Excerpts from a speech first given at the TEXTILE MUSEUM in Toronto, Ontario on May 23, 2007.

Let me begin by telling you a story. The year — 1912. The place — Toronto. Emily Watson – 12-years-old – has a dream. Because her father has a steady job in a factory, Emily can go to school. She's good in school and her dream is to stay there until she's 14 so that when she gets her leaving certificate she'll be qualified for one of the new jobs opening up for women – as an office worker, a typewriter lady or – best of all – a Bell Telephone operator.

    She's on track, her dream is almost a reality, and then her father is laid off. He walks the streets looking for work but too many others are in the same position. So he does as many men in those days did – he takes a risk and travels west –looking for work. "I'll send you money," he promises his wife and she believes him. What else can they do?

    Months pass and no money comes. But pretty soon the sheriff's bailiff comes and the Watson family is evicted — thrown out on the street. They have barely enough money left to pay the rent on two squalid little rooms in The Ward – Toronto's notorious slum area. Because the youngest children are still babies Mrs. Watson can't go out to work. Their only hope is 12-year-old Emily. She must leave school and look for work.

    Emily is still two years shy of the legal working age of 14. The only industry that will consider underage workers is the garment industry, the textile trade. And so she finally finds a job in a shirtwaist factory as a clipping girl – one of the underpaid, unskilled child workers who stand for 12 hours a day clipping threads from the finished garments. She is allowed barely half an hour for lunch and if she is late arriving in the morning, or stays too long in the washroom, or cuts a nick in the fabric while she's working, she's docked two –or five –or ten cents from her meager wage of $4 a week.

    Despite this, Emily is one of the lucky ones. She's been to school. Once she's of age she has the chance of a better job. The girls she finds already working in the factory are recent immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe. They speak little English. They don't understand the ways of their new country. They are very easy to exploit.

    Emily Watson is a fictional character but her life is based on the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, most of them female, who were exploited by factory owners in the days before there were laws strong enough to keep children in school until they were 14, and before they had unions to fight their battles once they were old enough to work legally.

    As I started to write Emily's story I wondered how I was going to recreate the squalor of the life these children led. Coming from a middle class background and living in a city that has been mostly cleared of Dickensian slums, I found these scenes hard to imagine. But then I discovered the treasure trove of archival photos in the City of Toronto Archives – an amazing visual documentation of the lives lived by Toronto's working poor one hundred years ago. Let me tell you how Toronto came to have such historical treasure.

    One theme in my book concerns the social justice movement that swept North America—particularly the industrial cities—at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The Industrial Revolution had created urban slums of appalling squalor. The voices that spoke out against these abuses were often met by an attitude of indifference or outright hostility. The prevailing attitude was: Slum dwellers are poor because they're lazy. Let them work harder if they want a better life. To combat this self-righteous Victorian lack of understanding, reformers had to be creative.

    Toronto, in the decade before the First World War, had many reformers, including two particularly prominent men: Joseph Atkinson of the Toronto Daily Star and Dr. Charles Hastings, the Medical Officer of Health. Both were appalled at the living conditions forced on the poor, most of whom were immigrants. These men were impelled first by a sense of common decency – the conviction that this was no way to treat fellow human beings. But Dr. Hastings in particular, was driven by another imperative. Slums were a breeding ground for disease. Few of the houses had flush toilets or running water and the filth from open-pit privies was contaminating the city's water supply, which came from Lake Ontario. As a result, both typhoid fever and tuberculosis were out of control in Toronto before the First World War.

    Dr. Hastings was particularly aware of the need to eradicate disease. His daughter had died from drinking tainted milk. Determined that no other parent would suffer such a tragedy, by 1914 Hastings had pushed Toronto to become Ontario's first city to require that all milk brought into its borders be pasteurized. As a result, in less than two years, he cut infant mortality in half, down to 131 deaths in every one thousand children.

    The most compelling weapon Joseph Atkinson and Charles Hastings found in their battle against slum conditions was the photograph. In 1911 the city hired photographer Arthur Goss, and Dr. Hastings was quick to send him out to document the living conditions of the poor. This graphic record of want, misery and despair was a powerful weapon in the fight to release public money to clean up the slums. Again, within two years of starting his campaign, Dr. Hastings had rid the city of 80% of the pit privies – source of the worst of the contamination.

    It was this same visual record that nearly one hundred years later showed me the characters and setting of my story. Looking at street scenes from The Ward, Corktown and Cabbagetown I saw details that gave me a sense of what life was like not only for people living at the time, but more important for me, what life must be like for the fictional characters I was inserting into a real streetscape.

    What I found most surprising about these photos was the faces of the children. Living in squalor, dressed in rags, they turned faces to the camera that were pinched from hunger, but also were blazing with life. Their eyes are fierce and knowing. They do not look like victims. They are street smart and in charge. One girl, no more than ten, has been pushing a rickety baby stroller in which sits a bag of coal that she has obviously scavenged – chunk by chunk – from the back of some industrial site. As she turns to the camera her body language is full of cocky, self-assurance. "See what I've done?" She seems to be saying. She knows that her ingenuity is essential to keeping her family afloat in precarious circumstances.

    These entrepreneurial urchins sent me an important message across the decades: "We aren't victims," they said. "Don't make us sound pitiful." I realized that no matter how dire the circumstances I created for my characters, I needed to show them behaving with spunk. Because of what I saw in the photos, I felt justified in making my protagonist a child who stands up and fights back. And in fact without the courage of many hundreds of teen-aged girls, the garment industry would not have been unionized.

    One archival photo in particular turned out to be perfect for the cover, a wonderfully evocative photo of five girls posing outside a factory. The middle girl, who became Emily in my mind, stands, hand on hip, with a look on her face that says "Don't mess with me." I would like to meet this Emily, the real girl in the archival photo. Ever since I set eyes on her I've wanted to know how her life really worked out.

    It took North American a long time to pass child labour laws with teeth in them. And in the end it was the Great Depression that finally took children out of factories – unfortunately not because it was the right thing to do for the children, but because men needed their jobs. However, whatever the motivation, child labour is now—for the most part—a thing of the past in North America.

    The fight for the rights of children has moved to the Third World, where the textile industry is beset by problems similar to the ones we faced just a century ago. The solutions, however, will not easily be found.

    We in the West enjoy the benefits of cheap, well-made, "off-shore" textiles – but these are often the product of sweat-shop child labour. On the other hand, that labour is essential to the survival of many Third World families – just as Emily's work was essential to the economic survival of her family.

    The simple solution—banning such child labour—could cause more distress than do the conditions under which the children work. So let me leave you with one of the big questions of the 21st century: "When it comes to helping the working poor of the world – Where do we go from here?"