The Power of Work and Wages: Working Toward Historicity in Children's Fiction

Abstract

The Power of Work and Wages:Working Toward Historicity in Children's Fiction Susan Campbell Bartoletti (bio) Someone in search of information about working children will find an abundance of books and articles on the subject of nineteenth-century child labor and the adults who fought for child labor reform. The general nature of the various texts is similar: they explain why the children worked; how their impoverished families needed the money to pay for food, rent, medical bills, and other necessities; and how greedy employers needed an abundant supply of cheap raw material. The texts tell what the adults did: how they organized labor strikes, formed unions, and struggled for social reform—for themselves and the children. Most agree that the history of child labor legislation is a history of progress and that future protection of children continues to be necessary—both in the United States and throughout the world. The familiar trope of the exploited and submerged child also dominates the literature published for children on the subject of child labor. For instance, Russell Freedman's award-winning Kids at Work (1994) highlights the crusade of Lewis Hine, a photographer hired by the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in the early 1900s to photograph working children. Over a ten-year period, Hine photographed over 4500 images of working children—images that stood as graphic evidence that the child workers of the United States were being exploited, and that eventually, after thirty years, brought success to the NCLC in its struggle for child labor reform. Freedman's focus on the adult as agent and the child as object is typical; while his book is haunting and poignant, it takes a nostalgic approach to Hine's work and that of the NCLC, reinforcing a mythopoetic image of helpful adults and their effort to reform labor for children.1 Although it is true that working children were horribly exploited and victimized, and that a coalition of adults was necessary to bring about child labor reform and legislation, the agency, activism, and heroism of working children are equally facts of history. Just as adults did, children negotiated, protested, and rebelled against unfair working conditions and challenged dominant authority and institutions—but today's nonfiction for children seldom addresses that fact. During the past ten years, a number of children's books have been published on the subject of nineteenth-century child labor and the adults who fought for child labor reform. With the exception of Joan Dash's We Shall Not Be Moved (1996) and my own Growing Up in Coal Country (1996), most children's nonfiction on the subject of child labor overlooks or, at best, marginalizes the agency of children. Milton Meltzer's Bread and Roses (1994) relates how men, women, and children worked during the years 1865 to 1936. Although the book's subtitle claims that it depicts the "overall struggle of American labor," the text tells how the adults struggled for labor reform for themselves and for children, most notably during the 1912 Lawrence, Massachusetts, strike when children were removed from their homes and sent to other cities. In another young adult book. Cheap Raw Material (1991), Meltzer traces the history of child labor from the beginnings of human history to the present. Again, the stories of the rebellion of spirited and courageous children are left out. In other nonfiction, Penny Colman's Mother Jones: March of the Mill Children (1994), Betsy Harvey Kraft's Mother Jones (1995), and Stephen Currie's We Have Marched Together: The Working Children's Crusade (1996) all relate "Mother" Mary Harris Jones's organization of the mill and factory children's strike and her efforts for child labor reform. As its title suggests, Currie's book, at least, is not simply the biography of Jones as a champion of the rights of (passive) children, but rather, an examination of the strike as adult/child collaboration. But on the other hand, the children's words have been used in a way that manipulates or omits sections that show the children indeed empowered themselves and challenged their parents, employers, and bosses. Even Currie, then, who ostensibly sees these working children as active agents, furthers...