child-laborer

Updated: May 26, 2025

To-day we are paying for the folly of the over-production and its consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood of yesterday. To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our surplus children of to-day. The child-laborer of one or two decades ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, underfed, illiterate, unskilled, unorganized and unorganizable.

Margaret Sanger - The Pivot of Civilization

And to-day, we must not forget, the child-laborer of yesterday is becoming the father or the mother of the child-laborer of to-morrow. "Any nation that works its women is damned," once wrote Woods Hutchinson. The nation that works its children, one is tempted to add, is committing suicide.

Margaret Sanger - The Pivot of Civilization