An “overwhelming … emphatic repudiation,” “sweeping and decisive” in its scale.Footnote ¹ That was how observers described a 1924 Massachusetts referendum, in which the state’s residents defied political observers’ predictions by voting down a proposed federal constitutional amendment regulating child labor. The vote in Massachusetts, known for its progressive values and strong labor protections, was a harbinger of the stunning defeat of the Child Labor Amendment (CLA) across the nation, which postponed for another decade any reprieve for millions of child laborers.

Despite decades of work by activists and legislators at the local and state levels beginning around the turn of the century, the scale and severity of child labor in 1920s America were staggering. According to the 1920 census, over 50,000 children between ten and fifteen years of age toiled in textile mills, along with tens of thousands more in steel and ironmaking, in lumber work, and in dangerous factories producing glass, clay, and rubber.Footnote ² The growing concentration of these jobs in states without strong regulations, particularly in the South, was fueling a race to the bottom, which only comprehensive, federal legislation could solve. The passage of the Keating-Owen Act in 1916 appeared to offer such a solution, until the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional just two years later. After another child labor law passed in 1919 faced the same fate, reformers settled on a constitutional amendment as the best—and perhaps last—chance to finally rectify what they believed was a great moral stain on the nation.

Gender thoroughly framed the contours of the debate over the CLA, with each side leveraging resonant images and myths about young boys and girls to plead their case. Proponents of the amendment centered on the imperiled teenage girl, whose future reproductive capacity would supposedly be jeopardized by paid work outside the home. Regulatory protection seemed sensible, even self-evident, when she was the focus of the debate. Meanwhile, opponents touted the physically precocious teenage boy, for whom paid work supposedly served as necessary preparation for becoming a productive member of the growing industrial economy. The government would be overstepping its authority to regulate such boys’ labor, they argued, in part because of the basic principle that all men—and subtly, these boys had functionally become men in how opponents of the CLA described them—should have the freedom to contract their labor. In short, the extent to which the government should protect children from premature work depended in large part on the gender of the imagined subject of that regulation.

Contested ideas about childhood and age played key secondary roles in the debate over the CLA, although they were still deeply intertwined with questions of gender. The amendment allowed Congress to “limit, regulate, and prohibit” the labor of anyone under the age of eighteen.Footnote ³ The burgeoning opposition movement—made up of a sprawling coalition of conservative female activists, factory owners, and university leaders, among others—discovered that this elevated threshold provided crucial grist for arguments about the amendment’s supposed neglect of teenage boys’ freedom to work. Proponents of the CLA—led by settlement house leaders, labor unions, and a host of progressive-minded organizations—proved largely unable to combat these powerful paeans to the teenage boy. In many ways, these debates about the law’s age threshold were a manifestation of longstanding and unresolved disagreements among the American public about the appropriate age for work, which were, in turn, reflective of underlying disagreements about the parameters of childhood itself.

The existing literature on the child labor debates of the early twentieth century almost universally elides any in-depth discussion of the ways that gender shaped the arguments each side put forward. Rather, it has largely focused on the influence of broader conceptions of childhood on child labor laws’ drafting and political prospects in Congress. For instance, scholars Viviana Zelizer and Steven Mintz have analyzed the national child labor battles of the 1910s and 1920s in part through the lens of childhood and its contested meanings.Footnote ⁴ Mintz describes the debate as between a “protected” and a “prepared” childhood. Similarly, Zelizer writes of how the reform movement elevated children’s sentimental value while those opposing regulation focused on children’s economic worth.Footnote ⁵ By contrast, this article explains the debate over child labor laws as a proxy for a debate over the gendered boundaries of childhood, rather than, as Zelizer argues, over the boundaries of legitimate types of work.Footnote ⁶

Age is also largely absent from the existing literature as a key theoretical framework through which the debates over child labor were contested. This absence contrasts with the fairly robust literature on how negotiations over age thresholds thoroughly infused concurrent debates over child protection in this era, particularly the fight to end child marriage.Footnote ⁷ This article expands on that literature through an analysis of the early twentieth-century debate over child labor regulation, viewing these laws’ age cutoffs as products of a decades-long evolution in beliefs about childhood. While the existing literature primarily focuses on “double age”—society’s often racialized use of either adultification or infantilization to impose greater social control or leniency—in the context of criminality and intellectual disability, this article analyzes this idea through the child labor debate of the 1920s. It does so in part by focusing on how race and gender, both in isolation and in concert, helped shape legislators’ conceptions of age, and in turn, the suitability of labor regulation for different groups of children.

Additionally, unlike much of the existing literature, this article touches not only on federal but also state-level debate and legislation, following in the footsteps of historian James D. Schmidt, who notes in his analysis of age consciousness in Appalachia that a “valuable part of historical inquiry … gets lost in ‘national’ histories.”Footnote ⁸ State-level legislation offers key insights into the distinct and nuanced ways that society understood children’s gender roles in the labor force, in part since these laws often more explicitly delineated the ages at which boys and girls could perform certain work. These statutes almost universally permitted boys to begin work at younger ages than girls, a sharp contrast with most other contemporary health and safety regulations—governing drinking, marrying, and sexual consent, for example—which protected boys at younger ages than their female counterparts. And unlike the deeply controversial national statutes, these state-level laws—which often narrowly targeted specific perceived dangers like night work and certain machinery—regularly elicited support even from traditional foes of broader regulation, thus illustrating how shared assumptions about both labor and gender helped trace the boundaries of permissible state intervention.

