Family Income and Child Labor in Carolina Cotton Mills

Abstract

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.”