| "Inventing 'the Forgotten Child': The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South," examines how and why white reformers created, developed, and promoted a racial meaning for child labor reform. The southern textile workforce was predominantly composed of native born whites. But to borrow a phrase from C. Vann Woodward and reinterpret it, "Progressivism for whites only" was not simply the exclusion of African American children from white-sponsored reform, it was the insistence by reformers of race as the essential identity of a group of children marginalized from dominant white society.;By seriously questioning the race-based rhetoric of reformers, whom most historians would admit were racial moderates, a new interpretation of Progressivism emerges. An examination of the whiteness of reform shows the possibility of latent class antagonisms to promote an investment in racial solidarity and the stake that reformers had in articulating relationships between race and citizenship rights in the early twentieth century. Perhaps, most importantly, racialized reform encouraged a spirit of regional reconciliation. Partly because the emphasis on the whiteness of reform laid common ground between northerners and southerners, a transregional white middle class emerged that judged itself by its own cosmopolitan ideals and put pressure on the South to judge itself by modern standards.;This transregional culture strengthened the activism of white southern women. The national movement was determined to bring the South up to a minimal national standard. Southern women were pressured to do more on this racially sanctioned public issue. White, middle-class women served as the agents of regional reconciliation on the child labor issue. The southern problem galvanized reformers because as long as northern textile manufacturers faced competition with a southern industry with weak labor laws, they fiercely opposed any additional advances in protective legislation in the North. This work seeks to recreate the centrality of the southern problem to the Progressive Era child labor campaign. |
