employer had been negligent. Gradually the states
adopted accident insurance plans, and some began to
grant pensions to widows with small children. Most
manufacturers favored such measures, if for no other
reason than that they regularized procedures and
avoided costly lawsuits.
The passage of so much state social legislation
sent conservatives scurrying to the Supreme Court
for redress. Such persons believed that no govern-
ment had the power to deprive either workers or
employers of the right to negotiate any kind of labor
contract they wished. The decision of the Supreme
Court in Lochner v. New Yorkseemed to indicate that
the justices would adopt this point of view. When an
Oregon law limiting women laundry workers to ten
hours a day was challenged in Muller v. Oregon
(1908), Florence Kelley and Josephine Goldmark of
the Consumers’ League persuaded Louis D. Brandeis
to defend the statute before the Court.
The Consumers’ League, whose slogan was
“investigate, agitate, legislate,” was probably the most
effective of the many women’s reform organizations of
the period. With the aid of league researchers, Brandeis
prepared a remarkable brief stuffed with economic and
sociological evidence indicating that long hours dam-
aged both the health of individual women and the
health of society. This nonlegal evidence greatly
impressed the justices, who upheld the constitutional-
ity of the Oregon law. “Woman’s physical structure,
and the functions she performs in consequence thereof,
justify special legislation,” they concluded. After 1908
the right of states to protect women, children, and
workers performing dangerous and unhealthy tasks by
special legislation was widely accepted. The use of the
“Brandeis brief” technique to demonstrate the need for
such legislation became standard practice.
Little Spinner in Globe Cotton Millat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Political Reform: The Woman Suffrage Movement
On the national level the Progressive Era saw the cul-
mination of the struggle forwoman suffrage. The
shock occasioned by the failure of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments to give women the vote after
the Civil War continued to embitter most leaders of the
movement. But it resulted in a split among feminists.
One group, the American Woman Suffrage Association
(AWSA), focused on the vote question alone. The
more radical National Woman Suffrage Association
(NWSA), led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B.
Anthony, concerned itself with many issues of impor-
tance to women as well as suffrage. The NWSA put the
View theImageimmediate interests of women ahead of everything else.
It was deeply involved in efforts to unionize women
workers, yet it did not hesitate to urge women to be
strikebreakers if they could get better jobs by doing so.
Aside from their lack of unity, feminists were handi-
capped in the late nineteenth century by widely held
Victorian ideals: Sex was a taboo topic, and women were
to be “pure” guardians of home and family. Even under
the best of circumstances, dislike of male-dominated
society is hard enough to separate from dislike of men.
Most feminists, for example, opposed contraception,
insisting that birth control by any means other than con-
tinence would encourage what they called masculine
lust. And the trend of nineteenth-century scientific
thinking influenced by the Darwinian concept of bio-
logical adaptation led to the conclusion that the female
personality was different from that of the male and that
the differences were inherent, not culturally determined.
These ideas and prejudices enticed feminists into a
logical trap. If women were morally superior to men—
a tempting conclusion—giving women the vote wouldPolitical Reform: The Woman Suffrage Movement 565Another argument in support of woman suffrage claimed that
women were intrinsically betterthan men. Note that this woman in
the turn-of-the-century poster, crowned by a halo, has her clothes
arranged in the shape of a cross.