Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke
down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades
after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and
Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work,
freedom, the market, and the state.
Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the
on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad
developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism,
moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood
explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring
political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that
divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who
opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the
child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the
story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of
sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society.