SOURCE: Atkinson, Linda. “The Children.” In Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, pp. 114-33. New York: Crown Publishers, 1978.

In the following excerpt, Atkinson discusses the work of American labor activist Mary (“Mother”) Jones on behalf of working children.

Children at work, either beside their parents or at tasks which they could handle alone, was not a new thing in the nineteenth century. Children had always worked on the farm and in the home. But children at work in mines and factories from sunrise to sunset, children who were stoop-shouldered and ill by the time they were ten, and who were commonly crippled on the “job”—that was new, as new as the factory system itself. And in America in the last part of the nineteenth century that was the way over a million children spent their childhood.

These children did not play. They did not go...