When Curt Muller required his female employees to work shifts in excess of ten hours at Grand Laundry in Portland, Oregon, it is unlikely he thought he was threatening future of human race. However, when he received a fine for overworking women in his laundry and contested fine's constitutionality before Supreme Court, Court's Justices would argue that matter of women's labor hours brought to fore precisely this issue. As first decade of twentieth century opened, labor reformers and captains of industry waged numerous battles over labor hours and conditions. Because stories of women and children suffering on factory floors gained sympathy for labor movement and sold newspapers, cases concerning women and minors typically led way for other labor regulations. In Supreme Court's 1908 ruling on Muller v. Oregon, Court found that a woman's special reproductive function could take precedence over freedom of contract established by due process clause in 14th Amendment. Muller is notable not just because it took an important first step in limiting demands employers could place upon workers, but also because it flew in face of Lochner v. New York (1905), and thus established a precedent for different treatment of men and women under law. In contradistinction to Lochner--which found that state could not legislate a maximum number of labor hours for male bakery workers without violating 14th Amendment--in his delivery of Court's opinion, Justice Brewer noted that although not all women are mothers, it is not unconstitutional to enforce a maximum number of labor hours for women because the of race justifies to protect her from greed as well as passions of men. Therefore, Justice Brewer notes, limitations which this statute [48 Or. 252] places upon her contractual powers, upon her fight to agree with her employer as to time she shall labor, are not imposed solely for her benefit, but also largely for benefit of all. The rhetoric in Brewer's opinion makes at least two important conversions: first, conversion of all women to mothers; second, a conversion of mothers to incomplete legal persons--persons who cannot fully exercise right to contract their labor. In other words, if ability to contract one's labor is a measure of legal personhood, Muller v. Oregon presupposes that protection of women and well-being of race requires legal limitation of this particular measure of personhood because as representative persons (mothers of race), women can never be same kind of legal persons that men are. Concerns about right to contract one's labor and definitions of personhood frequently intersected in American Progressive Era. In his reading of Muller Daniel Rodgers notes, From beginnings of protective labor legislation movement, assumption that women and children belonged in a separate, special category of workers had been central (239). One need only envision horror of 146 women burning alive or jumping to their deaths during Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 to understand public concern about working conditions for women. Popular fiction and film from century's first decade, including Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and white slavery film Traffic in Souls (1913), added a salacious undertone to physical risks female workers faced by drawing attention to unscrupulous men who might prey upon working girls. Furthermore, women may have been especially vulnerable to labor exploitation because union organizers typically overlooked female laborers in their organizing efforts. As Alice Kessler-Harris explains, out of all women engaged in industrial occupations in 1910 only 1.5 percent of these women were in unions (92). With women thus isolated from labor movement, sex-based legislation like Muller, paternalistic as its tone might be, may have been an important inroad to labor reform for female workers who were going largely ignored by American Federation of Labor. …
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Apr 1, 2013
Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt 
Open Access