Louise de Koven Bowen Quotes
It would seem as if the first duty of society were to protect the ever increasing throng of working women who are entering the industrial world by demanding for them a shorter working day and an adequate wage and by giving them ample opportunities for recreation. Only when we guard working girls from industrial overstrain and from dullness during their leisure hours, will they be able to resist temptation and to properly fulfill the functions which belong to them. When minimum wage boards are established in every state it may be made clear to the community that the economic status may be responsible for the moral and physical dangers to which overworked, underfed and underpaid girls are subjected.
Louise de Koven Bowen, 1859-1952, Social Worker and Reformer, Legal Protection in Industry, 1914
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At the time there was very little such legislation or regulation, and the little there was only occurred after massive lobbying efforts by organized labor. In modern times, often it takes a horrible tragedy to occur before the political will can be mobilized to cope with issues of occupational health and safety.
At the time, the mine owners and operators claimed that they had NO obligations to their workers—not even to ensure a safe mine. There was no OSHA and workers died and were maimed on the job much more frequently than they do today. Many mine owners now accept that they have obligations to the workers, and the rest are required to have responsible and safe working conditions by law and OSHA regulations.
The First Lady was very practical. Although she was a strong advocate of women working in all areas of the labor force, she also realized that there were very few women who had done so before and thus there were few role models for them. So women did not generally know how to dress to keep themselves safe. And if she thought any information was needed, she used her daily syndicated column in many of America’s newspapers to convey that information.
President Harrison had first brought the problem of injured workers having no protection or recourse to public attention {640537} Then Roosevelt’s term created legislation and the Congress passed it. The very conservative Supreme Court had declared the Employers’ Liability Act of 1906 unconstitutional, leaving no recourse of assistance for American railroad employees injured on their job through no fault of their own. Roosevelt was furious and he had the legislation redrafted to get around the Supreme Court objections. and that was passed in 1908 and was not overturned.
See {618590} and {618512} for more on the issue of special protective legislation for women in the workplace.
The feminists were split at the time over the issue of special protective labor laws for women which were different and more protective than those for men. The women received the added protection but the logic behind the lawmaking was that they were somehow less than the male workers and needed more protection. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, such labor laws for women were common, but they have mostly disappeared. See Bell-Richards {618512} for a succinct statement of the issue at the time.
Debs had unconstitutionally been arrested and jailed for opposing American entry into World War I. He was later pardoned by President Warren G. Harding.
The FDR administration was the first that allowed women to serve in executive and high level management positions of the government. Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor, was the first American female cabinet minister. Most people in America had not known that there were female executives in the government until Mrs. Roosevelt wrote this column. While the majority of Americans seemed to support this idea, there were religious and cultural conservatives who were much opposed, and pointed to this as another way in which the Roosevelts were “undermining the traditions of America.”
These were the same issues that were being fought over in every industrialized nation at the time.
When TR was the NYC Police Commissioner, Riis had given him midnight tours of the precincts so Roosevelt could see for himself what the police were and were not doing. When he became Governor, his labor inspectors never reported the terrible sweatshop conditions that the newspapers were writing about. So TR asked Riis to arrange some personal “visits”. The two of them alone would show up at a sweatshop in the middle of the day and the governor would simply introduce himself to the owner, who dared not prohibit the Governor from coming in and then asking questions of workers and managers. Even in modern times that would not happen in a large state. The Governor then realized that the state labor inspectors were not doing their jobs and covering up the problems. Major changes took place.
He could not get any legislation protecting the workers but Theodore Roosevelt did in 1906--Employers’ Liability Act of 1906 but rapidly the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional as it was the first federal mandate that had ever been placed on employers. Roosevelt then had the legislation rewritten to get around the Supreme Court objections and that was passed in 1908 and was not overturned. See {640536}.
