Speaks Out on Child Labor and Woman Suffrage
Philadelphia PA
July 22, 1905
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.
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.
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.
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 white girls will
be working tonight in the mills in those states, working eleven hours
at night.
In Georgia there is no restriction whatever! A girl of six or seven
years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins, may work eleven hours by
day or by night. And they will do so tonight, while we sleep.
Nor is it only in the South that these things occur. Alabama does
better than New Jersey. For Alabama limits the children's work at
night to eight hours, while New Jersey permits it all night long.
Last year New Jersey took a long backward step. A good law was
repealed which had required women and [children] to stop work at six
in the evening and at noon on Friday. Now, therefore, in New Jersey,
boys and girls, after their 14th birthday, enjoy the pitiful privilege
of working all night long.
In Pennsylvania, until last May it was lawful for children, 13 years
of age, to work twelve hours at night. A little girl, on her
thirteenth birthday, could start away from her home at half past five
in the afternoon, carrying her pail of midnight luncheon as happier
people carry their midday luncheon, and could work in the mill from
six at night until six in the morning, without violating any law of
the Commonwealth.
If the mothers and the teachers in Georgia could vote, would the
Georgia Legislature have refused at every session for the last three
years to stop the work in the mills of children under twelve years of
age?
Would the New Jersey Legislature have passed that shameful repeal bill
enabling girls of fourteen years to work all night, if the mothers in
New Jersey were enfranchised? Until the mothers in the great
industrial states are enfranchised, we shall none of us be able to
free our consciences from participation in this great evil. No one in
this room tonight can feel free from such participation. The children
make our shoes in the shoe factories; they knit our stockings, our
knitted underwear in the knitting factories. They spin and weave our
cotton underwear in the cotton mills. Children braid straw for our
hats, they spin and weave the silk and velvet wherewith we trim our
hats. They stamp buckles and metal ornaments of all kinds, as well as
pins and hat-pins. Under the sweating system, tiny children make
artificial flowers and neckwear for us to buy. They carry bundles of
garments from the factories to the tenements, little beasts of burden,
robbed of school life that they may work for us.
We do not wish this. We prefer to have our work done by men and
women. But we are almost powerless. Not wholly powerless, however,
are citizens who enjoy the right of petition. For myself, I shall use
this power in every possible way until the right to the ballot is
granted, and then I shall continue to use both.
What can we do to free our consciences? There is one line of action by
which we can do much. We can enlist the workingmen on behalf of our
enfranchisement just in proportion as we strive with them to free the
children. No labor organization in this country ever fails to respond
to an appeal for help in the freeing of the children.
For the sake of the children, for the Republic in which these children
will vote after we are dead, and for the sake of our cause, we should
enlist the workingmen voters, with us, in this task of freeing the
children from toil!
