Science as an Early Driver of Policy: Child Labor Reform in the Early Progressive Era, 1870–1900

Abstract

Scientific evidence is an increasingly important driver of social and environmental policy concerning child health. This trend began earlier than generally recognized. The child labor reform movement of the Gilded Age and early Progressive Era reflected not only moral and economic forces but also the dramatic advances during the later decades of the 19th century in scientific knowledge concerning children’s biological and psychological vulnerability to environmental and psychosocial stressors. The growing importance of scientific information in shaping policy concerning children’s health between 1870 and 1900 is illustrated by the events leading up to and following the New York State Child Labor Law of 1886. Child labor reform during this period was a critical step in the development of a science-based as well as a value-driven movement to protect children’s environmental health and well-being that continues today.

Child labor reform in the late 19th century represents an early milestone in the use of scientific arguments, along with moral and economic arguments, to support public policy to protect the health and well-being of children. During the late decades of the century, there was a quantum leap in the understanding of children’s biological and psychological vulnerability. The new awareness of the vulnerability of children to the toxic, hazardous, and psychologically stressful environment they faced in the workplace was a key factor in the reform of child labor practices as were newly available statistical data on the magnitude of the problem.

The term “science” used here refers broadly to knowledge gained by empirical methods by means of direct and indirect observation. It is not “modern science,” supported as today by molecular biology, workplace monitoring, biomonitoring, and quantitative toxicological and epidemiological data on workplace exposures and dose–response relationships. Nonetheless, by the late 1800s, a growing and reliable body of knowledge had been gathered on the biological vulnerability and the special needs of the child, as well as the magnitude of the problem of child labor. Pediatricians and other medical professionals also provided compelling observational and statistical data on the ills of child labor.

Reformers, largely women, such as Alzina Parsons Stevens, Clare DeGraffenried, and Alice L. Woodbridge, effectively used statistical data on the numbers of children employed in different occupations, observational data on the clinical manifestations of toxic and otherwise harmful exposures, and knowledge of the lifelong and even multigenerational effects of early exposures. The New York City lawyer and philanthropist Elbridge T. Gerry, president of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC), partnered with the eminent pediatrician Abraham Jacobi, president of the New York State Medical Society, to draft child labor legislation that clearly reflected the knowledge of the toxicity of the working environments and the vulnerability of the young child. In the passage of the 1886 New York State law, Gerry collaborated with the Workingmen’s Assembly, who not only supplied the critical statistical data on the extent of child employment in the hazardous trades, but also cosponsored the bill.

The New York State Labor Law of 1886 and the increasingly stringent laws that quickly followed represent an important step in the development of the field of children’s environmental health, a major branch of public health today. Although limited in scope and enforcement, the legislation was an important advance in the protection of children from environmental threats.¹ Yet the role of science as one of the forces in shaping the public perception of the value of the child and helping to drive reform during this early Progressive period has not been widely recognized.²

In this essay, I focus on the growing importance of scientific data in child labor reform during the early Progressive Era, more briefly reviewing the role of social, economic, political, and moral factors that also drove public discourse surrounding the issue.³ I describe the increased understanding of physicians, toxicologists, factory inspectors, sociologists, and psychologists that childhood, not only infancy,⁴ was a biologically vulnerable period of life and trace how progressive reformers used this knowledge effectively to advocate change. The growing interest of the medical profession in public health and the development of scientific expertise within newly founded public agencies such as the State Bureaus of Labor Statistics, were instrumental in child labor reform in the 19th century in the United States.⁵ The history of the 1886 law and its aftermath provides valuable insights into the increasing role of science, along with concern about social justice, economic arguments, and the rise of labor unions, in shaping a new child-protective social policy.

The intertwining of scientific expertise with socioeconomic and moral arguments in the cause of child labor reform is illustrated by the active collaboration of trained professionals, educated female reformers, society philanthropists, and union leaders. The published reports of factory inspectors and photographs detailing the hazardous conditions in which children worked all highlighted the biological and psychological vulnerability of children and were communicated to the public in widely read newspapers, periodicals, and reports of the late 19th century such as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Catholic World, and Harpers New Monthly Magazine.⁶ By detailing the successful harnessing of that knowledge to a powerful social and political movement, I address an important gap in research. I do not argue here that science by itself always (or even often) leads to appropriately preventive policies, as we see today with climate change, toxic substances, and incarceration and juvenile justice laws. However, the case of child labor reform in the early Progressive period illustrates that, when joined with social, economic, and moral arguments, science is a powerful lever for change.

