Nancy Woloch - A class by herself : protective laws for women workers, 1890s-1990s

A CLASS BY HERSELF

POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA

William Chafe, Gary Gerstle, Linda Gordon, and Julian Zelizer, editors

For a complete list of books in this series see:
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A CLASS BY HERSELF

Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s1990s

Nancy Woloch

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2015 by Princeton University Press

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Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

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Jacket photograph: Lewis W. Hine (18741940), photograph of workers in a paper box factory during Hines investigations of factory labor between 1909 and 1917. Courtesy of the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Woloch, Nancy, 1940 author

A class by herself : protective laws for women workers, 1890s1990s / Nancy Woloch.

pages cm. (Politics and society in twentieth-century America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-00259-0 (hardback)

1. WomenEmploymentLaw and legislationUnited StatesHistory20th century. 2. Sex discrimination in employmentLaw and legislationUnited States.History20th century. I. Title.

KF3555.W65 2015

344.7301'4133dc23

2014032483

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon Next Pro and Helvetica Neue

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

A CLASS BY HERSELF

Introduction

P ROTECTIVE LABOR LEGISLATION lies at a crossroads where womens history and legal history converge. At the end of the nineteenth century, progressive reformers launched a campaign to improve the lives of industrial workersto limit hours, raise wages, ameliorate working conditions, and promote occupational safety. A mix of popular, legislative, and judicial resistance impeded the passage of laws that affected men in the workforce. Laws to protect women and children, however, surged to the top of reformers agendas; women who pressed for such measures assumed central roles in progressive reform. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, most states passed not only laws to regulate child labor but also at least some type of womens labor laws, that is, measures to provide maximum hours, minimum wages, night work bans, or occupational exclusions. Such laws, their advocates claimed, would redress the special disadvantages that women faced in the labor market. They would also provide an entering wedge for more general laws that affected mena beachhead from which to promote labor standards for all employees.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the entering wedge strategy both succeeded and failed. A legal revolution in the New Deal vindicated the reformers efforts: the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 provided labor standards for men and women and laid a foundation for the modern regulatory state. Women-only protective laws thus served a major purpose that their proponents had envisioned. The reformers triumph, however, had a downside. The Progressive Era left in its wake scores of state protective laws that treated women as a separate class, that confirmed and perpetuated a gendered division of labor, and that remained in place for decades to come. In the 1920s, the laws evoked heated conflict among activist women who debated the merits of protection versus the unknown impact of a proposed equal rights amendment. The debate persisted, though with wavering intensity, until the 1960s, when a second legal revolution, catalyzed by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, led to the death of single-sex protective laws. The long history of protective legislation in the twentieth century, in short, embraces two issues: 1. Whether the state can regulate conditions of employment, and 2. Whether women are different or equal under law. Political and judicial upheavals ultimately resolved both issues, though vestiges of the disputes once linked to each survive todayin efforts to extend or revoke workplace standards or in debates among feminists over strategies to insure equality.

This book explores the development and impact of single-sex protective labor laws from their origins at the end of the nineteenth century to the 1990s. It considers the context in which they arose, the goals of their proponents, their effects on employers and employees, the resistance they faced, the feuds they provoked, the factors that led to their collapse in the 1960s and 1970s, the debates that persisted until (and even after) their death, and their many ramifications over timein politics, the workplace, the womens movement, the labor movement, and the legal system. Of special concern: the personnel of protectionthe groups of reformers, social scientists, labor leaders, lawyers, and judges who shaped protective policies; the womens institutions and bureaucracies that sustained protective laws, notably the National Consumers League and the Womens Bureau; the growth of a feminist opposition; the ways in which women workers affected by protective laws responded to them; and above all, the constitutional conversation that protective laws generatedthe decades of argument over the laws, in the courts and outside them. Embracing two parallel fields of scholarly inquiry, this study underlines the points at which legal history and womens history intersect and explores the circuitry that connects them. The legal process and constitutional questions unquestionably shaped protectionists options and tactics, though the road ran two ways; activist women also shapedand then reshapedthe law.