Muller v. Oregon

Muller v. Oregon (1908), a U.S. Supreme Court decision granting states the right to regulate the hours of women workers.The case began when laundry‐owner Curt Muller, convicted of violating Oregon's ten‐hour law for women, carried his appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing that the statute infringed his right to contract freely with his workers. At issue, then, was whether states had the power to intervene on behalf of employees in employment relationships. In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court had overthrown a New York law regulating the hours of bakers. The opportunity to prepare evidence in defense of the Oregon law fell to Florence Kelley and her research chief at the National Consumers' League (NCL), Josephine Goldmark. The case exemplified Kelley's strategy of using gender‐specific means to achieve classwide goals. Goldmark collected extensive evidence to prove that long hours jeopardized women's health and morals, and her brother‐in‐law Louis Brandeis argued the case before the Court. His famous “Brandeis Brief,” a compilation of sociological and medical evidence, persuaded the high court to uphold Oregon's law. Writing for the majority, Justice David Brewer accepted the argument that overwork was injurious to women, and that the state bore a responsibility for protecting women “to preserve the strength of the race.”

The ruling led many more states to regulate working conditions. It also popularized the practice of introducing sociological and medical data to establish legal claims. This approach, central to the concept that came to be known as “legal realism,” helped lay the groundwork for such later landmark decisions as Brown v. Board of Education. While women's organizations supported the Muller decision at the time, changes in working conditions and in ideology brought about a reversal of attitude, and in the 1960s and 1970s the National Organization for Women and other feminist organizations successfully campaigned for the removal of gender‐specific laws.
See also Progressive Era; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Josephine Goldmark , Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley's Life Story, 1953.
Nancy Woloch , Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents, 1996.

Kathryn Kish Sklar