Finally, this article fills a gap in the existing literature on the demise of the CLA, which primarily emphasizes how fears about communism—and more broadly, an overbearing federal government—helped to doom the amendment’s prospects.Footnote ⁹ While the context of the first Red Scare undoubtedly accounted for part of the political difficulties encountered by proponents of the amendment—the elevated age threshold may not have been decisive, after all, if not for this newfound fear of federal power—it provides critical context for arguments deployed even within this Red Scare framework. For instance, CLA opponents often pointed to the eighteen-year limit as proof that the amendment was a communistic plot to control male children and the private home. In short, this article positions gender—particularly through the prisms of age and race—as the fulcrum around which the fate of the CLA would ultimately turn. In the context of child labor, debates about the optimal size and scope of the federal government were so often filtered through gendered language that a deep analysis of that language is essential to fully understanding the era’s broader political discourse.

After the Civil War, American politics increasingly revolved around the principle of individual rights. As historian Susan Pearson notes, the war signaled a victory for a vision of liberalism that linked “citizenship and rights to … free labor,” which further reinscribed the nation’s deeply rooted, albeit racially delimited, streak of “rugged individualism.”Footnote ¹⁰ Yet by the late nineteenth century, a growing reform movement had introduced to the political scene a new maxim: protectionism. In the child labor debate, these two ideologies found themselves at loggerheads. The defeat of the CLA in state after state suggests that for the politically fraught issue of work, specifically, the ethos of “free labor” and “republican independence” ultimately remained too powerful in the pre-New Deal era. In short, the gendered images, myths, and stories of the rights-focused opposition won out over those proffered by the protectionist proponents of the CLA.

Childhood and the Child Labor Amendment

The national debate over child labor legislation in the 1920s came to consist in large part of a fight over the boundaries of childhood, particularly how gender, race, and age delimited which young people were considered children—and thereby merited the protection of the state. That fight was in some respects only a waypoint in a decades-long evolution in the public’s understanding of childhood as a defined and workable concept.

Reformers around the turn of the century navigated profound shifts in public conceptions about childhood.Footnote ¹¹ The second half of the nineteenth century had seen a growing public consensus about the innocence and fragility of childhood, spurred on in part by decreasing fertility and lower child mortality.Footnote ¹² The institutionalization of the juvenile court system in 1899, as well as new organizations like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, codified and reflected the growing separation between childhood and adulthood.Footnote ¹³ Meanwhile, increasing age consciousness gave legislators a means to categorize and regulate children not only in the labor market but also in the education and criminal justice systems.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1904, a landmark book by psychologist G. Stanley Hall introduced to the American public a distinct life stage called adolescence, which Hall described as occurring between ages fourteen and twenty-four. This was a “transitional stage,” he argued, one of extreme physical and psychological change.Footnote ¹⁵

Hall’s theories grew out of a worldview that privileged white children. In outlining his “recapitulation” theory—that each individual child developed in the mold of the human race’s historical evolution—Hall posited that only whites could become “civilized, modern adults,” while other races “reached the limit of their development earlier.”Footnote ¹⁶ The “child protection” movement was no less chauvinistic, albeit often more veiled, in how it spoke about the communities it served. For example, in devoting exclusive focus and scorn for immigrant child brides (even though plentiful data showed they married young at lower rates than their native peers), the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children—among the most prominent anti-cruelty organizations of the era—betrayed its view of who should be the subject of the state’s gaze.Footnote ¹⁷ In this era of “separate but equal” mythologizing, discrimination often appeared “covertly” in the day-to-day administration of the laws, according to historians Corinne Field and Nicholas Syrett.Footnote ¹⁸ In fact, it was precisely the “universality” of chronological age that rendered it such a “powerful weapon for discrimination” in not only how states and municipalities enforced labor protections, but also in government-administered programs such as military pensions.Footnote ¹⁹ Similar to this era’s failure of federal and state governments to enforce the civil rights promised to African Americans, child labor laws’ focus on a race-neutral metric of chronological age proved cold comfort for Black children consigned to labor from early ages in agricultural fields, functionally outside the protection of the regulatory state.

While child labor laws’ racially disparate impact often resulted from subtle aspects of their drafting—such as the exclusion of occupations in which African Americans were overrepresented—gender played a much more explicit role in state and local statutes. Across the nation, state and local laws dictated exactly when boys and girls could pursue a variety of life-cycle events, from consent to marriage to drinking alcohol; in most cases, girls were permitted to do so multiple years before their male counterparts.Footnote ²⁰ This disparity was a legacy of English common law, in which girls could marry at twelve years old, while boys had to wait until fourteen years of age.Footnote ²¹ While initially justified on the basis of developmental differences, the persistence of these differentials into the twentieth century—even as the permissible ages were raised well past the age of puberty—suggests that legislators were also motivated by their beliefs about women’s place in the social structure, in particular as vessels of reproduction. The laws were so numerous and comprehensive, in fact, that Field and Syrett argue that lawmakers had managed to construct entirely “differently gendered versions” of the citizenry.Footnote ²²

Despite its immutable and seemingly fixed nature, age remained a malleable and deeply politicized concept in this era. This was in part because of the widespread lack of birth registration across vast swaths of the country until well into the twentieth century, often rendering chronological age an unverifiable figure. In the political arena, Americans engaged in vehement debates about not only the “nature of childhood” and “who was a child” but also exactly how to “draw the boundaries between childhood and adulthood,” according to historian Stephen Robertson.Footnote ²³ Lawmakers and reformers routinely took advantage of this ambiguity to impose a second (or double) age toward particular groups of children, often to justify harsher or more lenient treatment of them. After all, there were many alternative methods of calculating age besides years since birth, from physical to intellectual to socio-emotional development. In this era, it was far from clear that one’s chronological age was the best metric to delimit who was fit for work, a reality even child labor reformers readily acknowledged. A uniform chronological threshold is “extremely unsatisfactory,” wrote Scott Nearing, the former Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee secretary, when the “real test of preparedness to work is not age but maturity.”Footnote ²⁴ In a widely circulated 1916 compendium on American labor law, economists John Commons and John Andrews similarly criticized a uniform fourteen-year standard. “Some children are more mature and fit to work at thirteen years of age than others are at fifteen,” they wrote.Footnote ²⁵ For both child labor reformers and their opponents, it was gender above all else that determined one’s “maturity” and “fitness” to work. For white children, that is. For Black children, particularly in the South, one’s gender merely determined the type of work that one would be expected to perform—largely domestic and agricultural work for girls and boys, respectively—rather than whether one would be protected from premature labor entirely.

