On February 24, 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in the case of Muller v. Oregon. That case had begun three years earlier when a supervisor at the Grand Laundry in Portland, Oregon, forced a laundress and labor activist named Emma Gotcher to work overtime. That requirement violated Oregon’s ten-hour day law, which had been passed in 1903 in order to protect the health of women in factories and laundries. When the owner of the laundry, Curt Muller, was convicted of a misdemeanor as a result of this violation, he appealed his conviction all the way to the Supreme Court on the grounds that it violated his right to freely contract with his workers.

While there is an interesting legal history to this case, as a historian of labor and industrialization I think its sociological significance is even more important. That significance derives from a brief coauthored by Josephine Goldmark of the National Consumers League (NCL), the future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, and a team of researchers. Since Brandeis, then a prominent Boston attorney, had been hired by the NCL to represent the State of Oregon before the Supreme Court, the product of this effort has come to be known as the Brandeis Brief.

You can find a scan of the Brandeis Brief in its entirety on the Web site of the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. (Brandeis was a native of Louisville, Kentucky.) The introduction there explains:

The brief was significant in that it was the first one submitted to the Supreme Court that relied primarily on extra-legal data to prove its argument.

In fact, the vast majority of the brief is nothing but excerpts of reports on the adverse effect of employment in factories upon men and women compiled from around the world. Therefore, to look at the brief as an extra-legal document does not do justice to the significance of its findings. The Brandeis Brief was, in essence, a pioneering anthology of the damage that industrialization inflicted upon workers.
Indeed, the fact that this damage crossed national boundaries makes the Brandeis Brief as good a primary source to study industrialization in general as it is for studying American law. For example, a German government report cited in the brief linked long hours to industrial accidents: “Many accidents are no doubt due to the relaxed vigilance and lessening of bodily strength following excessive hours of work (43).” German or American, this effect was the same. On a different note, a British study specific to laundries cited by Brandeis and Goldmark concluded, “The constant exposure to steam, standing on wet floors, the great heat in which the work is carried on, and the long hours at exhausting work, amply explains the tendency to pulmonary disease (108).” Limiting hours did not eliminate these ill-effects, but presumably it must have improved upon them.

The harms I’ve cited so far were not specific to women, but the Brandeis Brief did include many reports of ill effects of overwork that were supposed to be more alarming because they happened to the supposedly weaker sex. “I have noticed that the hard, slavish overwork is driving those girls into the saloons (45),” a Massachusetts textile worker reported in testimony cited by Brandeis and Goldmark. Such an effect would not have been at all remarkable if the workers had been men. On a darker note, the brief cited a doctor reporting to the British parliament, “I think that the committee would be perfectly surprised to find what a large number of these women are rendered sterile in consequence of these prolonged hours (37).” Such concerns strongly played into notions of race suicide that evolved from the eugenics movement that was just then coming to prominence in America.

Under the influence of the Brandeis Brief, Oregon won its case. While there may have been damage caused to the reputation of women by putting them on a pedestal in order to protect their reproductive organs, there were good effects too. Most notably, the Supreme Court was only willing to uphold hours limitations on women workers in 1908, but limitations on the hours that men could work came later. In Bunting v. Oregon (1917), the Supreme Court upheld a 1913 Oregon law that established a ten-hour limit for factory workers of either gender.

More importantly, in its landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, the Supreme Court explicitly made use of sociological evidence in the body of its opinion as a way to justify sweeping social change. In fact, the extra-legal strategy of the Brandeis Brief has become common in modern Supreme Court cases, even those that have nothing to do with labor. So while the justifications in the Brandeis Brief for protecting women look sexist from a modern perspective, the end result has nonetheless proven good for the cause of equality overall.

Jonathan Rees is associate professor of history at Colorado State University–Pueblo. His academic specialties are American labor and economic history. He blogs (mostly) about historical subjects at More or Less Bunk.