Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State by Elisabeth Anderson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State by Elisabeth Anderson Jaclyn N. Schultz Agents of Reform: Child Labor and the Origins of the Welfare State. By Elisabeth Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. xviii + 362 pp. Elisabeth Anderson argues in Agents of Reform that the welfare state's origins lie in child labor laws, yet the book's main focus is the eponymous "agents of reform" who pushed for such legislation. Anderson takes a social scientific approach to understanding these middle-class reformers who, with varying degrees of success, tried to convince legislators in nineteenth-century continental Europe and the United States to protect workers (especially children and women) from capitalist exploitation. Anderson concludes that such reformers were required for any real political movement on worker-related issues, particularly in times and places where organized labor was weak. Moreover, Anderson's framework theorizes that middle-class agents of reform were more likely to see their goals realized when they articulated the need for reform [End Page 313] vis-à-vis dominant discourses (which were often paternalistic), formed powerful alliances, and creatively problem-solved when facing barriers to success. Agents of Reform is a transnational comparative history in two parts. Part I focuses on the development of child labor laws during the first half of the nineteenth century, most of which were tied to education and were undesirable to the working class. Part II moves to the second half of the century and factory inspection laws that enforced earlier child labor laws. In these cases, reformers often worked to enact factory inspection with the help of labor movements. Throughout Agents of Reform, Anderson details the social, economic, and political contexts that reformers operated in as well as the backgrounds and political activism of the reformers themselves. Most of these agents of reform will be new to readers, but familiar faces such as Florence Kelley also appear. It is the depth and breadth of child labor law history that make Agents of Reform an impressive must-read not only for historians of child labor, middle-class reform, and the welfare state but also for those studying education, capitalism, and labor. In part I alone, Anderson compares two reformers in laissezfaire Prussia while tracing the eventual passage of child labor laws, in part, to compromises with chambers of commerce; she compares the cases of France and Belgium and argues that France passed child labor laws when Belgium did not because their agent of reform was flexible and effectively articulated and cited his proposal; she likewise relates the common school movement in Massachusetts to uncontroversial child labor laws there. In part II, readers are guided through a chapter each on the passage of toothless factory inspection laws in Germany, what Anderson calls "conciliatory" factory inspection laws in Massachusetts and, finally, robust factory inspection laws in Illinois that gave women enforcement powers. These six chapters collectively reveal the painstaking work that went into reconceptualizing the government as a protector of children and workers at a time when economic liberalism was at its height. This rich synthesis of child labor reform histories may, however, overshadow Anderson's social scientific framework as the highlight of Agents of Reform. As a trained social scientist, Anderson seeks to objectively answer the question of why some "states" passed labor laws protecting children while others did not. Across case studies, Anderson compares reformers, whom she refers to as policy or administrative entrepreneurs (the former push for legislation while the latter work from within bodies that administrate law), using variables including their abilities to effectively frame policy proposals, compromise, and signal expertise. Yet while these are collectively meant to be predictors of a reformer's success, Anderson's definition of success is ambiguous, particularly in part II. Moreover, her variables shift the focus away from other crucial factors in [End Page 314] child labor history. For example, at the times when Massachusetts passed child labor laws and Illinois passed factory inspection laws, both states were run by a single party (Whigs and Democrats, respectively) that supported the legislation. In the case of Belgium, which did not adopt child labor laws during the 1830s, child labor was...