The malleability of age was conspicuous in the child labor debate in Congress, where lawmakers’ policy prescriptions shaped and reflected the very terminology they deployed. For instance, Rep. Willard Ragsdale (D-SC) sought to adultify the factory girl by referring to “young women” when discussing boys and girls of the same age in a 1916 congressional debate. “To take these boys and these young women who are capable of earning their living” out of the factory, he argued, is to “throw the restrictive arm of this government between them and opportunity.”Footnote ²⁶ Because Representative Ragsdale avoided any mention of the more vulnerable population of “girls,” the woman’s labor—like the boy’s—would not trigger nearly as compelling of a justification for regulation.Footnote ²⁷ Tellingly, the response from a proponent of the bill who spoke next referred to the “girl” rather than the “young woman,” reflecting this constant back-and-forth about how to define, and how to speak about, childhood.Footnote ²⁸ Routinely in the debate over the CLA, opponents referred to boys and girls as “young men” and “young women”—or sometimes as merely “citizens”—as a means to subtly minimize their labor.Footnote ²⁹ In short, since specific anxieties—and in turn, policy provisions—arose at the intersection of certain ages and genders, the fight over child labor encompassed not only the policies themselves but a preceding debate about who exactly qualified as a child.

Lurking behind these colloquies were the various non-chronological methods of measuring age prevalent in this era, especially the vague concept of physical maturity. Because these methods carried even greater plasticity, they gave lawmakers license to make scientifically dubious arguments that often aligned with their own racialized and gendered assumptions. “A child in the South matures much earlier than a child in Maine or a child in Minnesota,” Sen. Lee Overman (D-NC) declared, in objecting to any “uniform” national child labor standard.Footnote ³⁰ The idea had broader application; in arguing for later age thresholds for child marriage, for instance, the League of Women Voters compared the country’s laws unfavorably to those of a country with a warmer climate like Italy—where girls were widely “presumed to mature more quickly,” according to Syrett.Footnote ³¹ If the lower limit there was fifteen years old, the argument went, it ought to be raised significantly higher in the United States.

With a relatively modest fourteen-year age threshold (and carve-outs for politically sensitive sectors such as agriculture), the Keating-Owen Act passed Congress with overwhelming margins in 1916, representing the first piece of federal legislation to regulate child labor. When the Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional two years later, its decision was widely panned across the political spectrum, and its proponents began initiating the process of ratifying a constitutional amendment in order to circumvent an increasingly intransigent judicial branch.Footnote ³²

The subsequent decade-long debate over the CLA in many ways clarified and expanded on a fledgling debate that had begun at the state level around the turn of the century and then surfaced on the national stage in the mid-1910s. On one side was a coalition of industrialists, conservative maternalists, and prominent intellectuals preaching a discourse of rights, in particular the right to control one’s labor. They sought to shrink childhood’s boundaries by mythologizing the teenage (white) boy who supposedly wanted nothing more than to maintain the right to labor freely without government regulation. The proponents of this theory described the amendment—which, in reality, did not itself restrict anyone’s labor but rather granted Congress the ability to regulate in the future—as an urgent threat to young male workers. Especially in its early years, the anti-reform movement was largely funded by deep-pocketed factory owners in the South who stood to benefit financially from maintaining the laissez-faire status quo. But in the wake of the Keating-Owen Act’s passage, the opposition found a powerful new set of arguments in the supposedly disempowered young boy longing to work and in the reification of parental control over their children. As its arguments became more broadly appealing, the opposition movement grew more diverse in its composition as well, gaining support from intellectuals in the Northeast, as well as religious leaders such as Archbishop of Boston William O’Connell.Footnote ³³ Opponents leveraged many Americans’ skepticism of government interference in family work and financial decisions. By weakening parents’ authority to fully decide where childhood ended and devolving it to the federal government, the CLA allegedly threatened traditional forms of authority within the family.Footnote ³⁴

On the other side was a group of welfare organizations, progressive legislators, and female philanthropists speaking in a discourse of protection, focusing in particular on vulnerable teenage girls. Often borrowing language and personnel from the so-called child-saving campaigns of the late nineteenth century, proponents of the CLA cast the lack of strong child labor regulations as a physical and sexual threat to girls in their “critical” period of development.Footnote ³⁵ Drawing their strongest support from the progressive Northeast, in particular the social reformers of the settlement house movement, such as Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, they emphasized the short- and long-term threat of labor to vulnerable girls, an argument that held wide appeal. This reform movement, which was cross-national in composition, took aim at a host of issues, especially those relating to public health and education. Although often left unstated, their motivations were rooted in scientific theories about “progress, race, reproduction, and degeneration,” writes historian Gregory Downs, and were underlined by racialized ideas and assumptions.Footnote ³⁶ Gender served in this era as a crucial lexicon for “transmitting white supremacy,” Downs notes, with a particularly “sexualized” conception of women’s weakness leveraged to “make racist arguments hit home.”Footnote ³⁷ Evidence of the movement’s “soft eugenics” also emerged in its disproportionate, and often exclusive, concern for white children at the exclusion of those who often bore the brunt of the ills these reformers sought to remedy.Footnote ³⁸ For instance, even though Black girls worked outside the home at rates four times higher than their white counterparts, reformers suggested implicitly and explicitly that only white girls merited protection from the state.Footnote ³⁹ These reformers also by and large disregarded the often nuanced desires of the children themselves, opting for a paternalistic attitude that has led historians in recent decades, such as James Schmidt, to at times cast them in a particularly harsh light.Footnote ⁴⁰