NARRATIVE OF EVENTS

The earliest legal restriction on child labor in the United States was a Massachusetts law passed in 1837, the focus of which was the provision of education to children who worked.⁷ A few other states adopted similar laws before 1880, but the legislation generally contained only weak restrictions and little provision for enforcement. The 1886 New York State Child Labor Law was the first enforceable child labor law in New York State and was followed by similar legislation in other states.⁸ By 1899, 44 states and territories had some type of child labor law.⁹

The context for the 1886 law is that, by the mid-1800s, the New York City environment had been dramatically altered by industrialization, the influx of immigrants, and spiraling violence.¹⁰ Demand for child labor in New York City was high, particularly in textiles, canning, mining, and street peddling, where children aged as young as six or seven years worked long shifts. By 1870, the population of New York City had increased to more than a million people, of whom half were foreign-born.¹¹ Huge numbers of poor lived in miserable shacks. The mortality rate for children younger than five years was a staggering 52 percent.¹² Public and private service systems were overwhelmed, riots and crime were frequent, and child cruelty and exploitation were common.¹³ Nearly 100 000 children were employed in factories and shops in New York City and its suburbs.¹⁴ Photos, such as those in this article, by reformer, reporter, and photographer for the New York Times Jacob Riis showed poor working children of New York City.

Photo by reporter and reformer Jacob Riis.

The privileged class in New York, as elsewhere, had a dual view of the problem of child labor as both a wrong that needed righting and a threat to its own security. In 1853, Charles Brace founded the New York Children’s Aid Society, which focused its efforts on behalf of child workers on education.¹⁵ In 1874, Gerry and Henry Bergh, founder of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1866, were moved by the riveting case of 8-year-old Mary Ellen Wilson¹⁶ to form the NYSPCC. More than any single individual, Gerry can be credited with laying the groundwork for New York’s effective protection of working children. He knew personally and worked effectively with social reformers, experts in the field of medicine, union leaders, and politicians committed to protecting children.

In 1882, Gerry, then president of the NYSPCC, and Jacobi, now considered the father of American pediatrics, jointly drafted a bill that was the blueprint for the bill that was eventually passed in 1886. It provided that no child younger than 14 years could be employed in any factory unless a physician had examined the child and certified in writing that the child was free of certain specified diseases and in proper physical condition for factory work; no child aged 14 years or older was to be employed for more than 10 hours a day or in certain specified hazardous industries (including mining, glass work, mercury, lead, arsenic, iron or brick works, tobacco products, or manufacturing in living quarters); and no child younger than 14 years could be employed in occupations involving the use of dangerous machinery. It was probable that the bill would have passed the assembly except that the session closed before it was brought to a vote.¹⁷

In 1883, Gerry and the NYSPCC renewed their efforts, but the factory interests of the state, which had been “caught napping” the previous year, loudly and successfully opposed the proposed bill.¹⁸ Although the bill had strong support from newly powerful source, organized labor, that increasingly feared competition from the growing, low-cost workforce of children,¹⁹ it did not pass.

In 1884, Gerry, again representing the NYSPCC, worked with leaders of the Workingmen’s Assembly to produce a new bill that was more stringent than the proposed 1882 bill, barring employment of children younger than 14 years; requiring an affidavit stating age and place of birth for children aged between 14 and 18 years; requiring a physician’s certificate for children younger than 18 years; barring employment at dangerous machinery or in certain specified occupations (as in the proposed bill of 1882) or in any place not properly lighted and ventilated; and limiting work hours to 10 per day or 60 per week for children younger than 21 years.²⁰ Enforcement was put in the hands of a factory inspector. Gerry’s bill passed the Senate, but was weakened during its final passage in the assembly.

