Child Labor & Women's Suffrage
by Florence Kelley (excerpt)
July 22, 1905-Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
[1] We have, in this country, two million children under the age of
sixteen years who are earning their bread. They vary in age from
six and seven years (in the cotton mills of Georgia) and eight,
nine and ten years (in the coal-breakers of Pennsylvania), to
fourteen, fifteen and sixteen years in more enlightened states.
[2] No other portion of the wage earning class increased so
rapidly from decade to decade as the young girls from fourteen to
twenty years. Men increase, women increase, youth increase,
boys increase in the ranks of the breadwinners; but no contingent
so doubles from census period to census period (both by percent
and by count of heads), as does the contingent of girls between
twelve and twenty years of age. They are in commerce, in offices,
in manufacturing.
[3] Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be
working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening
noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton
and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.
[4] In Alabama the law provides that a child under sixteen years of
age shall not work in a cotton mill at night longer than eight hours,
and Alabama does better in this respect than any other southern
state. North and South Carolina and Georgia place no restriction
upon the work of children at night; and while we sleep little girls
will be working tonight in the mills in those states. working eleven
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