Bruce Carruthers Elisabeth Anderson Northwestern University
This dissertation project is a comparative history of child labor policy development in Great Britain (1833-1891), Germany (1839-1903), and the United States (1880-1938), focusing particularly on the impact of changing cultural conceptions of childhood on the evolving content of child labor policy in each country. The research relies on a combination of secondary historical, published primary, and unpublished archival materials. These data will be analyzed to trace changes in child labor policy and in discourses surrounding the problem of child labor in each country over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This research promises to make valuable empirical and theoretical contributions to historical and political sociology in several ways. First, it will identify how and why child labor policy trajectories differed across countries. Furthermore, because child labor laws were the first type of state intervention into the free labor market, the project will offer valuable insight into the political and ideological origins of protective labor legislation more generally. Finally, by analyzing how changing ideas about childhood and child employment shaped the evolving content of child labor laws, the research promises to contribute to the scholarly understanding of the relationship between cultural ideas and policy change. In particular, it should help to specify more precisely how cultural ideas influence the policymaking process. By contributing to social scientific knowledge about the cultural, political and economic conditions facilitating the development of American and European child labor reform policy, this project also promises to yield information pertinent to the contemporary problem of child labor in developing countries. The project, which will show how American and European reformers were able to transform child labor policy in spite of strong resistance from employers and impoverished parents, can shed light on the conditions needed to enable similar reforms in the developing world.
