Photos of child laborers are nondescript, unnamed

There is a photograph taken inside a mill in Fall River, Massachusetts that depicts three rows of cotton spinning machinery that extend out toward the edges of the frame, as if the person taking it were hovering above the centermost row. The left side of the frame is a wall with many long, narrow windows that cast narrow streaks of light over the rows and rows of machinery. The right side of the frame shows a half dozen additional rows that get smaller as the depth increases.

In the two isles completely visible, at least 18 children, mostly boys, lean against the machines’ edges. The three closest to the the front are boys hard at work, not taking the time to glance up for the photograph.

The children toiled away inside the Cornell Mill between 1908 and 1912, in the same region where my great grandmother, Louise née Languirand, also assimilated into mill life at a young age, in the same period as well.

Louise’s family was very poor, as were many families who sent their children to work, making photographs of she and her siblings a seldom-justifiable expense. The photographer in the Cornell Mill is not named, but I surmise that what he or she documented is similar to what Louise experienced.

In the photo, the children are unnamed and very young, none looking a day older than thirteen. The period when the photo was taken, between 1908 and 1912 was when the United States Government first began codifying regulations and policies to help it approach the complicated issue of child labor.

Until then, it was not unusual for working class families to send one or more of their children to the mills to make extra money. They had to quit school and take up working days that sometimes lasted 14 hours long, almost always with lots of standing and only short breaks. The White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, established in 1909, sought to examine the working conditions to which young people were subjected, especially in dangerous environments like the mills, which dominated the cityscapes of most towns and small cities in New England.

Documents related to this time, first-hand stories or news clips that are not about various strikes are difficult to locate. This is likely related to the fact that many of these children were just that — children. Since they were taken from school so early on, there is no guarantee that they could read, let alone that they would grow up to achieve a level of education traditionally associated with those who keep diaries and write letters. Even the photographs, which indicate some strange desire on behalf of newspapers and photographers to document these sullen-faced, tired children, often lack descriptions, names or precise dates.

Otherwise, the primary first-hand accounts of mill life are from the 1850’s and almost entirely from the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell is primarily remembered as the town where all those “mill girls” described in today’s middle school history curriculums worked. The girls were often from farming families and generally lived in boarding schools.

My great grandmother, however, wasn’t from that posh, almost-coastal city. She was in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, approximately sixty miles away.

Louise, however, would have worked in an environment similar to the one depicted in Fall River, because both communities largely relied on immigrants to support their economies and lacked any nearby major cities — aside from Providence, which also hosted many mills at the time.

Photographs will not suffice as explanation of mill life, will not substitute for first-hand accounts, but they do provide a portrait that betrays certain emotions, certain levels of exhaustion, indubitably present in the daily life of the young laborers, evidenced in the visible lack of desire to so much as look up from the endlessly spinning spools of thread.