With political momentum on their side, and to ensure as much room to maneuver as possible for legislators in the future, the drafters of the Child Labor Amendment outlined a vastly broader and more vaguely defined role for the federal government. Its text simply read: “The Congress shall have the power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age.” To the CLA’s supporters, this elevated threshold was necessary to give future legislators flexibility in light of the unpredictable changes in the labor force that “a hundred years will bring,” as U.S. Children’s Bureau chief Grace Abbott put it.Footnote ⁴¹ But to the hitherto disjointed opposition movement, it provided an opening. Rather than a balanced negotiation between rights and protection for teenage boys, the CLA raised the possibility of the see-saw tipping all the way toward the protectionist side, effectively stripping these children entirely of their rights within the workplace. Supporters did not help their cause when they offered unconvincing justifications for the elevated threshold. “I recognize the very great difference between the 17-year-old girl and the 19-year-old girl, as far as the need of protection is concerned,” Abbott asserted at the 1924 hearings, without offering any scientific basis for this differentiation.Footnote ⁴² Sen. Joseph T. Robinson (D-AR), a bill supporter, similarly attempted to defend the proposed threshold but mustered no more than a suggestion that it offered “uniformity” and was helpful “for the sake of stability in the law.”Footnote ⁴³ Such legalistic explanations were simply no match for the blizzard of impassioned, hyperbolic claims from opponents, which increasingly began to focus on a supposedly disempowered, oppressed figure: the teenage boy.

Constructing the (Young) Working Man

For opponents of new child labor regulation—who had largely failed in the first decades of the twentieth century to defeat state and federal legislation—the beginnings of a coherent strategy were already evident by the time the debate over the Child Labor Amendment engulfed the nation. This strategy cast the teenage boy as an independent citizen capable of and even obligated to work for personal and collective benefit. Opponents of regulation drew on a host of ideals and myths that had long been central to the country’s republican ethos, buffeted by a key Supreme Court decision and a growing suspicion of federal power in the midst of the Red Scare.

In 1905, the nation’s highest court decided a landmark case, Lochner v. New York, which hinged on the question of who had the right to control their own labor. Frequently referred to legally as the “right to contract,” this ideal of independent, autonomous labor could be traced back at least as far as the free labor ethos of the anti-slavery movement.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Lochner, a bakery owner challenged a state statute that limited employees to ten hours of work per day and sixty hours per week. Increasingly vocal protestations against worker exploitation had precipitated the passage in 1895 of this New York law, which appeared to herald a new era of progressive labor lawmaking. But in Lochner, the Court stopped such progress in its tracks, declaring the statute an “unreasonable … interference” with the “right and liberty” to freely contract.Footnote ⁴⁵ The decision dealt a devastating blow to progressive reformers, who in response narrowed their focus to children—as well as, in some cases, to women.Footnote ⁴⁶

In seeking to block even this more sympathetic group from receiving any regulatory protections in the workplace, opponents of child labor regulation aimed to ensure young people would be granted the same “freedom to labor” as the adult bakers implicated by New York’s statute. They did so by spotlighting the adolescent boy, around whom they believed arguments for full autonomy in the labor market would be most persuasive—and in doing so, derail protective legislation for all children. Chief among the arguments deployed by the CLA’s opponents was the ideal of the “self-made man,” which posited that male adolescence was merely a training ground for becoming an independent, self-actualizing citizen in the modern industrial economy. Embodied in the narratives of celebrated author Horatio Alger, this ideal was firmly rooted in the American ethos.Footnote ⁴⁷ This was evident in how often southern congressmen framed their own experiences as child laborers during the debates in Congress in the mold of this self-made man ethos. “I thank God that I was compelled to go to work when I was but 9 years old,” Rep. James Britt (R-NC) proclaimed. “That experience I prize as my best life lesson.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Britt spoke of how the work allowed him to “feel the rights and duties” afforded to him as a citizen.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such adultification served to shorten the implicit boundaries of childhood to such an extent that nearly any law aimed at protecting child workers would have seemed unjust and unnecessary. In the eyes of Sen. James A. Reed (D-MO), after all, the teenage boy was an adult in all but name only, a “workman in the field, in the shop, and in the office, and … the soldier at arms.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Opponents’ cunning imposition of a double age on even prepubescent children served to call into question the necessity of expanding the regulatory apparatus at all, let alone to the high age threshold in the CLA. In fact, Reed and others appeared to suggest that there was almost no age at which boys were not functionally adults—and therefore no age under which they should be restricted at all in their labor. The dichotomy between boys’ imagined future roles in society, in stark contrast to that of their female counterparts, was evident in the way a local newspaper reported on the 1905 North Carolina bill, which local manufacturers successfully defeated. Boys were “future citizens,” while girls were “future mothers,” the editorial declared, notably pointing only to young boys (and not girls) being “unable to read” as one of the tragic consequences of premature labor.Footnote ⁵¹

By exploiting the continuing lack of public consensus about using uniform chronological age standards to delimit work—and thus childhood itself—opponents could elicit sympathy for the boy supposedly deprived of his so-called “God-given, God-inspired privilege … of labor,” and thereby forestall any new regulations.Footnote ⁵² Tellingly, it was almost always the physically precocious boy just below the proposed laws’ chronological age threshold—fourteen years of age for the Keating-Owen bill (sixteen for certain occupations), and eighteen for the CLA—who garnered the most attention. The “big, strapping 12-year-old, or 13, 14, or 15-year-old boy,” in the telling of Rep. Edwin Webb (D-NC), would be most unjustly constrained by Keating-Owen.Footnote ⁵³ A decade later, Rep. James MacLafferty (R-CA), in arguing to lower the amendment’s age threshold from eighteen to sixteen, invoked the “big, husky fellow” of seventeen.Footnote ⁵⁴ When opponents pointed to the teenage boy supposedly feeling helpless in supporting his vulnerable, widowed mother under an elevated minimum age threshold, it was again the seventeen-year-old boy they highlighted.Footnote ⁵⁵ In their view, it was these boys’ second age—an age that was higher and non-chronologically based—that carried weight in determining whether to regulate their labor. Tellingly, the extensive description of teenage boys’ physical prowess was largely absent from concurrent debates over the age of drinking, consent, and marriage. It appears that deploying a double age was particularly useful—and seamlessly applicable—in debates about work, given both the laborious nature of most occupations in this age of mass production and labor’s deep-rooted connection to republican ideals.