At this critical juncture, the Workingmen’s Assembly played a key role in supplying data on the extent of child labor by requesting a report by the State Bureau of Labor Statistics (published in January 1885) on the extent and conditions of employment of young children in factories of New York State.²¹ A contemporary article noted:

This work must be placed to the credit of the organized workers of New York State, since the Bureau of Labor Statistics was to a certain degree their official mouthpiece.²²

Again, in 1885, bills were introduced jointly by the NYSPCC and the Workingmen’s Assembly. Aware of the growing demand for reform of child factory labor, the growing political power of labor, and the powerful cooperation between the NYSPCC and the Workingmen’s Assembly, New York’s Governor David B. Hill wrote to Gerry for his advice. Hill then presented Gerry’s views in a message to the legislature strongly urging regulation of child labor in factories.²³ In 1886, the bill drafted by Gerry and again jointly supported by the NYSPCC and the Workingmen’s Assembly was finally passed.²⁴ Nevertheless, the New York Child Labor or “Factory Act” of 1886 was the first meaningful attempt to protect children working in factories.²⁵ Before its enactment in 1886, child labor in the factories of the most populated state in the union was practically unregulated.²⁶

In 1887 and again in 1892, on the basis of the recommendations of factory inspectors in New York State, the 1886 law was revised to add further protections.²⁷ These revisions reflected the importance of first-hand observation and data collection by the inspectors. In 1892 the various factory laws that had passed since the initial act of 1886 were rewritten into a single law, creating a uniform code. By 1897 the inspection force had been expanded from only two in 1887 to 26.²⁸ In 1903 the passage of the Finch–Hill Act closed loopholes in the earlier legislation, following a campaign by the newly constituted New York Child Labor Committee.²⁹

The series of events before 1886 ended in a significant action that was an important step in protection of children³⁰ and was followed by increasingly protective legislation. Passage of the New York State Child Labor Law of 1886 was a complex and dynamic process. Many factors were involved.

SCIENCE

By the 1880s, the sciences had expanded dramatically, reaching and engaging a popular audience, and influencing the way people viewed the world.³¹ There was wide public awareness of the theory of evolution and the evidence that natural processes were guided by universal laws. The technological advances of the industrial revolution, often with direct practical benefits to society, had stimulated scientific inquiry in biology and medicine, physics, and chemistry. This was a time of public optimism about the role of science in human progress.

Between 1865 and 1900 the increased recognition of childhood as a special and vulnerable period of development led to the formal establishment of academic societies and associations focusing on children in the fields of medicine, sociology, and psychology.³² In 1880, the American Medical Association organized a pediatric section, which became the foundation for the American Pediatric Society, established in 1888 with Jacobi as its first president. During the late 19th century, universities created their first departments and programs for the newer “scientific” social sciences of sociology and social psychology.³³ In 1865, the American Social Science Association was founded, providing among other things an institutional setting where women as well as men were able to undertake empirical research.³⁴ The field of academic sociology was established in the 1890s, the American Psychological Association in 1892.³⁵ Darwin himself provided a scientific model by studying his own children and recording their cognitive and emotional development.³⁶

In the late 19th century, the sciences of occupational and environmental epidemiology were in an early stage and did not become formal disciplines until the 20th century.³⁷ However, an early epidemiological study by Sir Percival Pott in 1775 reported an association between exposure to soot and a high incidence of scrotal cancer in young English chimney sweeps.³⁸

During this period, industrial toxicology also was not yet a formally established field. Rather it mainly took the form of detailed observations by factory inspectors, statistics from surveys, and in-depth reports by health and labor professionals.³⁹ Many articles, reports of surveys, and descriptions of working conditions and industrial disease appeared in the second half of the 19th century.⁴⁰

Between the 1830s and 1870, the writings of social reformers concerned with the well-being of children, and child workers in particular, did not evidence much awareness of the biological and psychological susceptibility of the child but primarily stressed the need for their education as an antidote to immorality and crime.⁴¹ By the last decades of the 19th century, they and the educated public in general had become aware that children were biologically vulnerable, differing from adults in their biological response to toxic exposures and psychosocial stress. As highly educated people, philanthropists such as Gerry, reformers such as Etta Wheeler, physicians such as Jacobi, and politicians such as Thomas Grady were well informed of the evidence of the susceptibility of the young. (Wheeler, Jacobi, and Grady were all colleagues of Gerry at one time or another.) At the Annual Meeting of the Medical Society of the State of New York in 1882, Jacobi, then president of the Society, stated

Some branches of work should be forbidden entirely, such as mining, glassworks, rag-sorting, working in mercury, lead, arsenic, etc., and in match factories, and those which are known to interfere with physical development, and others which are known to prove highly dangerous to children and adolescence. The earliest age at which the young ought to be admitted to manufacturing employment is fourteen.⁴²

