Empire City: New York Through the Centuries

The following is an excerpt from Empire City: New York Through the Centuries. Helen Campbell (pictured left) tells of her experiences of child labor in New York. Her pieces exposed that Gilded Age social inequities and public heath failures often featured strongly visual and emotional images which remain poignant for readers today. 

“In a report of the State Bureau of Labor it is stated that in one room less than twelve by fourteen feet, whose duplicate can be found at many points, a family of seven worked. Three of these, all girls, were under ten years of age. Tobacco lay in piles on the floor and under the long table at one end where cigars were rolled. Two of the children sat in the floor, stripping the leaves and another sat on a small stool. A girl of twenty sat near them, and all had sores on lips, cheeks, and hands. Some four thousand women are engaged in this industry, and an equal number of unregistered young children share it with them. As in sewing, a number of women often club together and use one room, and in such cases their babies crawl about in the filth on the wet floors, playing with the damp tobacco and breathing the poison with which the room is saturated.” ~ Helen Campbell (pg. 372)

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