Louis D. Brandeis | Brief for Defendant in Error, Muller v. Oregon, 1908
In defense of the Oregon law restricting women’s industrial work to ten hours, Louis Brandeis sought to persuade the Supreme Court that medical and sociological evidence proved that it was reasonable to pass legislation to protect women’s health. Brandeis, a lawyer who would later become a Supreme Court justice, together with Josephine Goldmark of the National Consumers League, presented a 113-page brief furnishing excerpts of reports from doctors and industrial commissions attesting to dangers of working long hours on women’s health.
The Dangers of Long Hours
A. Causes
(1) Physical differences between men and women.
The dangers of long hours for women arise from their special physical organization taken in connection with the strain incident to factory and similar work.
Long hours of labor are dangerous for women primarily because of their special physical organization. In structure and function women are differentiated from men. Besides these anatomical and physiological differences, physicians are agreed that women are fundamentally weaker than men in all that makes for endurance: in muscular strength, in nervous energy, in the powers of persistent attention and application. Overwork, therefore, which strains endurance to the utmost, is more disastrous to the health of women than of men, and entails upon them more lasting injury. . . .
Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1884
We secured the personal history of these 1,032 of the whole 20,000 working girls of Boston, a number amply sufficient for the scientific purposes of the investigation. . . .
Long hours, and being obliged to stand all day, are very generally advanced as the principal reasons for any lack or loss of health occasioned by the work of the girls. . . . There appears, as far as my observation goes, quite a predisposition to pelvic disease among the female factory operatives. . . . The necessity for instrumental delivery has very much increased within a few years, owing to the females working in the mills while they are pregnant and in consequence of deformed pelvis. Other uterine diseases are produced, and, in other cases, aggravated in consequence of the same.
The effect of women’s overwork on future generations
Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1871
. . . It is well known that like begets like, and if the parents are feeble in constitution, the children must also inevitably be feeble. Hence, among that class of people, you find many puny, sickly, partly developed children; every generation growing more and more so.
Source: Louis D. Brandeis, “Brief for Defendant in Error,” Curt Muller v. State of Oregon, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1907, No. 107: 18, 39–40, 51.
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