The professionals and reformers (often the same people) writing at the time were knowledgeable about the toxicity of the working environment and the special susceptibility of the young during critical life stages. In addition, they were able to effectively marshal scientific and observational data to support their arguments for the protection of this vulnerable population. Together, their writings provide a riveting account of the chemical and physical threats to the more than 1 118 258 vulnerable, wage-earning children in the United States.⁴³ For example, in “The Children at Work” (1886), the anonymous author referred to the documentation of lead-poisoned “work-children” of New York City and proceeded to describe her or his own personal observation of children in the cotton manufactories

[where] the air is composed in equal parts of cotton, tallow, machine-oil, and human expirations, heated to a temperature of seventy-five degrees. . . .⁴⁴

Stevens, an assistant factory inspector in Illinois, wrote about the health risk to these young textile workers, concluding that, in textile manufacture, the dangerous machinery, contaminated atmosphere, and inhumanely long hours do not permit normal development of a growing child.⁴⁵ She described how the glass industry wrecks the health of boys and frame gilding stiffens the child’s fingers, work in a tailor or sweat shop produces spinal curvature, and for girls “other diseases which mean lifelong pain and loss of power to bear healthy children.”⁴⁶ In bakeries, children roast before the ovens; in binderies, paper-box, and paint factories they are exposed to arsenicals, rotten paste, and poisons of paints; in metal factories the dust produces lung disease, there are accidents with hot metal, and deafness is produced by the hammering of plate.⁴⁷

Knowledge of the risks of physical injury and chemical poisoning in the workplace is evidenced by many other writers in the popular press. In 1873, Charles Loring Brace, a philanthropist in New York City and founder of the Children’s Aid Society, noted in an article in Harpers New Monthly Magazine that more than 100 000 children were at work in the factories of New York City and the neighboring districts, with another 15 000 to 20 000 who were “floaters” drifting from one factory to another. Describing in detail the work environments of envelope factories (8000 children), gold-leaf factories (number unknown), artificial flowers (10 000 to 12 000 children), and tobacco manufactories (10 000 children), the writer concluded that tobacco manufactories have by far the most noxious environment in which “the under-ground life in these damp caverns tends to keep the little workers stunted in body and mind.”⁴⁸

DeGraffenried, a graduate of Wesleyan College in 1865 and an investigator with the US Bureau of Labor assigned to research the condition of wage-earning women and children,⁴⁹ was one of the first labor investigators in the United States. She published 27 articles regarding the labor movement and won awards for essays on child labor and working women.⁵⁰ DeGraffenreid noted that “in type foundries and toy manufactories, the danger is lead poisoning,”⁵¹ and in twine factories the air is filled with floating particles of cotton and flax and must be “exceedingly unhealthful.”⁵² Her account of the many adverse effects of tobacco poison is painstakingly detailed:

extreme nervousness, maladies like St. Vitus Dance, physical weakness, disordered digestion, heart action impaired, strength sapped; the mind is excited, often the passions are inflamed and the moral sense deadened.⁵³

Stevens also observed these ills firsthand and gave a clinical account:

To know how a child is affected who breathes this atmosphere all day, bent over a tobacco bench, take up her hand and examine the shrunken, yellow finger tips, the leaden nails; lift her eyelid, and see the inflammation there; examine the glands of her neck, her skin; lay your hand upon her heart and note its murmur. Nor does the injury to the girl child in the cigar factory end with herself. The records of the medical profession show that women who have worked in the tobacco trade as children are generally sterile. When their children are not stillborn, they are almost invariably puny, anemic, of tuberculous tendency, the ready prey of disease.⁵⁴

Underpinning such detailed enumerations of the physical and psychological threats to child health and development was an evolving understanding of the biological susceptibility of the young. DeGraffenreid wrote that “the period from seven to fourteen is the most vital in the growth of the child.”⁵⁵ She noted

[M]any children are engaged at tasks too great for their physical strength, becoming consumptives in consequence or suffering serious bodily harm. . . . These years when mind and body are susceptible of the healthiest growth are spent in a monotonous round of indoor drudgery which undermines the constitution, stunts the intellect, [and] debases the higher nature. . . .⁵⁶

DeGraffenreid herself was concerned for future generations and placed great emphasis on risks to girls aged between 14 and 16 years:

[This is the] most dangerous interval in the development of womanhood; that when, as all physicians, educators and students of social science testify, the establishment of those sexual functions essential for the perpetuation of the race must not be imperiled by any undue strain on mind or body.⁵⁷

