The Story of My Cotton Dress
Scanned from The Child Labor Bulletin, August, 1914.
I HAVE HAD another accident! A big tear in my pretty
new dress. This time I want to mend it. When we went to Atlanta
Georgia, a few weeks ago, and saw the beautiful white cotton fields, mother
told me how little boys and girls must help make most of the stuff used
for our dresses. I used to think all other children had good times, and
that going to school was very hard. Now I know better.
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| The Cotton Field. |
I appreciate my dresses more since I know that
from the very beginning when the cotton is ripe in the hot sun, little
boys and girls must pick it for my dresses, while their backs grow tired
and their heads ache.
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Mother also took me to a cotton mill, on that trip. I
saw how the cotton bolls arc brought to the mill and the fluffy soft white
mass is combed and then spun from on bobbin another, until it is the finest
thread like the ravelings from the tear in my new dress.
The bobbins whirl around on large frames in the spinning room. |
| Spinning from one bobbin to another. |
Little girl "spinners" walk up and down the
long aisles, between the frames, watching the bobbins closely. When a thread
breaks, the spinner must quickly tie the two ends together. Some people
think that only children can do this quickly enough, but that is not so,
for in a great many mills only grown-ups work.
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| The Spinner |
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Mary is one of the spinners. She was very sad. Standing
all day long, she said, had broken down the arch of her foot and made her
flatfooted, which is very painful.
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| Mary. |
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Some people say it is good for the girls and boys to work—that
all children should be industrious But they do not stop to think that there
is a right and a wrong kind of work for little girls and boys. Spinning
for a little while a day could be made the right kind, but work
in a spinning room from 7 o'clock in the morning until 6 o'clock at night
is the wrong kind. It keeps the children out of school, it gives them no
chance to play, and they cannot grow strong.
Many spinning rooms have their
windows closed all day because the rooms must be kept damp or the threads
will break. Now, like growing plants, growing girls and boys need fresh
air as well as light and sunshine. But there are more than a million children
in this country who do not have fresh air, or play, or school because they
are working. And of these there are enough in the cotton mills to make
a big city full. |
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| The Green Fields |
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When a bobbin is filled, the "doffer boy" comes
along, takes it off the spinning frame and puts an empty bobbin in its
place.
Many doffer boys and girl spinners grow up without learning
to read or write, and without even hearing of George Washington.
Sometimes the machine is so high and the boys are so little,
they have to climb up to reach the bobbins. If they slip they can hurt
themselves badly. |
| The Doffer. |
At last the thread is ready to be woven into cloth. It
is put through a machine called the warper, which prepares the threads
which run the length of the goods. I think the hardest work the girls in
the mill did was to thread every one of these warp threads through a tiny
hole to prepare them for the loom that weaves the cloth.
"Surely, mother," I said when we left the cotton
mill , "little girls can't do any more work for a dress."
"Ah, yes, dear," she said, "it is in the
making of the dress itself that little girls take a big part. The cloth
you saw woven is sent to factories in other large cities. It is cut into
dresses that are carried in bundles into tenement homes. And such homes!
Often only one or two rooms for the whole family to cook and eat and sleep
and sew in. Mothers sew the dresses, while their little girls help draw
out the basting threads and sew on the buttons. |
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| They Climb upon the Machine. |
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"Not long ago I read the story about Rose, nine years
old. who sews buttons on little girls' dresses. Her mother used to make
dolls dresses, and Rose had to snip them apart. She grew so tired of doing
this for dolls for other little girls to play with, when she had no doll
herself and when she wanted to read fairy stories, that what do you think
she did? She snipped into the dolls' dresses with the scissors! So now
her mother makes big dresses, for little girls, and Rose cannot use the
scissors, but must work with a needle. She sews on 36 buttons to earn 4
cents."
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"The scallops of the embroidery trimming little girls
like so well for their dresses," mother continued, "are cut out
by children in tenement houses. These little girls generally go to school,
but often fall asleep over their lessons because they worked long after
bedtime the night before, and an hour or two before school in the morning. |
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| Rose. |
Cutting out Embroidery in a Tenement Home. |
"The pretty ribbon trimmings are pulled through the
dresses by children in still other tenement homes. You see, their mothers
do not mean to be cruel, but they must pay rent and buy coal and bread
and shoes with the money the children can earn. More cruel than these poor
mothers were the people who, when the fathers were little boys, made them
do work that taught them nothing; for now the fathers do not know how to
earn enough money, and they are idle while the children work.
"If only everybody cared, and would not buy things
that children make, the factory men would give the work to the fathers
and not to the children."
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| Pulling Ribbons through Garments in a Tenement Home |
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