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"The Story of My Cotton Dress" The Child Labor Bulletin, August, 1914

". ..I appreciate my dresses more since I know that from the very beginning when the cotton is

ripe in the hot sun, little boys and girls must pick it for my dresses, while their backs grow tired and their heads ache.

Mother also took me to a cotton mill, on that trip. ..The bobbins whirl around on large frames in the spinning room. Little girl "spinners" walk up and down the long aisles, between the frames, watching the bobbins closely. When a thread breaks. the spinner must quickly tie the two ends together. Some people think that only children can do this quickly enough, but that is not so. for in a great many mills only gro~-ups work. Mary is one of the spinners. She was very sad.

Standing all day long, she said. had broken down the arch of her foot and made her flatfooted. which is very painful. .

Some people say it is good for the girls and boys to work-that all children should be

industrious. But they do not stop to think that there is a right and a wrong kind of work for little girls and boys. Spinning for a little while a day could be made the right kind, but work in a

spinning room from 7 o'clock in the morning until 6 o'clock at night is the wrong kind. It keeps the children out of school it gives them no chance to play, and they cannot grow strong. Many spinning rooms have their windows closed all day because the rooms must be kept damp or the threads will break. Now, like growing plants, growing girls and boys need fresh air as well as light and sunshine. But there are more than a million children in this country who do not have fresh air, or play. or school because they are working. And of these there are enough in the cotton mills to make a big city full.

When a bobbin is filled, the "doffer boy" comes along, takes it off the spinning frame and puts an empty bobbin in its place. Many doffer boys and girl spinners grow up without learning to read or write, and without even hearing of George Washington. Sometimes the machine is so high and the boys are so little, they have to climb up to reach the bobbins. If they slip they can hurt themselves badly. ..

". .Surely. Mother," I said when we left the cotton mill. "little girls can't do any more work for a dress."

" Ah, yes, dear," she said, " it is in the making of the dress itself that little girls take a big part. The cloth you saw woven is sent to factories in other large cities. It is cut into dresses that are carried in bundles into tenement homes And such homes' Often only one or two rooms for the whole

family to cook and eat and sleep and sew in. Mothers sew the dresses, while their little girls help draw out the basting threads and sew on the b uttons. ..

". ..The scallops of the embroidery trimming little girls like so well for their dresses," mother continued, "are cut out by children in tenement houses. These little girls generally go to school, but often fall asleep over their lessons because they worked long after bedtime the night before. and an hour or two before school in the morning.

"The pretty ribbon trimmings are pulled through the dresses by children in still other tenement homes. You see, their mothers do not mean to be cruel, but they must pay rent and buy coal and bread and shoes with the money the children can earn. More cruel than these poor mothers were the people who, when the fathers were little boys, made them do work that taught them nothing; for now the fathers do not know how to earn enough money, and they are idle while the children work.

"If only everybody cared, and would not buy things that children make, the factory men would give the work to the fathers and not to the children"