Muller v. Oregon 1908
| Author | Daniel Brannen, Richard Hanes, Elizabeth Shaw |
| Pages | 1010-1016 |
Page 1010
Appellant: Curt Muller
Appellee: State of Oregon
Appellant's Claim: That an Oregon law prohibiting women from working more than ten hours a day is unconstitutional.
Chief Lawyers for Appellant: William D. Fenton, Henry H. Gilfry
Chief Lawyers for Appellee: H. B. Adams, Louis Brandeis
Justices for the Court: David J. Brewer, William R. Day, Melville W. Fuller, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph McKenna, William H. Moody, Rufus W. Peckham, Edward D. White
Justices Dissenting: None
Date of Decision: February 24, 1908
Decision: Ruled in favor of Oregon by agreeing with a lower court that women are a "special class" of citizens in need of protection at the workplace.
Significance: The classification of women as a special class brought mixed results. The decision paved the way for men and children to later receive similar protections under state laws regulating workplace conditions. But, the ruling also reinforced sexual discrimination in the workplace experienced by many women through the rest of the twentieth century.
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For years women have fought cultural stereotypes depicting females as the "weaker sex." Such perceptions have long been a part of English tradition dating back at least to the medieval period of history. Women were considered primarily as wives and mothers, to be protected from the rough world outside the home. In marriage a wife's identity would be fully merged into the husband's. This idea carried forward until the mid-nineteenth century when states began recognizing wives more as separate persons. Still unable to vote in elections, the growing feminist political movement of the mid-nineteenth century focused on gaining voting rights.
Other issues also began to attract attention as well. During the industrial expansion following the American Civil War (1861–1865), workers' conditions were often deplorable. By the late nineteenth century, mass immigration from Europe to the U.S. industrial cities led to many women seeking work in the factories. "Sweat shops" became common. Almost twenty states passed laws placing women in a special legal class for protection from such harsh work conditions. Among these was Oregon which passed a law in February of 1903 setting the maximum number of hours a woman could work in a day. The act stated that "no female [shall] be employed in any mechanical establishment, or factory, or laundry in this state more than ten hours during any one day."
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the growing public demand for regulation of businesses collided with the prevailing legal ideas that the "liberty of contract" as provided in Section 10 of Article I of the Constitution prohibited just about all forms of government interference in business. The liberty of contract is a basic freedom to make agreements with others. Many claimed the freedom to contract for labor was protected from state regulation by the Due Process Clause of the...
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