JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
(On discovering and photographically documenting children at work in the 1920’s and ’30’s, see here.)
Here’s an interesting bit I just slipped into while looking for something else.
Children at work.
10-15 years of age.
In 1880, half of the population was 10+ years old. There were 17 million people at work, and of these 1.1 million were children, making about 6% of the entire workforce. And that’s about as truthful as we’ll ever know about that statistic–given the relatively primitive way in which these numbers were corralled, my guess is that there were considerably more children at work than this.
And it looks like of the total population of male children aged 10-15 (3.37 million) that 1.1 million of them–about 29%–were working, mostly it seems in the fields.
