Sadie Pfeifer, 48 inches high, has worked half a year. One of the many small children at work in Lancaster Cotton Mills,

1908

Hine, a social activist employed by the National Child Labor Committee, was hailed as one of the most influential investigative photojournalists of the Progressive era for his images of child labor in urban America. Sneaking into factories, mills, and warehouses, he took photographs that were celebrated both for their artistic merit and for making visible the deplorable and dangerous working conditions of children. Hine used a slide of this photograph of a young girl named Sadie Pfeiffer, tending a row of spinning machines in South Carolina’s Lancaster Cotton Mills, in his 1909 talk "Social Photography, How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift," which he delivered to a national conference of social workers. Photographs such as this one were instrumental in the passage of child labor laws in the United States.