Child Labor Outside the Family (From the End of the Nineteenth to the First Third of the Twentieth Century)

Abstract The study reviews the issue of child labor in Hungary with a historical, ethnographic approach, from the perspective of the division of labor within the family, the economic and social situation of the family. For several millenia, children have been involved in some activity within their family and kinship system, according to their age, gender, physical and mental maturity, and have been assigned increasingly complex tasks as part of the process of preparing for adult life and adulthood. When the economic and social unity of families was damaged for whatever reason, crises, poverty, and misery disrupted the natural family division of labor, and children had to seek and work for wages, food, or other benefits, with the approval or even encouragement of their parents. This means that they also played a significant role in families' struggles to survive and overcome poverty, while their exposure and vulnerability increased outside the family framework. The paper will explore the latter form of child labor outside the family.