The exaltation afforded to the labor of teenage boys reflected in part society’s conception of manhood, which was tied to learning to take on responsibilities including paid work outside the home. Senator Reed explicitly bemoaned taking away from the boy the “thing that is … necessary to his development.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Similarly, when Harvard University’s president A. Lawrence Lowell argued against the CLA, he identified boys’ work as formative in cultivating their social skills and future productive abilities. “Much of the crime committed by young men at the present day is due to the fact that they have not acquired the habit of work during the period when habits are formed,” Lowell contended.Footnote ⁵⁷ In a decade marked by a surge in organized crime, such arguments were particularly resonant, often relying on data tables about “juvenile delinquency” from the relatively new field of social statistics.Footnote ⁵⁸ Proponents and opponents of federal regulation, it seems, largely agreed that work hastened development for boys. But whether or not that hastened development was beneficial became a key point of contention, reflecting a broader debate both about how long childhood should be protected, as well as its adaptability. In arguing against restrictions on boys’ labor, for instance, Representative Ragsdale contended that work “made them men sooner.”Footnote ⁵⁹ By contrast, when U.S. Children’s Bureau director Julia Lathrop endorsed the Keating-Owen bill, she declared that “to be a man too soon is to be a small man.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Those fighting against the CLA framed proposals to crack down on child labor as an attempt by an overreaching government to “control” these children’s labor, reflecting their view that the “freedom to contract” was a fundamental right of all young white males. This freedom would be “taken out of the hands” of young men and “vested in a government bureau in Washington,” warned Henry S. Pritchett, former Massachusetts Institute of Technology president and a prominent opponent of the CLA.Footnote ⁶¹ In fact, listening to just one day of debate on the Senate floor in June 1924, one would have heard warnings of federal “control” over (presumably male) children more than a dozen times.Footnote ⁶² In the context of the Red Scare of the 1920s, these calls carried added weight.

While reformers made clear they were seeking to impose regulations for these teenage boys’ benefit, countenancing such a limitation on their freedom remained a tough pill for many to swallow. This deprivation of freedom was in some ways similar to that imposed by the regime of segregation in the Jim Crow South. As historian Barbara Welke notes in an analysis of streetcar regulations in this period, the South’s “regulatory order” required “individual submission to the will of the state” for not only African Americans but whites as well—even if that order was intended to benefit the latter group only.Footnote ⁶³ This system was connected to a broader “politics of dependence” that Downs identifies as reigning in the post-Civil War era.Footnote ⁶⁴ But unlike in the case of segregation, where rights for whites were constantly negotiated alongside protection, child labor regulation left these ideals largely irreconcilable. A fifteen-year-old could either fall below or above the threshold for regulation. If above, the default was to leave him almost completely outside the state’s protection; if below, he would be under the state’s protective regime and—assuming reasonable enforcement of the laws—substantially curtailed in his freedom in the workplace.

Child labor regulations were distinct from the Jim Crow regime in one key respect: unlike the state’s heavy-handed role in enforcing segregation against Black southerners, the discrimination faced by Black children in child labor law stemmed primarily from negligence and indifference. Lawmakers at the state and federal levels ensured that two occupations disproportionately occupied by Black workers—agricultural and domestic work—were excluded from virtually all child labor regulations. And until the late 1910s, when the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) initiated a comprehensive campaign to highlight exploitation among young farm workers, this omission was largely adopted by the reform movement.Footnote ⁶⁵ The millions of Black children toiling on farms across the South at the time could have been forgiven for not celebrating the passage of the Keating-Owen Act as so many reformers did, given that it did not benefit a single one of them. These workers’ freedom to contract was a freedom in name only, as paid labor was often a necessity to ensure their family’s financial survival—and often more insidiously, to pay off their family’s perpetual debt as a result of the slavery-like system of sharecropping still prevalent across the Jim Crow South.Footnote ⁶⁶ For Black children, rather than an empowering experience necessary for future development, work was their lot from the moment they could bend to the cotton stalk. The state rendered certain children’s labor invisible in other ways as well. By maintaining prison labor systems that ensnared Black children at vastly disproportionate rates, the state placed their labor under its firm control but also outside of the bounds of the protective apparatus of child labor laws.Footnote ⁶⁷ In Texas, forced labor even continued in child prisons for decades after its abolition in the adult system, on the warped justification that Black boys were “incipient adult criminals” who would supposedly benefit from toil.Footnote ⁶⁸

For white children, specifically, the power of this discourse of rights was persuasive enough that some reformers decided to co-opt it for opposite ends, declaring that the “right” to be free from exploitative and premature labor should, in fact, take priority. In 1913, the NCLC published a “Declaration of Dependence” written by the “Children of America,” declaring that childhood was “endowed with certain inherent and inalienable rights, among which are freedom from toil.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Similarly, reformer Harold Cary spoke of setting working children “free” to enjoy a childhood without labor.Footnote ⁷⁰ Ultimately, though, it was an argument about the need for protection of vulnerable children—particularly adolescent girls—that reformers most often relied on in their fight to ratify the CLA.

