Times have changed for the world of education and technology over the past 100 years. Sure, that’s easy to say. But how can you visualize just how much things have changed? Thanks to the U.S. National Archives, there’s now photographs that will likely open your eyes.
In the early 20th century, photos were taken of children working with machines / technology as part of child labor. Controversy aside, the pictures are an interesting window into a much different time. Back then, businesses were free to use children for cheap work despite the dangerous conditions.
Today, students and children around the world still have a tight relationship with machines. Albeit a bit different now. These images below show just how far we’ve come.
A child in 1908 arriving for work in a mill to help her sister.
Photo: Lewis Hine/National Child Labor Committee/U.S. National Archives
The children working at Cornell Mill in Fall River, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1912.
Photo: Lewis Hine/National Child Labor Committee/U.S. National Archives
By 1911, Stanislaus Beauvais had already worked in this Massachusetts factory for two years.
Photo: Lewis Hine/National Child Labor Committee/U.S. National Archives
Two little girls smile sweetly as they take a break from their jobs in a cotton mill in Tifton, Georgia, in 1909.
Photo: Lewis Hine/National Child Labor Committee/U.S. National Archives
Street Bretzau, with a bandaged finger, was injured while working in the mule room of this Tennessee factory in 1910.
Photo: Lewis Hine/National Child Labor Committee/U.S. National Archives
A hundred years earlier, in 1911, a young child in Yazoo City, Mississippi, works a spinner.
Photo: Lewis Hine/National Child Labor Committee/U.S. National Archives
Some of the kids in this Macon, Georgia mill were so small they had to climb up into the machines to repair them.
Photo: Lewis Hine/National Child Labor Committee/U.S. National Archives
Images courtesy of U.S. National Archives & Library of Congress via Gizmodo
I love these archival photos. Few people know that the coffee break was invented in the Willimantic, CT textile mills so that the children could have a bit of juice and a snack around midmorning–it wasn’t generosity, per se, it was proven that the break and snack increased overall productivity. New England has a rich history in industrialism. One of the ironies, sadly, is that so many of the luxuries that the middle class received during this period–things that allowed for the concept of free time, rather than sitting home weaving cloth for clothes–were made by these children–people who suffered greatly in the labor market. Ironically, the technology 100 years later–this very device on which I’m typing–is also made by people who are not being treated fairly in the labor market. I hope this will improve.
Great feature!
I am Joe Manning, a historian. Lewis Hine took all the photos above. I have tracked down and interviewed the descendents of over 300 of the child laborers that Lewis Hine photographed in the early 1900s. You can see all my stories of these children, including my story of the little girl on the right in the photo shown above of the two girls in Tifton. Go to this link. http://www.morningsonmaplestreet.com/lewishine.html
Incidentally, all of Hine’s more than 5000 photos are on the Library of Congress website, and I have provided a link to them on my website. The National Archives has only a small number of them.
It is nice to know that technology has changed for the better. The children in the photographs had hard lives and never got to experience the joys of childhood.
Agreed! It’s great to see what it used to be like but I’m with Kirsten, and we have come a long way. Now if only kids from other parts of the world wouldn’t have to suffer from labour and poor conditions at their young age.
We all see things so differently. I see the results of families who needed income and used the only means possible to earn it. Not much was known about contraception. Families with many children needed everyone to be involved in income production. Children were to ‘carry there own’ weight. Is it possible that this generation grew up knowing that there were no handouts? That working hard does pay off? That meeting the needs of your family was sometimes more important than personal intersts.
As a culture we have really changed, but has the change made us stronger or weaker as a nation.