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The Limits of Legislation: Katherine Philips Edson, Practical Politics, and the Minimum-Wage Law in California, 1913–1922

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Jaclyn Greenberg
Jaclyn Greenberg
Affiliation:
Center for the Study of Women, UCLA
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Extract

In 1913 the California legislature took a momentous step to improve the wages and working conditions of its women workers by passing a controversial new form of social welfare legislation, a minimum-wage bill, which established the Industrial Welfare Commission. The mandate gave the commission extensive power: not only to establish a minimum wage for each industry employing women, but to regulate hours and working conditions as well. Although reformers had been building an edifice of protective legislation for women for three decades, the creation of a government body with such wide-ranging authority over virtually every aspect of women's wage work was unprecedented. A handful of states passed similar legislation, but few rose above the challenges by opponents to actually implement the law in a meaningful way. The California Industrial Welfare Commission, in contrast, established wage, hour, and sanitary standards in women's occupations from canneries to movie studios. Responsibility for the success of the California law rested on the administrative brilliance of one woman, Katherine Philips Edson, the law's chief sponsor and then leading commission member. Under her guidance the commission slowly and judiciously improved working women's conditions and won public acceptance of the innovative form of state intervention.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , April 1993 , pp. 207 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1993

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References

Notes

1. The minimum wage applied to women only until 1938. Massachusetts passed the first minimum-wage law in 1912. It was followed by eight states in 1913. Eighteen states had passed minimum-wage legislation by 1923, when similar legislation in Washington, D.C., was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. For an extensive contemporary description of minimum-wage laws, see “The Development of Minimum-Wage Laws in the United States, 1912 to 1927,” Bulletin of the Women's Bureau, no. 61 (Washington, D.C, 1928)Google Scholar.

2. Because the minimum wage followed the passage of other forms of protective legislation, particularly the major victory in establishing hours legislation, scholars have relegated the minimum wage to merely an aspect of protective legislation for women. See Baer, Judith, The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Women's Labor Legislation (Westport, Conn., 1978)Google Scholar; Lehrer, Susan, Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905–1925 (Albany, N.Y., 1987)Google Scholar; Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York, 1982)Google Scholar; and Steinberg, RonnieWages and Hours (New Brunswick, 1980)Google Scholar. See also chap. 5, “Maximum Hours, Minimum Wages,” in Coleman, Peter J., Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Lawrence, Kan., 1987).Google Scholar

3. For a scholarly treatment of Katherine Edson, see Braitman, Jacqueline, “Katherine Philips Edson: A Progressive-Feminist in California's Era of Reform,” (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1988)Google Scholar; idem, “A California Stateswoman: The Public Career of Katherine Philips Edson,” California History 65 (June 1986): 82–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hundley, Norris, Jr., “Katherine Philips Edson and the Fight for the California Minimum Wage Law, 1912–1923,” Pacific Historical Review 29 (1960): 271–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Katherine Philips Edson,” in James, Edward, ed., Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass., 1971): 562–64.Google Scholar

4. Linda Gordon notes the “celebratory” nature of one stage of scholarship on women's influence on the welfare state in Gordon, Linda, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison, Wis., 1990), 23Google Scholar. Examples of the growing body of literature documenting women's contribution to the building of the social welfare state include Sonya Michel and Koven, Seth, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origin of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95 (October 1990): 1076–1108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar, and “Gender and Professionalization in the Origins of the U.S. Welfare State: The Careers of Sophonisba Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, 1890–1935,” Journal of Policy History 2 (1990): 290–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985): 658–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. A summary description of the year-long controversy appears in Industrial Welfare Commission, Fourth Biennial Report, 1919–20, 1921–22 (Sacramento, 1923), 11–12.Google Scholar

6. See Edson correspondence to Florence Kelley and Edson to Marion Harron (n.d. 1923?), Katherine Philips Edson Collection, Box 1, folder 18, Special Collections, UCLA.

7. Minutes, Industrial Welfare Commission, 23 May 1922.

8. This sentiment was expressed at a mass meeting at the Los Angeles Labor Temple. Los Angeles Record, 29 April 1922.

9. Los Angeles Record, 10 May 1922.

10. Los Angeles Citizen, 21 April 1922.

11. See, for example, Barbara Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mother's Aid,” in Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare, 123–51, and Judith Baer, The Chains of Protection.

