WORKERS, WIVES AND MOTHERS : THE PROBLEM OF MINIMUM WAGE LAWS FOR WOMEN IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Lipschultz, Sybil.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Subjects (All):

United States--History.

United States.

History.

0337.

Local Subjects:

0337.

Physical Description:

208 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 47-10A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

Conflicts between women's equality and difference arose in the 1920s over the battle between the women's minimum wage and the first proposed Equal Rights Amendment. These issues, along with economic considerations, influenced the Supreme Court's decision to invalidate the women's wage law in Adkins v. Children's Hospital.

Social feminists, who advocated the minimum wage, diverged from their earlier ideology of "domestic feminism." No longer suggesting women needed state protection because they were frail and dependent, feminists urged state intervention on behalf of women as part of a woman's right to "industrial equality." Influenced by the symbolic meaning of suffrage, feminism became increasingly egalitarian and rights-oriented in the 1920s. Social feminists, however, stopped short of supporting the E.R.A. They believed constitutional equality would undermine laws designed to address women's economic and social inequality.

The rise of the National Woman's Party and their advocacy of the E.R.A. transformed the debate surrounding protective labor laws. It created a contradiction between equality and a legally regulated workplace. This not only put feminists with labor politics in an uncomfortable position, it gave the courts a method by which to turn equality rhetoric against women, while defeating labor reforms many conservatives saw as "redistributive". The Adkins Court struck the minimum wage in a decision that upheld the sanctity of free contract and denied the validity of an interventionist state, while hiding behind a mask of equality for women.

Adkins, the minimum wage test case, failed partly because three recent conservative appointments changed the political composition of the Court. But it was also an example of the Court's power to limit reform. Previously gained hours limitations for women were virtually meaningless without increased wages. Furthermore, the Court acted as a social controller of women, responding to perceptions of increased independence for women, who were marrying at a later age and maintaining high visibility in the workplace. Finally, the Court was able to use Adkins to ward off for fourteen years the possibility of minimum wage laws for men, even nationalization of these laws.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-10, Section: A, page: 3856.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1986.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

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