She noted that

[T]he physical organization of the female is of greater delicacy and more easily affected by unfavorable environment, [and thus] the stronger is the likelihood that the shattered constitution of the girl-worker will bequeath to generations yet unborn the scourge of inherited blood poison and the moral curse of racial depravity.⁵⁸

A clear link between the developing scientific understanding of the biological effects of child labor and legislative reform in the 1880s is evidenced by contemporary articles in the press. These include an 1882 article published in the New York Times reporting on the effort to pass the 1882 bill (the blueprint for the subsequent bills including that passed in 1886). The article summarized the main arguments supporting the bill’s passage—that childhood is a special and vulnerable period of development and the toxic environments in which children were frequently laboring were directly harmful to their health and development:

The work in which children are engaged in this City is in many cases injurious to their health. In no cases, of course, can it be healthy for children of very tender years to pursue one unvarying, unremitting round of labor for a long number of hours. But in addition to this there are additional causes of injury to health to be found in the lack of proper ventilation in many of the places in which they work, and also in the nature of the work they perform. Gold-leaf workers, for instance, are compelled, from the nature of the material in which they work, to keep the windows of their shops closed even on the warmest days. It has been claimed by physicians that work on several kinds of artificial flowers is not only injurious but positively dangerous, from the fact that arsenical poisons are used in the dyes employed in coloring the flowers. Certain branches of paper-making in which children are employed are also said to be dangerous for the same reason. In tobacco factories, in which it is said that fully 5,000 children under 15 years of age are employed, many of the boys work underground in a damp atmosphere preparing, brining, and sweetening the weed preparatory to “stemming.”⁵⁹

Photo by reporter and reformer Jacob Riis.

Contemporary articles also testified to the importance of statistical data in child labor reform.⁶⁰ The New York Times described how, in 1887, when the 1886 bill was being implemented and strengthened, Professor Felix Adler, social reformer and founder of the ethical culture movement testified that “Imperfect as statistics were on this subject in America, those at hand showed a state of affairs that demanded prompt attention and rigorous measures.”⁶¹ The American Social Science Association took pride in the growth and application of statistics in reform:

There is in the United States of America a class of offices, State and Federal, devoted to the collection of statistics relating to labor in all its aspect. Their origin may be said, in some respects, to have found its stimulus in the American Social Science Association. The evolution of the idea underlying these bureaus was rapid, while their extension has been somewhat surprising.⁶²

Photo by reporter and reformer Jacob Riis.

SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS

The social and economic transformation wrought by the industrial revolution and the massive influx of immigrants to the Eastern Seaboard States were the root causes of the surge in child labor in the United States and New York City in particular. The transformation also created new forces that led to reform of child labor law but made the process a highly contentious one, with factions split along socioeconomic lines. Poor immigrant parents opposed child labor laws, believing that their offspring had an obligation to contribute to their household’s well-being.⁶³ Privileged people viewed children as being in need of special protection. At the same time, they were concerned that poor children (especially children of immigrants) were a potential threat to society.⁶⁴

Social and economic changes in the late 19th century led to the rise of new players: educated women,⁶⁵ newly empowered labor unions, and philanthropists and charitable organizations actively engaging in public policy. By the late 19th century, with the formation of women’s colleges, for the first time American women had access to higher education.⁶⁶ In 1870, an estimated one fifth of resident college and university students in the United States were women; by 1900 the proportion had risen to more than one third.⁶⁷ Educated women engaged in reform were professional women like Stevens, DeGraffenried, and Woodbridge, but most college- and university-educated women were not themselves trained scientists. (Rossiter has written about the systematic failure to recognize the role of those women who did enter the sciences.⁶⁸) However, although most college- and university-educated women reformers were not themselves trained scientists, they were aware of the new science about children’s susceptibility to environmental and social stressors as well as the substantial social and economic costs of child labor. Teaming up with scientists, educated women became a driving force behind the new sciences of childhood and their application to reform.

The number and power of local labor union organizations had increased steadily from the mid-19th century on. Organized labor supported child labor reform out of concern for children’s health and well-being and, even more, out of fear of competition from this huge low-cost and unorganized workforce. As illustrated by the 1886 New York State Law, unions were key partners in securing reform.