12. For a related approach on an international stage, see Miriam Cohen and Hanagan, Michael, “The Politics of Gender and the Making of the Welfare State, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” Journal of Social History 24 (Spring 1991): 469–84.Google Scholar

13. Feminist critics have argued that science was not class-or gender-neutral. Most of the analysis has focused on the hard sciences. Bleier, Ruth, Feminist Approaches to Science (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Keller, Evelyn Fox, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, 1985)Google Scholar; Harding, Sandra, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca, 1991)Google Scholar. But the criticism can apply to the social sciences as well. See Joan Scott, “A Statistical Representation of Work: La Statistique de l'Industrie à Paris, 1847–1848,” in Scott, Joan, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 113–38.Google Scholar

14. Heeding Nancy Cott's injunction to differentiate within the overly broad categories that defined women's social activism in the Progressive Era, we should state at the outset that Edson's advocacy of women workers presents a somewhat different experience from the more familiar proponents of protective legislation, such as Margaret Drier Robins of the Women's Trade Union League or Florence Kelley of the National Consumers’ League, who encountered working-class women in the social settlement movement or through participation in cross-class organizations for women workers. Edson's interest in working women evolved within a more conservative context. Cott, Nancy, “What's in a Name: The Limits of ‘Social Feminism’: or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women's History,” Journal of American History 76 (December 1989): 829CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Payne, Elizabeth, Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women's Trade Union League (Urbana, 1988)Google Scholar; Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s.”

15. Governor Johnson appointed six women to state office, all of them leaders in the California Federation of Women's Clubs. See Mary Gibson, A Record of Twenty-five Years of the California Federation of Women's Clubs, 1900–1925 (The California Federation of Women's Clubs, 1927); Moore, Dorothea, “The Work of Women's Clubs in California,” Annals 27 (September 1906): 257–60.Google Scholar

16. Newspaper clipping, “Mrs. Edson Tells Club Women of Women's Progress in East,” n.d. but probably 1915, Edson Collection, Box 4, envelope 7.

17. See Seth Koven and Sonya Michel's discussion of the manifestations of maternalist ideology in “Womanly Duties.”

18. Katherine Edson, “Industrial Problems As I See Them,” typed manuscript (1914?), Edson Collection, Box 7, folder 5. See also Oakland Tribune, 26 January 1919.

19. Johnson simply said she was qualified because she was a “representative woman.” Los Angeles Herald, 3 September 1912.

20. With the exception of Massachusetts, the states that passed minimum-wage legislation had little industrial development. A study of minimum-wage laws found that only one quarter of all gainfully employed women in the United States lived in states that had passed minimum-wage legislation.

21. As one astute observer, Helen Bary, secretary of the Political Equality League in southern California, noted some years later, although her organization of club women financed the Wage Earners Suffrage League, none of the club women suffragists besides Bary had ever been to the Los Angeles working-class district; and they considered her very brave for doing so! Jacqueline Parker, “Labor Administration and Social Security: A Woman's Life” (Regional Oral History Office, 1973), 20–21. For an analysis of the complex relationship between elite and working-class women in the suffrage movement, see DuBois, Ellen, “Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance: Harriot Stanton Blatch and the New York Woman Suffrage Movement, 1894–1909,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 34–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cott, Nancy, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven, 1987).Google Scholar

22. The shift of her constituency to the right was part of Edson's disappointment with the fruits of suffrage. She admitted in 1915 that “the truth of the matter is that when we get the vote we find we haven't gotten as much as we thought we would have before we had it.” Edson to Mrs. Norman Whitehouse, 28 April 1915. In 1919 she wrote, “Woman are only part of the public opinion of the community and if the community is reactionary you will find the women partaking of the quality as well as the men.” Edson to Mrs. Raymond Robins, 14 March 1919, Edson Collection, Box 1.

23. Katherine Edson, “Statement to the Woman's Organizations of California on the Present Status of Minimum Wage Legislation in This and Other States,” 22 April 1922, Edson Collection, Box 7, folder 5.

24- Kazin, Michael, Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era (Urbana, 1989).Google Scholar

25. For a full discussion of labor views of minimum wage, see Crockett, Earl, “The History of California Labor Ligislation, 1910–1930” (Ph.D. diss.), 72–78Google Scholar, and Norris Hundley, “Katherine Philips Edson and the Fight for the California Minimum Wage.”

26. Crockett, “The History of California Labor Legislation,” 73.

27. Edson to Chester Rowell, Chester Rowell Papers, 1914 (n.d.), Box 13, Bancroft Library, University of California—Berkeley.

28. Crockett, “The History of California Labor Legislation,” 72

29. For a discussion of business opposition, see Beyer, Clara, “History of Labor Legislation for Women in Three States,” Bulletin of the Women's Bureau, no. 66 (Washington, D.C., 1929), 129Google Scholar; Norris Hundley, “Katherine Philips Edson,” 275–76.

30. Ben F. Schlesinger to Gertrude Beeks, 17 October 1914, Edson Collection, Box 2, folder 6.

31. Hiram Johnson to Franklin Hichborn, 22 September 1913, Johnson Collection, Bancroft Library.

32. Hiram Johnson to Edson, 8 September 1913, Edson Collection, Box 2, folder 4.

33. Jacqueline Parker, “Labor Administration and Social Security,” 51.

34. Walter Mathewson to Katherine Edson, n.d. 1915, Edson collection, Box 2, folder 9.

35. Katherine Edson to A. B. C. Dohrmann, 21 July 1915, Edson Collection, Box 1, folder 3.

36. Industrial Welfare Commission, First Biennial Report (Sacramento, 1915), 12.Google Scholar

37. Katherine Edson to Hiram Johnson, 3 June 1915, Edson Collection, Box 1, folder 3.

38. Edson to Miss Marion Harron, n.d., Edson Collection, Box 1, folder 8, pp. 2–3.

39. Although technically the minimum wage was a separate issue from employers’ ability to pay, in fact the precarious stature of the law compelled nearly all commissions in the country to gear their estimations to satisfy employers as well as employees. As a contemporary sociologist concluded, the minimum wage was a compromise between what a woman needed and what she could get. Miller, Roland, “California's Reasonable Minimum Wage,” journal of Applied Sociology 11 (September-August 1926–1927): 545–46.Google Scholar

