Child Labor in the Southern Textile Mills: Survival, Reform, and Memory

Child labor in the Southern textile mills has long stirred debate among reformers, journalists, and historians. Was it simply exploitation, a symbol of the South’s backwardness? Or was it a strategy of survival for families trying to make ends meet in mill villages? The reality was complex. For mill families, children’s work was often essential, while outsiders, especially Northern reformers, condemned the practice as immoral. This essay argues that child labor endured not because Southerners rejected modern ideas of childhood, but because it was woven into the economic and cultural fabric of mill village life.

When mills sprang up across the South in the late nineteenth century, boosters promised that industrial jobs would modernize the region. Families moved from farms into mill villages, drawn by the promise of steady wages and housing. But mill pay was low, and rent and groceries, often sold through company stores, could consume much of a household’s income. In this setting, children’s wages were not optional. As historian Daniel Holleran shows, in some Piedmont families, children brought in as much as a third of the family’s total earnings.1

Mill villages reinforced this dependence. Families rented mill-owned houses and relied on company-controlled amenities. Falling behind on bills could mean eviction. Historian Thomas Dublin has argued that these circumstances blurred the line between necessity and exploitation: children’s labor propped up the household economy, but it also tied entire families more tightly to the company.2 For parents, sending children into the mill was a painful calculation, but often one of survival.

To Northern reformers, however, child labor symbolized Southern backwardness. Organizations like the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) distributed pamphlets and Lewis Hine’s famous photographs of weary mill children. Activists such as Alexander J. McKelway warned that long hours and dangerous machinery robbed children of education, health, and morality.3 For them, child labor was not just a regional issue but a national stain.

Unions and Northern manufacturers also had practical motives.

They worried that cheap Southern textiles, produced in part by child labor, undercut their competitive position. Historians Daniel Holleran and Walter Trattner have noted that calls for federal child labor laws reflected both humanitarian and economic concerns.4 Condemning the South thus served moral and market purposes.

But these critiques often ignored the realities of Southern mill families. As Elizabeth Fones-Wolf has pointed out, reformers rarely asked what alternatives poor families had. Agricultural wages were low, local schools were underfunded, and opportunities for advancement were scarce.5 Condemnation alone did little to change those facts.

Southerners often pushed back against outside criticism. Local newspapers insisted that Northern reformers misunderstood the South. Parents argued that without their children’s wages, families would fall into destitution. Some even suggested that mill work was better than field labor was safer, cleaner, and more likely to lead to advancement within the mill system.6

The cultural gap was wide. Reformers envisioned childhood as a protected stage of life. In mill villages, children had long been part of the family economy, first on farms and then in factories. Historian Mary Frederickson has shown that in Southern culture, children were expected to contribute early, making mill work feel like a continuation of tradition rather than a betrayal of it.7

Even after reformers won child labor laws, enforcement was weak. Inspectors were few, and families often lied about children’s ages. Mill owners, facing labor shortages, looked the other way. Early national laws, such as the Keating–Owen Act of 1916, were struck down by the Supreme Court. Not until the 1930s, with the Fair Labor Standards Act, did child labor decline in practice.8

Historians, like reformers, first tended to describe mill child labor mainly as exploitation. Later labor historians echoed this perspective, presenting child labor as a byproduct of capitalist greed. By the 1980s, however, scholarship began to shift. David Carlton’s Mill and Town in South Carolina (1982) and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s Like a Family (1987) emphasized how family economies shaped mill life. They acknowledged exploitation but also stressed that families were making hard choices in difficult circumstances. Timothy Minchin later argued that reform campaigns without economic alternatives often made families even more vulnerable.9

More recently, scholars such as Grace Hale and Joe Crespino have pushed the conversation further, exploring how child labor intersected with race, gender, and Southern identity. Reformers’ attacks on Southern mills, they argue, reinforced cultural stereotypes about the South as poor, white, and morally deficient.10 In this light, child labor was not just an economic practice but also a cultural marker—used by outsiders to define and stigmatize the region.

Child labor in Southern textile mills was a survival strategy. Northern reformers condemned it as exploitation, while Southern families saw it as a necessity of life in mill villages. The paternalistic system of housing, wages, and company stores and the families desire for economic improvement resulted in families choosing to send children to work. Reformers’ campaigns succeeded in raising awareness but faltered because they offered no realistic alternatives until broader changes came in the twentieth century.

The historiography has moved from moral judgment toward contextualization. Today, historians recognize both the suffering of children and the resilience of families who endured. To reduce the story to exploitation alone oversimplifies the lived experience; to excuse it entirely erases the costs paid by children. The history of child labor in the Southern mills reminds us, that nation-building was partially borne by the youngest members of society.

Footnotes

1. Daniel A. Holleran, Textile Families: Mill Work and Household Economy in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 87–90.

2. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 45–47.

3. Alexander J. McKelway, “Child Labor in the Carolinas,” National Child Labor Committee Pamphlet No. 1 (1909); Lewis Hine, Child Labor in the Carolinas: Photographs and Reports (New York: NCLC, 1910).

4. Daniel A. Holleran, Textile Families, 122; Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), 56.

5. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 11–13.

6. “Mill Life Defended,” Greenville News, July 7, 1908.

7. Mary Frederickson, Between Mothers and Daughters: The Making of Female Culture in the South, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 88.

8. Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children, 183–85.

9. Thomas R. Dawley, The Child That Toileth Not: The Story of a Government Investigation That Was Suppressed (New York: Thomas R. Dawley, 1912).

10. David Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880–1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Timothy J. Minchin, Fighting Against the Odds: A History of Southern Labor Since World War II (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).

11. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998); Joe Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).