The 1908 U.S. Supreme Court case Muller v. Oregon stands as a landmark—though a rather ambiguous one—in the history of both female reform and constitutional jurisprudence. The case arose from the criminal prosecution of a laundry owner who violated an Oregon statute limiting the hours of women's employment to ten per day. The question before the Court was whether the statute conflicted with the guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment that bars states from depriving any person of liberty or property without due process of law.
The Oregon law at stake in Muller typified the gender-based, protective labor legislation central to reform in the Progressive Era. The crusade for such enactments was led by a cross-class alliance of women reformers in the National Consumers' League and the Women's Trade Union League.
The Muller case upheld the constitutionality of the hours law. Paradoxically, it arrived at a ruling quite radical in its day through thoroughly conventional patriarchal reasoning. The Court recognized the legitimacy of legislation restricting labor exploitation, contravening the free market and abridging fundamental individual rights of liberty of contract. But it did so in the name of woman's physical frailty, traditional dependence, and reproductive destiny—what the justices termed "inherent" sexual difference. The ruling sharply distinguished between protective laws for women and men. In the Court's eyes, the sex-specific "burdens of motherhood," which made women unequal to men as economic competitors, together with public interest in procreation, afforded women a unique entitlement to special legal protection as wage earners.
The Muller decision represented a triumph for female reform. Yet its legacy remains troubling, for it etched female dependence into constitutional doctrine, enshrined gender as a legitimate legal category, and defined women as a distinct and unequal class of citizens.
Amy Dru Stanley
See also
Protective Labor Legislation.
