Title: Labor of Innocents: Forced Apprenticeship in North Carolina, 1715-1919
Abstract: The subject matter of Labor of Innocents is revealed in its subtitle. Using a mixture of primary and secondary sources, Karin L. Zipf portrays court-ordered apprenticeship, in contrast to the more prevalent voluntary apprenticeship, as “an institution employed by the white patriarchal elite as a measure of social control” (p. 7). Dating from 1715, North Carolina's apprenticeship code ostensibly operated to assure that orphaned and indigent children would not become a burden on the public purse. But “colonial law …provided the class and gender framework that denied poor women and single women rights to their children” (p. 39). Later, as a free black population grew in antebellum North Carolina, apprenticeship “law and practice increasingly became defined by race” (ibid.). Apprenticeship codes were modified to threaten any free blacks not employed “in some honest, industrious occupation” (p. 17). Immediately following the Civil War, the number of court-ordered apprenticeships spiked as “masters throughout the South revived the antebellum practice of apprenticeship to secure labor once provided by slaves” (p. 44). Throughout this period, conflicts over apprenticeship hinged on the rights of parents versus those of masters. In the late nineteenth century, concern for the welfare of the child came to the fore. “Mothers who failed to meet court standards of womanhood saw their children apprenticed” (p. 107). Finally, while the practice had largely disappeared by the turn of the century, the state Child Welfare Act of 1919 ended court-ordered apprenticeship.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 7
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