Child Labor

"...Although in our work girls under sixteen, as well as boys, are counted children.  It will be remembered that the census returns place girls over fifteen among adults, but reckon boys as children until sixteen years" (Hull-House Maps and Papers 52).

Girls were considered adults before boys were.  What?  Humans are humans, children are children, age is age.  This is saying that 15 years old meant that girls were adults, but boys had another year of childhood.  So girls' childhoods were taken from them even earlier than they were supposed to be.  First off, I am going to hit this from a feminist standpoint.  Girls were supposed to grow up faster and become adults before boys; so in some ways girls had more responsibility, they lost their childhood before boys.
We talked yesterday in class about how Hiis's pictures sent the message that children lost their childhoods; they were forced to act older, to grow up faster, to have more responsibility.  What goes along with this message is the assumption that childhood is a right.  Everyone has a right to a childhood; I personally believe that one of the greatest (yet very common) tragedies is when children lose their childhood.  I believe that when children are forced to grow up fast, to have to seek out love on their own, to have to fend for themselves, they are robbed and something within them "breaks".  What "breaks" is the child's sense of safeness, the sense that they are okay and that they will be okay.  When faced with hardship during the early years of childhood, children are robbed of growing up and believing that they can have a good life.  They are robbed of the vision of the American Dream.