Young Workers and the Violence of Industrial Freedom

This session will explore the meanings of child labor in the progressive era. We will examine how the conflict between middle-class reformers and working people over this issue altered the nature of modern childhood and hence the meanings of freedom in a capitalist society. Specifically, we will consider the place of young workers in the expanding industrial economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by looking at their responses to industrial accidents. This investigation will allow us to think about the ways in which violence, freedom, and law are related.

Questions

1. What defines childhood and children, adulthood and adults?2. Was the prohibition or restriction of child labor and expansion or a contraction of freedom?3. What do we mean by “law,” and how does the legal process shape freedom?4. Why is modern life so violent? What is the relationship between danger and freedom?

Recommended Readings

Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent, (2005).Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al, Like a Family, (1987).HughHindman, Child Labor (2002).Stephen Lassonde, Learning to Forget, (2005).Stephen Mintz, Huck’s Raft, (2004).Stephen Robertson, Crimes Against Children, (2005).John Fabian Witt, The Accidental Republic, (2004). Barbara Welke, Recasting American Liberty, (2001).

Bio:

James D. Schmidt received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1992. His first book, Free to Work (Georgia, 1998) examined the relationship between labor law and the meanings of freedom during the age of emancipation. His forthcoming book, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Modern Childhood (Cambridge, 2010) explores how young workers and their families sought to forge a usable industrial childhood and how industrial violence mediated by the legal process forestalled that vision. At Northern Illinois University, he teaches classes on the nineteenth century United States, on legal history, and on the history of childhood. He lives on a small farm in northwestern Illinois, where he and his spouse raise sheep.