Muller v. Oregon - Significance, A Clash Of Ideas, With Friends Like These . . ., The Aftermath, Further Readings

Muller v. Oregon - Further Readings

Muller v. Oregon - Significance

Pigeonholing women as a special (weaker) class sex in need of minimum wages and maximum hours won the battle but lost the war, perpetuating sex-segregation in the work place. On 18 September 1905, an Oregon launderer, Mrs. Elmer Gotcher, brought a complaint against her boss at the Portland Grand Laundry. She claimed Curt Muller had let his overseer, Joe Hazelbock, make her work more than ten hours…

Muller v. Oregon - A Clash Of Ideas

These two ideas--the state's "special interest" in regulating business and the Constitution's protection of "liberty of contract"--clashed dramatically during the Progressive Era (1900 to World War I). In 1905, the Supreme Court upheld "liberty of contract" in Lochner v. New York by overturning a state law setting sixty hours a week as the maximum hours that (mostly male) bakers could work. The Lo…

Muller v. Oregon - With Friends Like These . . .

Brandeis, however, claimed that women as a group needed special protection, using the widespread assumption that women were the "weaker sex." He said it was "common knowledge" that to permit women to work more than ten hours a day in factories, laundries, and the like "[was] dangerous to public health, safety, morals [and] welfare." This argument forced the Court to reconsider Lochner v. New York.…

Muller v. Oregon - The Aftermath

After Muller, many states passed wages and hours laws and other statutes regulating the conditions of work. However, in 1923, the Supreme Court ruled this legislation was unconstitutional in Adkins v. Children's Hospital. Then the Great Depression of the 1930s forced the Court to reverse its decision. In the 1937 case West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, the Court--drawing on Muller v. Oregon--overruled i…