TABLE OF CONTENTS
About the Author
Miriam Forman-Brunell is a professor of history, women, and gender at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She is co-director of Children and Youth in History, author of Babysitter: An American History, and editor of The Girls' History and Culture Readers, among other works.
Girls’ Labor and Leisure in the Progressive Era
Lewis Hine Photographs (1912)
Annotation
Far less familiar among Lewis Hine’s photographs taken for the National Child Labor Committee is a contrasting pair of images that sheds light on changing notions of girlhood. While industrial homeworkers produce Campbell Kids dolls in a documentary image typical of child laborers, the middle-class girls in this prescriptive photo are “playing” house instead.
The working-class model of childhood pathologized by reformers stands in contrast to the middle-class notion of girlhood Progressives promoted.
Image 1: Library of Congress, Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction No. LC-DIG-nclc-04209. Lewis Hine. “Children Playing with Campbell Kid Dolls.” Accessed September 26, 2012.
Image 2: Library of Congress, Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction No. LC-DIG-nclc-04209. Lewis Hine. “Making Dolls Legs for Campbell Kids.” Accessed September 26, 2012.