Protection in the “Critical” Age

Rather than attempt to directly undermine the deeply resonant image of the supposedly disempowered teenage boy, proponents of the CLA opted instead to fight to replace that image in the public’s mind with a different one: a physically and sexually vulnerable girl of the same age. Work outside the home during this seemingly critical period of her adolescence would supposedly threaten her development and—in a milieu infused by ideas about eugenics—endanger the purity of the nation’s racial stock.

Just three years after the Supreme Court decided in favor of the right to contract in Lochner, another case came before the Court that looked almost identical, with one critical distinction: the statute in question protected only female workers. In a unanimous decision, the Court in Muller v. Oregon upheld the law, declaring that its limitations on a woman’s “contractual powers” were “not imposed solely for her benefit, but also largely for the benefit of all.”Footnote ⁷¹ For the Court, the protection of this vulnerable group was paramount, overriding the “freedom to contract” outlined in Lochner. The striking contrast between this decision and the one just a few years earlier illustrates a fundamental reality of this era: governmental protection from overwork was legally and politically acceptable, as long as it benefitted a group considered vulnerable enough to merit it. This vulnerable group very often consisted only of white teenage girls, perhaps most clearly evident in the so-called White-Slave Traffic Act (Mann Act), a 1910 law that sought to crack down on a perceived crisis of white girls being seduced by immigrants into enforced prostitution.Footnote ⁷² Therefore, the CLA’s supporters often highlighted this more broadly sympathetic group, whose freedom to labor carried little weight among the public instead of directly engaging their opponents in the debate over teenage boys.

The need for protection was contingent not only on gender but also on developmental stage, connected to a specific period of a girl’s adolescence in which dangers were supposedly elevated. Girls in this age range—often vaguely defined and delimited, but usually between the ages of approximately fourteen and twenty-one—were described by reformers as in a critical period of physical and sexual growth and, therefore, heightened danger.Footnote ⁷³ They were in the transition point from “girlhood to womanhood,” one that carried implications for not only the girl but also the entire nation.Footnote ⁷⁴ Growing concern with girls in this age range was in part a reflection of an increasing consensus within the medical community that females experienced “arrested” development relative to males, writes historian Cynthia Russett, allowing them to preserve their “energies for reproduction.”Footnote ⁷⁵ These efforts reflected not only a new crusade—what Josephine Goldmark, Chairman of the Consumers’ League’s Committee on Labor Laws, called a “necessary sequel” to existing minimum-age laws—but also a growing preoccupation with protecting future mothers and their children.Footnote ⁷⁶ “There are some valuable things in the world,” Alexander Johnson, a New Jersey school official, said at the 1914 NCLC conference, “but the most valuable are the mothers.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Hall devoted an entire chapter in his 1904 book to adolescent girls, bemoaning that women are “so exhausted” even before marriage that they cannot fulfill their motherly roles; if no improvement occurs in the “best women,” he warned ominously, men will “have recourse to emigrant wives.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Hall’s racialized argument illustrates that arguments about femininity and the protection of future mothers were often motivated by a eugenicist desire to safeguard the purity of the white race. “She could earn as much sometimes as 75 cents a day, though, alas, at the expense of the beautiful blue eyes she turned up to me,” investigator Irene Ashby wrote of the Southern mills.Footnote ⁷⁹ In short, white purity was epitomized by the white teenage girl whose reproductive capacities were supposedly threatened by undue labor in this critical period.

These capacities would only be preserved, reformers and their legislative allies believed, if certain child labor regulations were differentiated by gender. In practice, that meant ensuring protections would extend throughout girls’ critical developmental period. For some regulations such as those affecting hours worked, this effort took the form of longer coverage for girls than boys.Footnote ⁸⁰ For others, like regulations on standing while at work, all female workers fell under the law’s purview—but teenage girls often received additional protections.Footnote ⁸¹

Because of the emotional power and sympathy evoked by girls in this critical period, reformers sometimes went to great lengths to fit their subjects into this age range, illustrating how political actors in this debate sought to shape the child—and childhood itself. In a 1905 North Carolina battle over whether to regulate twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls’ labor in the mills, reformers decided to foreground this argument about girls’ development, rather than focus on another common argument about the girls’ right to attend school.Footnote ⁸² That meant, though, that they had to subtly extend this critical range earlier than the age at which most girls even began puberty.Footnote ⁸³ Reformers involved in the effort, including Alexander J. McKelway, still couched their assertions in contentions about medical consensus; the “tradition” of employing twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls in the cotton mills, he wrote, flew “directly in the face of all the teachings of medical science as to the necessity for the especial care and protection of young girls at that period of life.”Footnote ⁸⁴ An illustration published by the NCLC, of a factory girl looking up at a menacing man, likely a factory boss, similarly demonstrates how reformers could portray the girl as particularly vulnerable by situating her in this vulnerable age period. Illustrator Mary Ellen Sigsbee appeared to be seeking to portray her subject as more mature—based on her facial features and handbag—than her short stature relative to the boss would suggest. By situating her within this developmental age range, Sigsbee could convey that the threat was not only physical but sexual as well, further magnified by the dark background and the fact that this subject is alone in the room with the overseer (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Mary Ellen Sigsbee, “The New Hand” (1913). Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Unlike conceptions at the time of manhood, which were tied more to the acquisition of certain intellectual and work-related skills, womanhood was more inextricably linked with a specific period of sexual development. “The establishment of those sexual functions essential for the perpetuation of the race must not be imperiled by any undue strain either of mind or body,” U.S. Department of Labor investigator Clare de Graffenried wrote in 1890.Footnote ⁸⁵ That view, ostensibly confirmed by a range of scientific studies in this period, fed into a dichotomous view of boys’ labor in relation to girls’ labor.Footnote ⁸⁶ “The boy may be stunted or he may grow disproportionately, but the effect upon the more delicate organism of the female is disastrous and cruel,” Pennsylvania child labor activist Peter Roberts wrote.Footnote ⁸⁷ Precisely because of these unique and profound societal implications of girls’ labor, de Graffenried—writing in 1890, before much of the child labor legal infrastructure had even been constructed—identified “the State” as the entity that should be responsible for preventing this “evil.”Footnote ⁸⁸

