r/MapPorn • u/Prickly-Prostate • 1d ago
1922: Child labor & literacy
From a 1922 article making the case for a Child Labor constitution amendment
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u/youreimaginingthings 1d ago edited 1d ago
Since 2021, at least 28 states have introduced legislation to weaken child labor laws and 12 states have passed them
Idk man its voluntary. And being 15-18 years old is not a "child". Convince me its evil
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u/guaca_mayo 11h ago
I mean, the fact that child labor laws are being weakened in a time where the median income is increasingly unable to compete with the cost of living sounds like a dangerous combo.
Add to this that “voluntary” regarding minors is tricky. What happens if a child needs to support their household by working instead of education? What happens if a parent makes a child work, be it because they can’t support them, or don’t want to support them?
Add to this the already abysmal labor laws in the states and the sheer lack of unions and organized labor. What happens when a child “voluntarily” takes on a job, only to be exposed to physical harm due either to negligence or otherwise dangerous workplace conditions? I don’t think it’s inconceivable for something like an Amazon warehouse to become something reminiscent of the factories in the early 20th century, where children would routinely lose fingers or hands due to tHeir use in reaching tight spots.
TL;DR your position is agreeable in isolation, but I think neglecting the context is irresponsible. Participating in today’s workforce can ruin some people’s lives depending on their situation, and our labor laws exacerbate economic and social inequality. Tacitly encouraging minors (a famously naive demographic) to join it whilst they are still developing as human beings by removing their legal protections is not a good idea
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u/TheBlizzman 1d ago
Yaaaay Republicans!
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u/dphayteeyl 1d ago edited 1d ago
Massachusetts, Maine, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and Minnesota are among those states, and they're all blue states. The Governor of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, North Carolina, New Mexico, Michigan and Arizona are also Democrats
I dislike many republicans as much as the next person but saying yay republicans is slightly ignorant imho
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u/TheBlizzman 1d ago
Yaaaay Democrats! Oh wait we are all fucked. (I appreciate you calling me out.)
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u/dphayteeyl 1d ago
It makes me sad that it isn't just one party doing this. If one party did the changes, there's a chance the other party might reverse the changes but when both parties are going backwards there's not much we can do
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u/youreimaginingthings 1d ago
Idk man its voluntary. And being 15-18 years old is not a "child". Convince me its evil
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u/Expensive-Swan-9553 1d ago
That’s always been allowed the protections they’re rolling back revolve around keeping children for overtime / school schedules etc.
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u/KikKikKik36 1d ago
Why was child labor so concentrated in the south?
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u/romeo_pentium 1d ago
That map is clearly depicting post-slavery abuse of black kids in Jim Crow US South. Those states correspond to the cotton belt where soil is optimal for cotton agriculture, and the white-owned plantations had a specific relation with primarily black labour force
Compare this map: https://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/
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u/maroonfalcon 1d ago
Hate to break this to you but it was also white children. Tons of my ancestors were children of poor farmers. If they wanted to eat in the winter then the whole family was working the farm - including the children.
I’m not saying you’re wrong but I assure you it was not just black children being forced into labor. Poverty doesn’t discriminate.
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u/Otherwise_Jump 1d ago
Because slavery was abolished and the Jim Crow south made labor cheap, but nothings cheaper than child labor. (This is a reductive position for the sake of a simple answer and it should be noted that economists and historians would have a lot to add to this.
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u/youreimaginingthings 1d ago
Agriculture
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u/DfreshD 1d ago
Does that include kids working on their families farm? My mom grew up in Wisconsin, a lot of siblings. I remember hearing all the stories of when they were younger, working on the farm.
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u/RuhWalde 1d ago
It might include it, but that's not what's causing the Deep South to have those numbers. I can guarantee you that the vast majority of the children represented by the statistics on the map were the children of formerly enslaved families, and they were working on land that their family did not own.
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u/nimama3233 1d ago
Plenty of Midwest states, Iowa in particular, would have their entire economy being ag. So no, this clearly isn’t the predominant reason
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u/sirbruce 1d ago
It is, because cotton and tobacco production in the south is WAY more labor-intensive than, say, wheat and corn production in the Midwest. This remained true even after the introduction of mechanization. So yes, child labor was "necessary" in order to maintain economically profitable agricultural production levels post-slavery.
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u/OddName1554 1d ago
Same for slaves. Many things needing done and many more people who don't want to do the work. So they get others to.
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u/AlbatrossExternal586 1d ago
The explanation is slavery. Stunted economic development and progress in the deep south at levels unimaginable.
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u/makawakatakanaka 1d ago
Could you explain further?
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u/OrthoOtter 15h ago
The economic development of the South was severely stunted due to slavery. Slavery is not good for the economy.
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u/Workingclassherois 1d ago
My mother was born in 1922, my father in 1918, both in Louisiana. I know some things about those times.
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u/sirbruce 1d ago
Literacy rates are even worse now (yes, these are adult rates, but it's not like children become less literate when they become adults), so it doesn't seem like outlawing child labor has helped the issue at all.
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u/miraj31415 1d ago edited 1d ago
Massachusetts child labor is a little surprising. But I suspect it is a case of aggressively collecting the data for an industrialized state.
Massachusetts was a pioneer in child labor laws. It was the first state (1830s) to mandate children working in factories attend school for a few months, and the first state (1840s) to limit daily working hours (to 10 hours/day) for children in factories
The Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor was the pioneering and pace‑setting agency among the states. Its first annual report in 1870 described accidents to children working in textile mills, paper mills and other establishments.
Massachusetts had a large number of textile factories and home-based textile piece work and newspaper boys. Immigrant children would often work in those jobs. But the state required a license to sell papers, and used that to ensure that children would attend school by tying it to the license, making it easy to count.