by Mrs. Florence Kelley, now and for many years a member of the settlement family. She has long consecrated her energies to securing protective legislation throughout the country for children compelled to labor and, with the late Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Alabama, suggested the creation of the National Child Labor Committee. In its ten years’ existence it has affected legislation in forty-seven states, which have enacted new or improved child labor laws. On this and on the New York State Committee Mrs. Kelley and I have served since their creation.
Though much has been accomplished during this decade, the field is immensely larger than was supposed, and forces inimical to reform, not reckoned with at first, have been encountered. Despite this opposition, however, we believe that the abolition of child labor abuses in America is not very far off.
In Pennsylvania, within a very few years, insistence upon satisfactory proof of age was strenuously opposed. Officials who should have been working in harmony with the committee persisted in declaring that the parent’s affidavit, long before discarded in New York State, was sufficient evidence, despite the fact that coroners’ inquests after mine disasters showed child workers of ten and eleven years. The Southern mill children, the little cranberry-bog workers, the oyster shuckers, and the boys in glass factories and mines have shown that this disregard of children is not peculiar to any one section of the country, though Southern states have been most tenacious of the exemption of children of “dependent parents” or “orphans” from working-paper requirements.
In the archives at Washington much interesting evidence lies buried in the unpublished portions of reports of the federal investigation into the work of women and children. The need of this investigation was originally urged by settlement people. One mill owner greeted the government inspectors most cordially and, to show his patriotism, ordered the flag to be raised above the works. The raising of the flag, as it afterwards transpired, was a signal to the children employed in the mill to go home. In the early days of child labor reform in New York the children on Henry Street would sometimes relate vividly their experience of being suddenly whisked out of sight when the approach of the factory inspector was signaled.
It is perhaps unnecessary to mention the obvious fact that the child worker is in competition with the adult and drags down his wages. At the Child Labor Conference held in Washington in January, 1915, a manufacturer in the textile industry cited the wages paid to adults in certain operations in the mills as fourteen cents per hour where there were prohibitive child labor laws and eleven cents an hour where there were none.
The National Child Labor Committee now asks Congress through a federal bill to outlaw interstate traffic in goods produced by the labor of children. Such a law would protect the public-spirited employer who is now obliged to compete in the market with men whose business methods he condemns.
Sammie and his brother sold papers in front of one of the large hotels every night. The more they shivered with cold, the greater the harvest of pennies. No wonder that the white-faced little boy stayed out long after his cold had become serious. He himself asked for admission to the hospital, and died there before his absence was noted. After his death relatives appeared, willing to aid according to their small means, and the relief society increased its stipend to his family. At any time during his life this aid might have been forthcoming, had not the public unthinkingly made his sacrifice possible by the purchase of his papers.
Opposition to regulating and limiting the sale of papers by little boys on the streets is hard to overcome. A juvenile literature of more than thirty years ago glorified the newsboy and his improbable financial and social achievements, and interest in him was heightened by a series of pictures by a popular painter, wherein ragged youngsters of an extraordinary cleanliness of face were portrayed as newsboys and bootblacks. In opposition to the charm of this presentation, the practical reformer offers the photographs, taken at midnight, of tiny lads asleep on gratings in front of newspaper offices, waiting for the early editions. He finds in street work the most fruitful source of juvenile delinquency, with newsboys heading the list.
I am aware that at this point numerous readers will recall instances of remarkable achievements by the barefoot boy, the wide-awake young news-seller. We too have known the exceptional lad who has accomplished marvels in the teeth of, sometimes because of, great disadvantages; but after twenty years I, for one, have no illusions as to the outcome for the ordinary child.
When the New York Child Labor Committee secured the enactment of a law making it mandatory for the schoolboy who desired to sell papers to obtain the consent of his parents before receiving the permissive badge from the district school superintendent, we sent a visitor from the settlement to the families of one hundred who had expressed their intention to secure the badge. Of these families over sixty were opposed to the child’s selling papers on the street. The boy wanted to “because the other fellows did,” and the parents based their objections, in most cases, on precisely those grounds urged by social workers,—namely, that street work led the boys into bad company, irregular hours, gambling, and “waste of shoe leather.” Some asserted that they received no money from the children from the sale of the papers. On the other hand, a committee of which I was chairman, which made city-wide inquiry into juvenile street work, found instances of well-to-do parents who sent their little children on the streets to sell papers, sometimes in violation of the law.
The three chief obstacles to progress in protection of the children are the material interests of the employers, many of whom still believe that the child is a necessary instrument of profit; a sentimental, unanalytical feeling of kindness to the poor; and the attitude of officials upon whom the enforcement of the law depends, but who are often tempted by appeals to thwart its humane purpose. A truant officer of my acquaintance took upon himself discretionary power to condone the absence of a little child from school on the ground that the child was employed and the widowed mother poor. Himself a tender father, cherishing his small son, I asked him if that was what he would have me do in case he died and I found his child at work. Oddly enough, he seemed then to realize for the first time that those who were battling for school attendance for the children of the poor and prevention of their premature employment, even though the widow and child might have to receive financial aid, were trying to take, in part, the place of the dead father.
To meet cases where enforcement of the new standards of the law involves undeniable hardship, another form of so-called “scholarship” is given by the New York Child Labor Committee. Upon investigation a sum approximating the possible earnings of the child is furnished until such time as he or she can legally go to work. An indirect but important result of the giving of these scholarships has been the continuous information obtained regarding enforcement of the school attendance law. Inquiry into the history of candidates disclosed, at first, many cases in which, although the family had been in New York for years, some of the children had never attended school, and perhaps never would have done so had they not been discovered at work illegally. The number of these cases is now diminishing.
Allusion to these two forms of “scholarships” should not be made without mention of one other in the settlement, known as the “Alva Scholarship.” The interest on the endowment is used to promote the training of gifted individuals and to commemorate a beloved club leader. The money to establish it was given by the young woman’s associates in the settlement, and small sums have been contributed to it by the girls who were members of her own and other clubs.
