The Working Children of Boston: A Study of Child Labor Under a Modern System of Legal Regulation (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Working Children of Boston: A Study of C...)
Excerpt from The Working Children of Boston: A Study of Child Labor Under a Modern System of Legal Regulation
In the days before the English factory acts these questions were all answered definitely in the negative. More recently they have been answered in the negative by many studies of the labor of chil dren in this country, from the early Massachusetts inquiries to those which led to the 19-volume report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage Earners.1 But each year legislation regulating child labor has tended to become more voluminous; child labor codes have been enacted and uniform child-labor laws have been proposed and passed, in part at least, by a considerable number of States. The public conscience has approved a 14-year minimum age and the requirement of employment certificates until 16 years of age, with compulsory school attendance up to 14 and between 14 and 16 if a child is not employed. Nevertheless, until the questions asked above can be answered absolutely in the affirmative it is impossible to settle back in the complacent belief that the child - labor problem has been solved. Under each more advanced form of regulation, therefore.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury was an American social economist and author.
Background
Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury was born on March 12, 1876, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a descendant of William Sumner, who came to America in 1636 and settled in Dorchester, Massachussets. Her father was George True Summer, later a district judge in Colorado; her mother, Katharine Eudora Marsh, granddaughter of Jerome Luther Marsh, pioneer editor of newspapers in Wisconsin and in Colorado. When Helen was five years old, the family moved to Durango, Colo. , where, except for six months' homesteading on a ranch in the Montezuma Valley, they lived for eight years, and then settled in Denver.
Education
From the East Denver High School she went to Wellesley College where she received the degree of bachelor of arts in 1898. Her college life was interrupted by a year at home, but she completed the four years' work in three. As an undergraduate she exhibited a lively interest in political and economic questions and a vigorous reaction against injustice and special privilege. During the McKinley-Bryan campaign (1896) she tried her hand at a novelette upholding free silver, which was published under the title The White Slave: or the Cross of Gold (copyrighted 1896). The strikes in Colorado led by the Western Federation of Miners made a deep impression on her and when she went to the University of Wisconsin in 1902 for graduate study she was a strong believer in the rights of labor.
Career
She was secretary to Prof. Richard T. Ely for a time and then became an honorary fellow in political economy and an active collaborator in John R. Commons' American Bureau of Industrial Research. Her name first appeared as an author on labor subjects with the publication in 1905 of the widely known college textbook, Labor Problems, on which she collaborated with Prof. Thomas S. Adams. In 1906 she returned to Denver for a year to make a special study of equal suffrage in Colorado for the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York State. The results were published in Equal Suffrage (1909). Her next work, based on exhaustive study of widely scattered original sources, was an authoritative history of American labor in the late 1820's and the years immediately following. It was accepted as a dissertation for the degree of Ph. D. at Wisconsin in 1908 and became generally available under the title, "Citizenship, 1827-1833, " as a section of the History of Labour in the United States (1918) by John R. Commons and others. She was also an associate editor of A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, edited by Commons and published in 1910 -1911. A second original historical contribution, a pioneer in its field, was her "History of Women in Industry in the United States, " published in 1910 by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics as volume IX of its Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-earners in the United States. In Colorado she had joined the Socialist party, and she was one of several who organized a Socialist group at the University of Wisconsin. In 1910, when abroad studying the industrial courts in Germany, France, and Switzerland, she was a listener at the Copenhagen Congress of the Socialist International. Appointed in 1913 as industrial expert in the newly organized United States Children's Bureau, she directed a series of studies on the administration of child labor (employment certificate) laws, prepared by the bureau staff. The painstaking factual reports, to which she gave detailed oversight, were the basis for an analytical study by her, Standards Applicable to the Administration of Employment Certificate Systems, published by the bureau in 1924. After two years as industrial expert, she was appointed assistant chief of the Children's Bureau. Heavy administrative work was interfering with the research work in which she was most interested and in June 1918 she became director of investigations, a position which she held until November 1918. Although she then resigned from the regular staff, she continued to work with the bureau until 1924. From 1924 to 1926 she was on the staff of the Institute of Economics, engaged in formulating a program for adequate statistics in the field of labor. Subsequently, until December 1928, she was associated with the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, to which she was a contributor. She also contributed to the Dictionary of American Biography. She died on March 10, 1933, at her home in New York City.
Achievements
Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury was a prominent economist, whose investigative work centred largely on historical and contemporary labour issues, particularly in relation to women and children.
Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury always believed in the ideal of production for use and not for profit, but she abandoned Marxism as inapplicable to the American economy and turned instead to James MacKaye's socialist theories.
Membership
Helen L. S. Woodbury was an early member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and for many years before her death, a member of the national council of its successor, the League for Industrial Democracy.
Connections
On November 25, 1918, Helen Laura Sumner married Robert Morse Woodbury.
