Children, hours and the law

THE LIMITS THE STATE SET · 1897 TO 1909 AND AFTER

What the law allowed: Indiana's factory age was regulated late and lightly. In 1897 the state set fourteen as the minimum age for factory work. The Factory Act of 1899 went further in words: it prohibited the employment of children under fourteen in factories altogether, and forbade factory owners to work boys under sixteen more than sixty hours in a week. The Indiana Supreme Court upheld the act in 1909, in Inland Steel Company v. Yedinak, on the complaint of a thirteen-year-old rolling-mill hand who had been required to labor twelve hours a day — a Lake County case, not a Fort Wayne one, carried here because it fixes what Indiana law was in the years Fort Wayne's mills were filling: a child of thirteen in a factory was illegal on paper, and a boy of fifteen could still lawfully be worked ten hours a day, six days a week. No Fort Wayne-specific count of child factory workers was published in the census tables reached for this section; the city's child labor survives in the record in particulars rather than totals — among them the twenty-five apprentices of Wayne Knitting Mills whose 1900 walkout, below, was a protest by boys against being charged for the needles they broke.

The women's hours Indiana would not limit: For adult women the state's record is one of refusal. A Commission on Working Women, created by Governor Samuel Ralston in 1913, traveled the state documenting working women's conditions; its work produced no maximum-hours law, and by 1918 Indiana stood as one of only six states that did not limit the hours of its women laborers. The ten-hour days the federal visitor recorded at Fort Wayne's plants in 1918 were, in Indiana, simply legal. The sixty-hour ceiling for boys, the fourteen-year floor, and no ceiling at all for women: those were the legal terms on which the factory city was built in its greatest growth years.

Sources: Inland Steel Co. v. Yedinak, 172 Ind. 423 (1909) (the Factory Act of 1899 — Acts 1899 p. 231, §§8021–8022 Burns 1908 — its under-fourteen prohibition and sixty-hour limit for boys under sixteen, and the twelve-hour days in the complaint); Neuman, "Protecting the Fairer Sex: Indiana's Failure to Improve the Lives of Working Women" (Butler University, 2014) (the 1913 commission, the failed bills of 1913, 1915 and 1919, and Indiana as one of six states without a women's hours limit by 1918); the 1897 age-fourteen law as compiled in Indiana child-labor histories; the Women's Bureau memorandum of October 1918 (the hours actually worked at Fort Wayne).