om manual labor is known only in theory, have
persistently ruled that the _Constitution forbade the State to make laws
protecting women workers_. It has seemed to most of our courts and most
of our judges that the State fulfilled its whole duty to its women
citizens when it guaranteed them the right freely to contract--even
though they consented, or their poverty consented, to contracts which
involved irreparable harm to themselves, the community, and future
generations. The women of this country have done nothing more important
than to educate the judiciary of the United States out of and beyond
this terrible delusion.

CHAPTER VI

MAKING OVER THE FACTORY FROM THE INSIDE

The decision of the United States Supreme Court, establishing the
legality of restricted hours of labor for Oregon working women, was
received with especial satisfaction in the State of Illinois. The
Illinois working women, or that thriving minority of them organized in
labor unions, had been waiting sixteen years for a favorable opportunity
to get an eight-hour day for themselves. Sixteen years ago the Illinois
State Legislature gave the working women such a law, and two years later
the Illinois Supreme Court took it away from them, on the ground that it
was unconstitutional.

The action of the Illinois Supreme Court was by no means without
precedent. Many similar decisions had been handed down in other States,
until it had become almost a principle of American law that protective
legislation for working women was invalid.

The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion
that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody
of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would
be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may
appear obscure.

The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, and
they know something--not much, but still something--about the men of the
working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions
under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to
public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor,
twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these
are bad things,--bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for
the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor
comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.