In the decades after de Graffenried’s publication, reformers succeeded in shepherding through a plethora of state and local laws protecting girls in this critical age group. For instance, excessive standing supposedly accentuated the long-term physical risks of factory work for girls, so reformers convinced state legislators to implement so-called right to sit regulations.Footnote ⁸⁹ In Muller, the Supreme Court had ruled that women held less “capacity for long-continued labor” than men, “particularly when done standing,” giving states and localities the ability to implement such gendered labor regulations.Footnote ⁹⁰ While some of these new regulations applied to women workers of all ages, others, such as Ohio’s, specifically focused on girls between sixteen and eighteen years of age.Footnote ⁹¹ Later, when a group of legislators in the state sought to lower the minimum age for girls’ night work to sixteen, to equalize it with the minimum age for boys, the Ohio Consumers’ League fought back vigorously, arguing that it would “greatly impair” these girls’ livelihoods.Footnote ⁹² In an era in which rigorous scientific evidence was scant, reformers relied on the public’s instinctive skepticism of overwork for girls. “The harmful effect of continuous standing, upon young and growing girls, is too well established a fact to require any elaboration,” wrote Philadelphia Consumers’ League official Florence Lucas Sanville, pointing vaguely to “permanent ill effects,” likely in reference to future reproductive capacity.Footnote ⁹³ She specifically highlighted the “swollen feet” of the female workers, which in one instance caused a young girl to refuse to even meet a suitor. “The best young man was turned away,” Sanville lamented.Footnote ⁹⁴ Reformers also took issue with girls staying too long, and too late, at the factory. Consequently, lawmakers at the state and local levels passed laws limiting total hours worked and prohibiting night shifts for teenage girls.Footnote ⁹⁵ In New York, while young boys and all women faced restrictions on night work, girls aged sixteen to twenty-one encountered additional limitations.Footnote ⁹⁶

In Arizona, Alaska, Louisiana, and other states, weekly hours limits applied to boys under sixteen but extended to age eighteen for girls.Footnote ⁹⁷ And in multiple states, protections against specific physical dangers in the factory, such as cleaning machinery while in motion, also often covered girls longer than boys.Footnote ⁹⁸ Many of these state laws imitated model legislation published in 1908 by Goldmark in a prominent reform journal; those guidelines codified a sixteen-versus-eighteen-year-old disparity in both hours and night work restrictions.Footnote ⁹⁹ While these laws restricted particularly dangerous work settings and patterns, they did not ban girls’ labor entirely, allowing hundreds of thousands to continue to work throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

Regulations affecting teenage girls functioned more like a scalpel than a sledgehammer, often tailored to specific physical dangers such as moving machinery, or moral concerns like those associated with night work. And in justifying such laws, reformers often targeted “overwork” rather than “work” more broadly.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Partly because of these more modest aims, and because they protected a group whose needs were seen by many as having society-wide implications, these regulations often attracted more universal support than strict minimum-age thresholds.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Even manufacturing lobbyist David Clark, a critic of virtually all child labor legislation, conceded that no girl under eighteen should be working at night.Footnote ¹⁰² Although precisely targeted and limited in scope, these regulations impacted a fairly large proportion of the female workforce; approximately half of all working women were between sixteen and twenty years of age (compared to working men, a plurality of whom were between twenty-five and thirty-four years of age).Footnote ¹⁰³

