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5 Some states had enacted laws prohibiting A young girl works at a cranberry bog
or limiting child labor, but for the most part in Burlington County, New Jersey.
those laws were weak and enforcement was
lax. At the beginning of the Depression,

there was no national child-labor law that
applied equally to all American children.
6 In 1930, according to the census, two and
a quarter million boys and girls between the
ages of ten and eighteen were working in

factories, canneries, mines, and farms. Tens of
thousands of other children under the age of
ten, who were laboring on farms, as street

peddlers, and in home workshops, were not
counted by the census. Because kids could be
hired for lower wages than grownups, they
often replaced adults who had been laid off. A
child’s wages might make up the entire family

income. “I don’t expect I’ll ever get back to
school,” said a thirteen-year-old girl who was
working in the same cotton garment factory

that had laid off her father.
7 A girl who started work when she was
fourteen described her daily routine: “At 5:30
it is time for me to get up . . . I hurriedly eat
my breakfast, and I am ready to go to work.

It is a chilly winter morning, but I know it
will be hot in the mill. I start on my three
mile walk to the factory. As I walk, I see

others hurrying to work. I look at the older
people and wonder if they, too, feel the
resentment every morning that I do, or if as
the years go by their spirits are deadened.

lax If something is lax, it has been done in a lazy
way—rather than carefully.

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