1 Jan 1908 Jahr - Muller v. Oregon limits women's work hours

Beschreibung:

Child Labor Committee: A reform organization that worked (unsuccessfully) to win a federal law banning child labor. The NCLC hired photographer Lewis Hine to record brutal conditions in mines and mills where thousands of children worked.

Muller v. Oregon: A 1908 Supreme Court case that upheld an Oregon law limiting women’s workday to ten hours, based on the need to protect women’s health for motherhood. Muller established a groundwork for states to protect workers but divided women’s rights activists, some of whom saw it as discriminatory.

Mother's pensions: Progressive Era public payments to mothers who did not have help from a male breadwinner. Recipients had to meet standards of “respectability” defined by middle-class home visitors, reflecting a broader impulse to protect women but hold them to different standards than men.

The urban settlement movement called attention to poverty in America’s industrial cities. In the emerging social sciences, experts argued that unemployment and crowded slums were not caused by laziness and ignorance, as elite Americans had long believed. Instead, as journalist Robert Hunter wrote in his landmark study, Poverty (1904), such problems resulted from “miserable and unjust social conditions.”

By the early twentieth century, reformers placed particular emphasis on labor conditions for women and children. The National Child Labor Committee, created in 1907, hired photographer Lewis Hine to record brutal conditions in mines and mills where children worked. Impressed by the committee’s investigations, Theodore Roosevelt sponsored the first White House Conference on Dependent Children in 1909, bringing national attention to child welfare issues. In 1912, momentum from the conference resulted in creation of the Children’s Bureau in the U.S. Labor Department.
Those seeking to protect working-class women scored a triumph in 1908 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Muller v. Oregon, which upheld an Oregon law limiting women’s workday to ten hours. Given the Court’s ruling three years earlier in Lochner v. New York, it was a stunning victory. To win the case, the National Consumers’ League (Chapter 18) recruited Louis Brandeis, a son of Jewish immigrants who was widely known as “the people’s lawyer” for his eagerness to take on vested interests. Brandeis’s legal brief in the Muller case devoted only two pages to the constitutional issue of state police powers. Instead, Brandeis rested his arguments on data gathered by the NCL describing the toll that long work hours took on women’s health. The “Brandeis brief” cleared the way for use of social science research in court decisions. Sanctioning a more expansive role for state governments, the Muller decision encouraged women’s organizations to lobby for further reforms. Their achievements included the first law providing public assistance for single mothers with dependent children (Illinois, 1911) and the first minimum wage law for women (Massachusetts, 1912).

Muller had drawbacks, however. Though men as well as women suffered from long work hours, the Muller case did not protect men. Brandeis’s brief treated all women as potential mothers, focusing on the state’s interest in protecting future children. Brandeis and his allies hoped this would be an “opening wedge” that would open the door to broader regulation of working hours. The Supreme Court, however, seized on motherhood as the key issue, asserting that the female worker, because of her maternal function, was “in a class by herself, and legislation for her protection may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary for men.” This conclusion dismayed labor advocates and divided female reformers for decades afterward.

Male workers did benefit, however, from new workmen’s compensation measures. Between 1910 and 1917, all the industrial states enacted insurance laws covering on-the-job accidents, so workers’ families would not starve if a breadwinner was injured or killed. Some states also experimented with so-called mothers’ pensions, providing state assistance after a breadwinner’s desertion or death. Mothers, however, were subjected to home visits to determine whether they “deserved” government aid; injured workmen were not judged on this basis, a pattern of gender discrimination that reflected the broader impulse to protect women, while also holding them to different standards than men. Mothers’ pensions reached relatively small numbers of women, but they laid foundations for the national program Aid to Families with Dependent Children, an important component of the Social Security Act of 1935.
While federalism gave the states considerable freedom to innovate, state government priorities and power also limited some national reforms. In the South, for example, and in coal-mining states like Pennsylvania, companies fiercely resisted child labor laws — as did many working-class parents who relied on children’s income to keep the family fed. A proposed U.S. constitutional amendment to abolish child labor never won ratification; only four states passed it. Tens of thousands of children continued to work in low-wage jobs, especially in the South. The same decentralized power that permitted innovation in Wisconsin hampered the creation of national minimum standards for pay and job safety.

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