Child Labor Depicted In 'My Cotton Dress'

Child Labor Essay
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Back then some children had an actual childhood, they got to go school, come home and play with their friends. But then again some people weren’t as rich and some of them needed to provide for their families. This caused physical and emotional pain for the kids that needed to work all day. Some of the kids that didn’t have to endure all that pain, didn’t even know they were wearing the dresses or getting warm by the coal young children worked to make and get. As I have said, some of the wealthy children never even knew there were places that had kids doing labor. But for those who did they would feel uncomfortable for example in the story “My Cotton Dress” one of the cotton farm girls rips her dress, but feels bad to get a new one because she knows children will have to make it. Both the kids that were aware and the kids that actually made the dress and picked the cotton, both thought that it was wrong and needed to be stopped. For the kids that did not know about the child labor they could have not known or cared. It’s not like the kids who worked all day had time to make up their homework and play with their friends. Those kids had to eat dinner and go over the working regulations, to help justify this the book Lyddie has a lot of information like this; “Let’s forget about studying those
That the wealthy did not have to work off debt but the poor did, a solution to getting the debt off their backs was to send their children to cotton farms, Mills, coal mines, etc, to work off their debt. Those poor kids experienced physical pain like illnesses/disease, cuts/bruises and maybe even death. They also experienced emotional pain like loneliness, stress, depression, etc. But remember kids that were privileged enough to not work were very lucky. And some of them didn’t even know