In the headquarters of the National League in New York City a group of trained experts work constantly, collecting and recording a vast body of facts concerning the human side of industry.  It is ammunition which tells.  One single blast of it, fired in the direction of a laundry in Portland, Oregon, two years ago, performed the wonderful feat of blowing a large hole through the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

There was a law in Oregon which decreed that the working day of women in factories and laundries should be ten hours long.  The law was constantly violated, especially in the steam laundries of Portland.  One night a factory inspector walked into the laundry of one Curt Muller, and found working there, long after closing time, one Mrs. Gotcher.  The inspector promptly sent Mrs. Gotcher home and arrested Mr. Muller.

The next day in court Mr. Muller was fined ten dollars.  Instead of paying the fine he appealed, backed up in his action by the other laundrymen of Portland, on the ground that the ten-hour law for women workers was unconstitutional.  The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees to every adult member of the community the right freely to contract.  A man or a woman may contract with an employer to work as many hours a day, or a night, for whatever wages, in whatever dangerous or unhealthful or menacing conditions, unless “there is fair ground to say that there is material danger to the public health or safety, or to the health and safety of the employee, or to the general welfare....”  This is the legal decision on which most protective legislation in the United States has been based.

Several years ago, in Illinois, a law providing an eight-hour day for women was declared unconstitutional because nobody’s health or safety was endangered; and on the same grounds the same fate met a New York law forbidding all-night employment of women.

So Mr. Curt Muller and the laundrymen of Portland, Oregon, had reason to believe that they could attack the Oregon law.  The case was appealed, and appealed again, by the laundrymen, and finally reached the Supreme Court of the United States.  Then the Consumers’ League took a hand.

The brief for the State of Oregon, “defendant in error,” was prepared by Louis D. Brandeis, of Boston, assisted by Josephine Goldmark, one of the most effective workers in the League’s New York headquarters.  This brief is probably one of the most remarkable legal documents in existence.  It consists of one hundred and twelve printed pages, of which a few paragraphs were written by the attorney for the State.  All the rest was contributed, under Miss Goldmark’s direction, from the Consumers’ League’s wonderful collection of reasons why women workers should be protected.

The League’s reply to the Oregon laundrymen who asked leave to work their women employees far into the night was, “The World’s Experience upon Which the Legislation Limiting the Hours of Labor for Women is Based.”  It is simply a mass of testimony taken from hearings before the English Parliament, before state legislatures, state labor boards; from the reports of factory inspectors in many countries; from reports of industrial commissions in the United States and elsewhere; from medical books; from reports of boards of health.