But labor regulation was in many ways an outlier in the ways the state treated the two sexes during their formative years.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The age of majority—when a person was considered an adult for purposes of various rights and privileges—was in most jurisdictions lower for girls than for boys in the early twentieth century. That meant that girls could consent to sex, marry, and inherit an estate one or even multiple years before their male counterparts.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The reasoning often proffered by advocates reflected the mainstream view of women’s role in society at the time: since the purpose of adulthood for women was to marry and procreate, the law should facilitate women’s ability to do so earlier. These disparities—and in particular, the low age at which girls could marry—galvanized reformers in the 1920s to raise the age of majority to at least eighteen years of age. They were particularly distraught by high-profile cases such as that of a fifteen-year-old clerk named Frances Heenan marrying fifty-one-year-old socialite Edward Browning, with the members of the couple dubbed “Peaches” and “Daddy” by the tabloids. The case brought the idea of “pedophilic” behavior to public attention for the first time, according to Syrett.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Child marriage reformers’ pleas for legislative action often echoed their counterparts fighting for labor reform. “Until a girl has passed her period of rapid growth and has also been able to store up a degree of vigor, she is not ready, physiologically speaking, for either marriage or child-bearing,” a pamphlet released by the League of Women Voters declared.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Similarly, physician Elizabeth Blackwell warned that early marriages would “exhaust the vital energy of the mother.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But unlike the near-universal approval of child labor regulation for teenage girls, the child marriage reform movement saw defeat after defeat of bills even to raise the age of majority for girls to just sixteen years, reflecting not only the formidable anti-regulation climate of the Red Scare but also the fact that young labor for girls was perceived by a politically overwhelmingly majority of Americans as distinctly dangerous.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In contrast to early sex and marriage, which aligned with and even helped uphold the prevailing view of women’s place in the social structure, premature labor for girls disrupted those same gendered expectations. Not only did labor outside the home not serve as useful preparation for the idealized future life of the homebound mother, but it also would take away from her educational studies. “An illiterate mother does not augur well for the child of tomorrow,” a South Carolina inspector wrote in an NCLC bulletin.Footnote ¹¹⁰ And perhaps most treacherously, work also supposedly posed distinct dangers to the fragile female body in its most critical development period. Reformers believed that the physical dangers arose from a combination of the work itself—disproportionately in the mills, where air circulation was low and the girls either stood or sat all day—and the stress naturally imposed on the body during this period of development.Footnote ¹¹¹ Many physicians at the time argued that puberty “weakened” girls through the “illness” of menstruation, but brought “strength and vigor” to boys.Footnote ¹¹² Therefore, girls supposedly faced a heightened risk during puberty of contracting diseases such as tuberculosis. “These grave, but hidden, infections are more common in adolescence than in early childhood,” National Tuberculosis Association president Eugene L. Opie warned, “and more frequent in adolescent girls than in adolescent boys.”Footnote ¹¹³ The preoccupation of these reformers—usually implicit but sometimes stated outright—rarely extended to Black or even immigrant children. In the South Carolina inspector’s article about the crisis of uneducated young women in the South, for instance, all seven data tables cover only “Native Whites.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ It does not so much as mention the vastly higher illiteracy rates of Black, or immigrant, children. NCLC co-founder A. J. McKelway was similarly blunt about his focus in bemoaning that the “future mothers of the race” would be endangered by premature labor.Footnote ¹¹⁵ That was despite the fact that for girls, more so than for boys, being African American was far and away the most important factor for whether a child was working or not in 1920. An astonishing 14 percent of Black girls aged ten to thirteen were employed, compared to just 2 percent of native white and 0 percent of Italian and Irish immigrant children.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Reformers described the risks to (white) girls in this critical age range as not only physical but also moral. Newsgirls, a group that interacted with the public more than almost any other workers, attracted outsized attention from reformers, who believed that those in the “sexually maturing” stage—between prepubescent girls and “grown women”—were most at risk.Footnote ¹¹⁷ “So far as girls are concerned, we feel that the arguments in favor of prohibiting [street] trading increase rather than diminish in force as the age of the traders advances,” wrote Edward Clopper, an NCLC regional secretary.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Therefore, the “age of prohibition” should be higher for girls than for boys, he argued, suggesting eighteen years as a threshold but expressing openness for a limit as high as twenty-one.Footnote ¹¹⁹ It was the “specter of prostitution” that led reformers to devote disproportionate attention to regulating these girls’ street labor relative to their younger counterparts, Vincent DiGirolamo notes.Footnote ¹²⁰ Of the twenty-four states with regulations on street selling as of the early 1930s, all but three had gender disparities in their laws.Footnote ¹²¹ Twenty states had limits of fourteen years of age or below for boys and sixteen or above for girls; in some states, the disparity was as high as nine years.Footnote ¹²² By conceding to limited and targeted restrictions on teenage girl labor in the 1910s, opponents may have, perhaps inadvertently, succeeded in undermining some of the very motivations for why an eighteen-year threshold such as in the CLA was necessary in the first place.

The supposedly imperiled “street girl” worker was in fact an exceedingly rare phenomenon by the time states began to pass such gendered restrictions, underscoring the extent to which their prominence in this debate was as much a rhetorical tactic as a reflection of realities on the ground. As of the 1910 census, just 281 females under the age of eighteen were registered as newsgirls across the entire country, a minuscule fraction compared to the nearly 20,000 working as textile spinners—and to the 30,000 boys employed as news sellers.Footnote ¹²³ Yet between 1912 and 1915, over a dozen states codified into law strict new minimum age restrictions on street traders, laws almost entirely justified by the plight of street girls.Footnote ¹²⁴ In Iowa, which in 1915 instituted an eighteen-year minimum for female street traders, alongside a much more lenient eleven-year minimum for boys, the law nonetheless affected nearly fifteen times as many boys as girls.Footnote ¹²⁵ The gender disparities in these laws, as well as those relating to total weekly hours and night work, reflected the extent to which legislators believed the protective arm of the state should extend significantly further into girls’ lives than into boys’ lives.

Although they had proposed an elevated threshold in the CLA to allow the government to regulate how, not whether, teenagers worked, reformers faced unrelenting attacks painting the amendment as a plot to take away these older children’s right to work at all, even on the farm.Footnote ¹²⁶ The irony is that many states already regulated certain children’s ability to work up to age eighteen without significant controversy.Footnote ¹²⁷ Sen. Irvine Lenroot (R-WI) pointed specifically to state-level regulations concerning adolescent girls performing night work and acting as telegraph messengers as proof that the CLA was not the radical expansion of government authority that opponents contended.Footnote ¹²⁸ But reformers appeared to find it exceedingly difficult to concisely square this reality with the amendment’s text, which did not specify that future regulations on older teens would necessarily be limited—or only apply to girls.Footnote ¹²⁹ While the amendment’s sponsor, Rep. Israel Foster (R-OH), declared that the bill’s supporters unequivocally did not seek to “prevent” work among those under eighteen years of age, opponents like Sen. Hubert Stephens (D-MS) warned that the “power granted is absolutely without any limitation.”Footnote ¹³⁰ “Why do they not write into this proposal limitations bounding and circumscribing the authority of the Federal Government?” asked Senator Reed of Missouri.Footnote ¹³¹ After all, the CLA did explicitly give Congress the authority to completely “prohibit” such labor, paving the way for opponents to make far-fetched but emotionally resonant arguments about the amendment potentially preventing teenage boys from working on the family farm.Footnote ¹³² Even Sen. Clarence Dill (D-WA), a strong supporter of the CLA, belatedly urged its sponsors to lower the age threshold, arguing that such a change would have only minimal negative effects on vulnerable children but could potentially salvage the bill’s prospects. Regulations on those aged sixteen and seventeen constituted “special cases” that could be left to the states, he asserted, pointing to laws in Georgia that regulated girls’ labor up to age eighteen.Footnote ¹³³ “There is a great deal of opposition, and it is growing at an alarming rate, I fear, to these higher-age brackets,” he warned, “endangering the ratification of this amendment.”Footnote ¹³⁴