Abstract

"City of Candy: Contested Female Labor in the Confectionery Industry, 1890-1900"

Colleen Doody, DePaul University (cdoody@depaul.edu)

When we picture late 19th century Chicago factory workers, the image of burly men slaughtering hogs or pouring molten steel likely comes to mind. But young women and girls filled the city’s factories. In “City of Candy,” I explore Chicago’s candy industry during the late 19th and early 20th century. Chicago was the center of the candy industry during the 20th century, and the city’s factories provided generations of Chicagoans with careers as well as products, including Wrigley’s gum, Snickers’ bars, and Cracker Jack. The candy industry reminds us that women and children, who made up half of the workforce in the confectionery industry, were at the center of capitalist production. Chicago as a candy city doesn’t fit our highly masculine conception of Chicago as “Hog Butcher for the World.”
My paper explores both why unmarried immigrant girls worked in candy factories and how their presence was contested. Fathers were the sole breadwinner in less than half of working-class immigrant households, which meant that the income of female children played a key role in keeping the family out of poverty.
Progressive reformers and labor leaders in the late 19th century backed legislation to both reduce the number of hours women over 16 worked and to prevent children under 14 from laboring in factories. Immigrant parents and business owners, on the other hand, rejected these reform attempts. In an era before birth certificates, parents often didn’t know their child’s age, and they routinely claimed children were over 14 because the family needed the income. The Illinois Manufacturers’ Association recognized that limiting women’s hours would force management to restrict hours for all the workers in that factory. They ultimately sued, and the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the hour restrictions as a violation of the 14th amendment implied “liberty of contract.”