| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South. By Shelley Sallee. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004. xiv, 207 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8203-2448-5. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8203-2570-8.)
Shelley Sallee presents a compelling account of child labor reform in Alabama during the Progressive Era. "Whiteness" drives the book. Child labor was a whites-only problem in the southern cotton textile industry, as work inside the mills was reserved for whites. The child labor reform movement, which aimed at that industry, was framed by this "whiteness." As reform unfolded, however, the whiteness of the mill children became enmeshed with principles of white supremacy, and "whiteness" took on new meaning.	1
Child labor was portrayed as a menace to white supremacy. Premature work deprived Anglo-Saxon children of education, while blacks were portrayed as eagerly seeking education. To uplift low whites before they sank below blacks, it was necessary to get the white children out of the mills and into the schools. Rhetoric of reform was couched in terms that made an appeal for the salvation of "whiteness." Sallee's book richly interprets this oft-neglected low motive for child labor reform and demonstrates that these white supremacist views were also embraced by northern Progressives.	. . .

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