Equality or Fairness?

ED: We’re back with BackStory, I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. We’re talking today about how past generations of Americans have struggled to define what is and isn’t fair when it comes to compensating people for the work they do. So far we’ve talked about the deep strain of thinking that informs today’s opposition to a minimum wage hike. Now we’re going to turn to the story of how the minimum wage took shape in the first place.

BRIAN: The nation’s first minimum wage law was passed by the state of Massachusetts just over 100 years ago in 1912. Over the next decade or so 15 other states and the District of Columbia would follow suit. But there was a big difference between these laws and the minimum wage laws on the books today. Those early laws only applied to women and children.

PETER: Right around the turn of the century, the Supreme Court had struck down the right of legislators to interfere in workplace contracts. But a few years later, the court modified that decision by creating an exception for women. Women were a special class, they were vulnerable, they were mothers, they performed important functions outside of the workplace. They needed to be protected.

BRIAN: At first, many women embraced the idea of the so-called protective wage. But after the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote, some women began wondering, why should equality be limited to voting?

ALICE PAUL: Women Voters are demanding that the suffrage victory be carried to its logical fulfillment in the granting to women of complete political, legal, and civil equality with men.

PETER: This is the famous suffragist, Alice Paul, as quoted in the New York Times in 1922.

ALICE PAUL: This is an issue based on justice, and political expediency.

PETER: Alice Paul and her National Women’s Party were pushing for an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. They wanted women to enjoy full legal equality with men. And that would require dropping protective wage legislation.

BRIAN: But the National Women’s Party met with strong resistance from another faction in the movement. Longtime activist, Florence Kelly, was among those who basically said, get real!

FLORENCE KELLY: This insanity expresses itself in eager demands for identical treatment without according to men. It is idle to explain to them that if these ideas prevail the statutory working day and the legal wage will all be swept away.

BRIAN: I sat down with historian Dorothy Sue Cobble who has written a lot about these early reformers. Cobble refers to Kelly and her allies as social feminists. And explain that they were just as concerned about equality as Paul’s supporters were.

DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: But in some cases, they thought differential treatment was necessary and important and it benefited women. And the social feminists who supported these laws hoped that in fact they could be extended to men. And by the ’20s they were making arguments based much more on need. And the fact that women were the low wage sweated workers, and much less based on difference.

BRIAN: Yes, but it sounds to me like lurking under this difference in approaches might be some kind of class difference. Were these women coming from different places in terms of socioeconomic status?

DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: I think that’s definitely part of it. Most of the women in the National Women’s Party were professional women. They were concerned about opening up opportunities for professional women. Alice Paul had multiple degrees. Most of these women were highly educated. The social feminists were much more mixed in terms of class. But there was also a substantial number of working class women who were involved and pushed for protective laws.

BRIAN: This emerging difference of perspective, let’s call it, within the women’s movement, in some ways is a moot point because the Supreme Court weighs in again in 1923, as I recall.

DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: Yes, the Supreme Court rules in the Adkins v. Children’s Hospital case. And that’s where in Washington DC there had been minimum wage for women established. They say, no, much has changed, there’s much less difference between men and women. Actually they are now politically equal.

BRIAN: Is that because of the 19th Amendment?

DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: In part because of the 19th Amendment, but also in part, a shifting norms in a sense of women moving into employment, the first and second generation of women having gone to higher education. There’s just these much larger changes going on as well.

BRIAN: And as an historian, would you agree that women in fact had made advances? Is that an accurate reading of social change?

DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: Yes absolutely, there was progress, particularly politically in terms of civil rights. The problem was that there were longstanding economic inequalities between men and women that had not changed. And the effort to establish wage floors was an effort to move women toward greater economic equality.

BRIAN: In the end, the Equal Rights feminists certainly triumph on the theory of equality. But was it a Pyrrhic victory, given that in this case equality meant that nobody got a minimum wage?

DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: Right. I think we see that same issue going through the 20th century. It’s important that women have some of the same rights as men. But if, in fact, we have a society in which men aren’t being treated the way they should be, what kind of advance is it for women to have the same poor rights or no rights as men.

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BRIAN: Dorothy Sue Cobble is a historian at Rutgers. She is the co-author of the forthcoming book, Feminism Unfinished, a short, surprising, history of American women’s movements.

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