Reformer–writers underscored the present and future dangers to a democratic and civilized society:

The evil in New York is evidently enormous, and most threatening to our future. These children, stunted in body and mind, are growing up to be our voters and legislators.⁶⁹

Of utmost concern, the family structure, which was seen by many reformers as critical to a civilized and functioning society, was undermined.⁷⁰ DeGraffenried wrote that the “moral and physical well-being of the community demands restriction within reasonable limits of the labor of women and children.”⁷¹ Child labor is a “social and economic wrong . . . which strikes at the safety of the home, the family, the future manhood and womanhood of the republic.”⁷²

In 1894, Woodbridge, secretary of the New York Working Women’s Society, cited the facts that child labor had led to lower wages, generally longer hours of labor, and inferior quantity and quality of production in the industries in which children are employed. She characterized child labor as an obstacle to economic progress.⁷³ In addition, the working classes are the “purchasing classes” and employment of children lessened the opportunities of employment of adults and “the consumptive powers of the community.” She provided detailed statistics supporting her argument that the employment of children reduced rather than increased family income. Lambasting the present laws regarding the labor and education of children as utterly inadequate and urging further legislation, she concluded, “Life is worth more than meat, and character than money bags.”⁷⁴ The Reverend John Talbot Smith, writing in Catholic World magazine, stated

The bodies and souls, the time, the labor, the youth, the innocence of children have a market value of one dollar and a half in the United States!⁷⁵

MORAL FACTORS

Contemporary periodicals record the powerful arguments of the reformer–writers that the practice of child labor was a moral wrong—an evil not tolerable in a civilized society. They used every weapon of biblical rhetoric, irony, and fear—conjuring images of Herod, of upper-class children rosy in sleep while skeletal, poor children dragged themselves home from work.⁷⁶ They predicted a future of an ignorant and illiterate citizenry, physically and morally degenerate as a result of the toxic and corrupting environment in which they were forced to spend half of their “unnatural lives.”⁷⁷ Child labor was

an evil which cries out strongly for instant and thorough suppression. How great it is, what havoc it has made and makes among the numerous poor, what ravages of disease and suffering it has inflicted on them, is not known even to the benevolent societies which seek the welfare of the children.⁷⁸

Characterizing child labor as child slavery with indignant references to the Bible, Stevens wrote

To force a child whose only inheritance is a weak constitution into employments which require the fullest development of mind and body is an act which out-Herods Herod.⁷⁹

She concluded

Public opinion will sometime [judge] that a nation that suffers child labor is unchristian and uncivilized, its code of laws inhuman, its people without moral sense or moral courage.⁸⁰

CODA AND CONCLUSIONS

The work of child labor reformers in the Gilded Age and early Progressive Era achieved only partial success in regulating the conditions of child labor, but was a significant step in the evolution of the field of children’s environmental health. By the late 19th century, science had emerged as an important force in policymaking to protect children’s health. Progressive reformers of the 20th century increasingly relied on scientific data in their push for reform of child labor⁸¹ and for protection of children from toxic environments generally.

Today, there remain many challenges. Despite the promise of the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child,⁸² adverse psychosocial, economic, and environmental conditions are commonplace worldwide.⁸³ In developing countries there are more than 250 million economically active children between the ages of five and 14 years, almost half of whom are engaged in hazardous work.⁸⁴ Globally more than a million children younger than five years die each year from environmentally related conditions.⁸⁵ Public health is grappling with the problems of increasing prevalence of chronic childhood diseases that are, in significant part, environmentally related, such as asthma and developmental disorders. These conditions are now understood to be related to environmental and social factors and, less importantly, to genetics. A major concern is the threat from the many toxic chemicals in the environment including air pollutants, pesticides, and chemicals in consumer products.⁸⁶ During the past decade, these contaminants have been routinely found in bodies of pregnant women, newborns, and children.⁸⁷

There has been exponential growth in scientific knowledge during the past several decades about the mechanisms involved in the biological vulnerability of the developing fetus, infant, and child to the toxic effects of both environmental pollutants and psychosocial stressors associated with poverty or race/ethnicity.⁸⁸ Scientific research in the past decades has also shown that early epigenetic alterations occurring during fetal development as a result of environmental or psychosocial insults can permanently reprogram the functional capacity of organs—with effects seen in childhood, adulthood, and in future generations.⁸⁹ In echoes from the 19th century, this scientific evidence has led scientists and reformers of the 21st century to call for new efforts to protect children from toxic chemicals in the environment and to address the socioeconomic and racial disparities in the well-being of children.⁹⁰ As the work of protecting children continues into the 21st century, scientific evidence has become increasingly important as a driver of policy, alongside moral and economic arguments.