approach might result in more integrated, culturally responsive, gender sensitive and family-

centered child mental health service system is missing.

Overall, Dr. Lyons creates a compelling case for the need to reconceptualize the existing

children’s public mental health system. He operationalizes a vision that moves the decision focus

in the mental health system to one that is based on knowledge of the needs and strengths of the

child and family at all system levels. Dr. Lyons clearly understands the complexity of the issues

facing the existing children’s public mental health system. Dr. Lyons’s vision to build healthy

communities and use the TCOM approach for creating system change makes a significant

contribution to the mental health field. In this book, Dr. Lyons presents complex information in

an easy to understand format. Overall, this is an excellent book. It is a must read for

administrators, clinicians, policy-makers, advocates, graduate students and anyone who wants to

improve the existing children’s public mental health system.

Mary C. Ruffolo

University of Michigan, School of Social Work,

1080 South University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA

E-mail address: mruffolo@umich.edu.

Tel.: +1 734 936 4799.

Shelley Sallee, The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South, University of

Georgia Press, Athens, 2004, 207 pp., 0-8203-2570-8

During the first decades of the twentieth century, as many as 25% of children between 10 and

14 years of age were employed full time, in occupations ranging from domestic service to

agriculture, from manufacturing to the street trades. Under these conditions, the regulation and

eventual elimination of child labor was a primary goal of child welfare reformers. Prior to the

enactment of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (1938), which outlawed child labor in

interstate commerce, the regulation of child labor, together with school attendance, mothers’

pensions, and the juvenile court, provided the policy agenda for child welfare reformers.

In this book, Shelley Sallee explores the development of the anti-child labor movement in

Alabama from the 1890s to the 1920s, ending with the early years of the Alabama Child Welfare

Department (CWD). The campaign emphasized the regulation of employment of white children

but not of African American children. The campaign for child labor regulation gave the national

movement to limit child labor several important leaders and resulted in the creation of the CWD in

1919. In 1931, Loraine Bedsole Tunstell, the Director of the CWD, addressed the National

Conference of Social Work on progress made in child welfare during the past decade. After listing

several of Alabama’s notable achievements of the past decade, Tunstell listed ten reform objectives

for the next decade. Ninth among these was bconsideration of the welfare of Negro children, so thatin planning for the further development of child welfare service, their various needs may be met

(Tunstall, 1931).QAs the author of the first book-length treatment of child labor reform inAlabama,

Sallee joins the small group of authors who have pointed out that the focus of much of social

welfare development before World War II was on Americans who were considered to be bwhite.QIn seven chapters, Sallee carries the story of child labor regulation in Alabama from the

coming of the textile industry to the state in the 1880s to the creation of the CWD in the 1920s.

doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2005.09.001

Book reviews860

Child labor became an issue in the industrializing Deep South as textile factories left the

Northeast and relocated in Georgia, Alabama and other southeastern states that did not regulate

child labor as stringently as Massachusetts and other states in the Northeast did. Samuel

Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), wanted Southern states to

regulate child labor and sent Irene Ashby, an English reformer, to Alabama to investigate the

employment of children in the textile industry. Gompers and Ashby promoted child labor

regulation as a child welfare measure, rather than a labor measure, believing that such an

approach would have a better chance of success in states like Alabama, where labor was largely

unorganized. Their emphasis on the bwhitenessQ of child workers was the result of a calculation

of the probable political potential of the measure.

Child workers in Alabama included both African American children and poor white children.

Middle- and upper-class whites disparagingly called poor whites bcrackers,Q implying that their

status reflected an inherent inferiority. Sallee describes the efforts of businessmen and reformers

to portray the bcrackerQ as bwhite,Q bthe descendent of the CavilierQ (p. 36), in contrast to

immigrant workers in the North and African Americans in the South. Alabama produced several

national leaders in the campaign to regulate child labor, notably Montgomery clergyman Edgar

Gardner Murphy and, Sallee argues, influenced such other national leaders as Jane Addams and

Florence Kelley to accept a bwhites onlyQ approach to child labor regulation.

For disparate reasons, both mill owners and child labor reformers emphasized the difficulties

of white child workers, often contrasting their unfortunate status with that of African American

children. Although African American children were heavily represented among child workers,

reformers emphasized protecting white child workers and directed reform efforts at industries,

such as the textile industry, in which white children were heavily represented. Occupations with

higher concentrations of African American child workers, such as agriculture and domestic

service, were excluded from the child welfare laws that were passed.

Whiteness was emphasized in the context of the growing segregation of the races in the turn

of the century Deep South. The Alabama Constitution of 1901 was designed to institutionalize

white domination and African American subjugation. Curiously, in a book on the exclusion of

African Americans from the benefits of social welfare reform in the Deep South, African

American leaders, such as Tuskegee Institute’s Booker T. Washington, receive almost no

attention. Sallee’s focus is on the white child labor reformers and white children who benefited

from their efforts. In spite of the exclusion of any attention to contemporary African American

perspectives, Sallee’s book is unique in describing the development of child welfare legislation

in a single Deep South state. It provides a valuable introduction to the development of child

labor legislation in the Deep South.

Reference

Tunstall, A. M. (1931). State and community organization for child welfare: Alabama’s program of state and local

cooperation. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, 58, 103.

Paul Stuart

University of Alabama,

School of Social Work, Tuscaloosa,

AL, United States

E-mail address: pstuart@sw.ua.edu.

doi:10.1016/j.childyouth.2005.11.003

Book reviews 861