From the archives: Rheta Childe Dorr on labor and hour restrictions

In the Progressive Era, a number of state legislatures passed laws (purporting) to protect women in the workplace, primarily by restricting the time of day, number of hours, and types of jobs women were allowed to work.  In a 1925 copy of Good Housekeeping, Rheta Childe Dorr took aim at this paternalism:

About the time this article is published, women's clubs all over the country will be reassembling, and before long, their committee chairmen will be reporting on legislative measures purporting to protect women wage-earners by limiting and restricting their hours of work...

My first protest is against classing grown women with children under the law. Practically all laws limiting hours of work, prohibiting night work, and providing for a minimum wage are enacted for women and minors. I say "practically" just to be on the safe side. As a matter of fact, it is the routine thing to class woman labor with child labor or adolescent boy and girl labor.

The reason given is that the vast majority of "females in gainful occupations" are girls of tender years, temporary invaders of industry, pathetic filters between the schoolroom and the matrimonial altar; I could if I had space quote statistical tables to prove the untruth of these generalizations. Few would read the statistics, and besides, I should rather have Good Housekeeping readers think of working women as human beings, rather than rows of figures. However, I will state that the last census gave the number of women, eighteen and over, in industry as 7,502,700. Nearly two million of these adult women were married. These wage-earners are not children. Why interfere with their rights to earn the highest possible wage by putting them under the police power of the State? All the arguments in favor of such a policy, boil down to one sentimental aphorism. "Women are women." Different from men. Weaker...

In 1919 the welfare advocate pushed through the Legislature a fifty hour law and a prohibition against night work for the transportation workers. Ninety percent of the nearly 1000 women in New York immediately lost their jobs, only a small number of ticket sellers escaped the general slaughter.

"They told us the fifty-four hour law would put us on Easy Street." I heard one woman say. "Well, it put us on the street all right!"

Excerpts can't give the article justice.  Each paragraph is brilliant, and Dorr's humor is evident despite her frustration.  Read the full thing here. 

Though I would not dare admit as much around polite society, I owe this find to Rehabilitating Lochner, David E. Bernstein's new revisionist history of the titular case.