For example:  Christmas happens on a Friday.  The firm decides to keep the store open on the following day—­Saturday.  There is an expression of dissatisfaction from a number of clerks.  A meeting of the association is called, and a vote taken as to whether the majority want the extra holiday or not; whether the majority are willing to lose the commissions on a day’s sales, for, of course, salaries continue.  The vote reveals that the majority want the holiday.  The Store Council so reports to the firm, and the firm must grant the holiday.

All matters of difficulty arising between employers and employed, in the Filene store, are settled not by the firm, but by the Arbitration Board of Employees, also elected by popular vote.  All disagreements as to wages, position, promotion, all questions of personal issue between saleswomen and aislemen, or others in authority, are referred to the Board of Arbitration, and the board’s decision is final.  There is no tyranny of the buyer, no arbitrary authority of the head of a department.  Every clerk knows that her tenure is secure as long as she is an efficient saleswoman.

Surely it is not too much to hope that, in a future not too far distant, all women who earn their bread will serve a system of industry adjusted by law to human standards.  In enlightened America the courts, presided over by men to whom 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.