Innocent Witnesses: Childhood Memories of World War II by Marilyn Yalom (review)

child labor history. For example, at the times when Massachusetts passed child labor laws and Illinois passed factory inspection laws, both states were run by a single party (Whigs and Democrats, respectively) that supported the legislation. In the case of Belgium, which did not adopt child labor laws during the 1830s, child labor was nearly twice as prevalent as in France, which did (85, 88). These factors may be more important than Anderson admits. Readers may also question whether Anderson pays enough attention to the socioeconomic status of her agents of reform. Those who often had the least success, particularly in Anderson’s US examples, were also those who had the least education and were once working-class laborers themselves, suggesting that structural reasons for success or failure are potentially more important than individual agency. Nevertheless, whether or not Anderson’s metrics for reformer success are compelling as explanatory, Agents of Reform does convincingly demonstrate that, to a large extent, “the origins of regulatory welfare . . . depended on the ideas and agency of individual policy entrepreneurs” (116). The stories of how such agents of reform attempted to transform their ideas and agency into child labor legislation on both sides of the Atlantic make Anderson’s book a valuable contribution to the field of childhood studies.