Session Abstract

In this session, we propose childhood as a central category of analysis for rethinking the meaning of independent or "free" labor in United States history. Our papers examine three turning points in labor ideology through the lens of childhood: gradual emancipation in the Revolutionary-era North, the rise of free labor ideology in the antebellum North, and the origins of anti-statist conservatism in the 1920s rural South. Taken together, our papers reveal the usefulness of childhood in addressing enduring questions such as the meaning of freedom, labor, and dependence in the United States from the Revolutionary period through the early twentieth century. Sarah Levine-Gronningsater examines anew the legal and ideological origins of gradual emancipation law in the Revolutionary-era North by asking why these laws focused on children and not adults. By placing childhood at the center of her analysis, Levine-Gronningsater advances our understanding of the ideology of slave emancipation law in the early republic. Jane Green's examination of early nineteenth-century youth labor reveals that a narrative of maturity, adulthood, and citizenship was central to free labor ideology and the "cult of domesticity." Green's analysis thus challenges dominant labor narratives of the early nineteenth century that focus primarily on adult men's wage labor and adult women's domestic labor in the home. Marjorie Wood's paper locates the origins of twentieth-century American conservatism in an early twentieth century political movement against the federal regulation of child labor. By showing how opponents of child labor regulation were motivated by traditional views of parental authority over children, Wood offers a novel explanation for how family values discourse became linked to free market ideology and anti-government sentiment. Paula S. Fass, the commentator for our session, is a leading historian of American childhood. Prof. Fass currently holds the Margaret Byrne Professorship in History at the University of California at Berkeley and is serving as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Rutgers University.