40. Section 6a of the Minimum Wage Law, Industrial Welfare Commission, First Biennial Report, 19.

41. On the complex relationship between social science and political reform, see Furner, Mary, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington, Ky., 1975)Google Scholar: Haskell, Thomas, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana, 1977)Google Scholar; and Ross, Dorothy, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

42. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report on Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States, Senate Doc. 645, 61st Cong., 2d sess., 19 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1910); The Brandeis Brief was submitted by Josephine Goldmark of the National Consumers' League and Louis Brandeis in the Supreme Court case of Muller v. Oregon in 1908.

43. U.S. Department of Labor, “The Development of Minimum-Wage Laws in the United States, 1912 to 1927,” 4.

44. Edson stated this belief particularly strongly in an interview about women and war jobs. Speaking of women in canneries, factories, and laundries, she said, “I really think that the sooner they give up their jobs and go back to their homes, the better it is going to be for everybody concerned.” She felt that “95 per cent of the women (over age 23?) are working because the man of the family—the husband or the father is not able to provide for his family.” Oakland Tribune, 26 January 1919.

45. IWC, Second Biennial Report, 28. Parker, “Labor Administration and Social Security: A Woman's Life,” 54.

46. IWC, First Biennial Report, 14.

47. IWC, Second Biennial Report (Sacramento, 1917), 53.Google Scholar

48. Ibid., 47.

49. For an in-depth analysis of assumptions behind discussions of working women's wages, see Alice Kessler-Harris, “The Wage Conceived: Value and Need as Measures of a Woman's Worth,” in , Kessler-Harris, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington, Ky., 1990), 6–32.Google Scholar

50. Ibid.

51. IWC, What California Has Done to Protect the Women Workers (Sacramento, 1927), 6.Google Scholar

52. Katherine Edson, “Statement by Katherine Philips Edson,” n.d., Edson Collection, Box 7, folder 4.

53. Katherine Edson to Mary Anderson, 10 may 1922, Edson Collection, Box 1, folder 12.

54. San Diego Labor Leader, 2 June 1922.

55. Ibid.

56. Edson to Mary Anderson, 10 May 1922, Edson Collection, Box 1, folder 12.

57. San Francisco Labor Clarion, 20 September 1918.

58. In a discussion of protective legislation, Alice Kessler-Harris quoted evidence given by Woman's Party activist Jane Norman Smith that union men spoke in different voices about legislation depending upon whether the discourse was public or private: “… trade unionists acknowledged openly that in public ‘we must talk about “humanitarian” laws for women and that sort of sob stuff, but when we get into committee, we just come right down to brass tacks.’ “(Out to Work, 203).

59. Los Angeles Citizen, 19 May 1922.

60. “Report submitted by Mrs. Daisy Houck to Local Union U.G.W. of A. 125, L.A.,”

10 May 1922.

61. Los Angeles Citizen, 19 May 1922.

62. Alice Kessler-Harris provides a framework for understanding this tension. She described working women's culture as valuing honor and dignity, traits that she felt became a casualty of organized labor's closing ranks in response to the employers’ attack on labor unions in the 1920s. Alice Kessler-Harris, “Problems of Coalition-building: Women and Trade Unions in the 1920s,” in Milkman, Ruth, ed., Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History (Boston, 1985), 120.Google Scholar

63. Houck statement.

64. Katherine Edson, “Statement to the Women's Organizations.”

65. Edson to Mary Anderson, 10 May 1922, Edson Collection, Box 1, folder 12.

66. Edson to Mrs. Seward Simons, 17 November 1916, Edson Collection, Box 1, folder 4.

67. For analyses of changes in women's work in the 1920s, see Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, and Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work.

68. In her examination of ladies’ auxiliaries of the skilled-trades unions, Susan Levine shows that consumer desires were not incompatible with trade-union principles. Levine, Susan, “Workers’ Wives: Gender, Class, and Consumerism in the 1920s United States,” Gender and History 3 (Spring 1991): 45–64.Google Scholar

69. Los Angeles Citizen, n.d., Edson Collection, Box 7, folder 7.

70. Newspaper clipping, “The Woman's Viewpoint,” n.d., Edson Collection, Box 7, folder 7.

71. Edson to Marion H. Harron, n.d., Edson Collection, Box 1, folder 18.

72. Los Angeles Citizen, 13 April 1923.