In 1946, Boston pharmacist Minna Seiniger wrote to President Harry S. Truman to seek his help with a workplace dispute with her longtime employer, Liggett’s Pharmacy. Seiniger’s troubles had begun several months earlier when she was transferred to a different branch of the store, where Mr. Milligan, “a lively new assistant manager” eager to prove himself, “started in on” her. The pharmacists’ union had recently negotiated a sizable pay raise in exchange for a modest bump in their weekly hours, and Milligan responded by squeezing more work out of the pharmacists. When Seiniger refused to stay late one night to make fifty extra pill capsules, her manager grew “extremely angry” and began “accenting his remarks by poking at my shoulder with his finger.” Milligan also added to Seiniger’s duties, demanding that she “carry in the empty bottles and clean the shelves on a ladder” despite her fragile health on account of her recent spinal bone graft surgery. But Seininger also felt she’d been wronged by her union, as the new longer hours left her “terribly run down.” After Seiniger lost her job upon presenting these concerns to the company, the union refused to help because she had not taken the established steps for filing a grievance. Joining the millions of other workers who petitioned the executive branch in the 1930s and 1940s, Seiniger asked Truman to intervene with both the union and the company. Specifically, she wanted him to convince Liggett’s to reinstate her, to hire an assistant to handle the physically taxing chores Milligan had assigned her, and to make the new longer hours optional. Anticipating Truman’s resistance, Seiniger reminded him, “My problem may seem to be a very trivial one to you, but it is the individuals that make up the nation.”^{Footnote 1}

Seiniger hoped to draw Truman’s personal attention to her many workplace concerns: long hours, inflexibility, a capricious supervisor, an unresponsive union, health and safety hazards, and assaults on her dignity. Instead, his office forwarded her letter to the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, an agency that shared Seiniger’s assumption that the government should defend women against exploitive working conditions. When Seiniger put pen to paper in 1946, each state regulated women’s encounters with the labor market, and her state of Massachusetts established some of the earliest and most comprehensive laws. Seiniger received a prompt letter of response from Anne Larrabee, the bureau’s acting director, but its contents surely left her dissatisfied. While the bureau was “very sympathetic with your situation,” Larrabee explained, her employer’s actions cleared the bar set by existing standards.^{Footnote 2} Federal laws regulated workers’ wages and hours only where their workplaces engaged in interstate commerce, and her pharmacy did not fall into this category. Her wages and hours were legal under Massachusetts’ sex-specific regulatory framework, and workplace safety provisions in the state applied only to women in industrial occupations. Larrabee made no reference to Seiniger’s concerns about the union’s failure to help or the new boss’ disrespectful attitude toward her. Seiniger thus saw her intertwined demands for redress tailored to her personal situation fall between the cracks in the precarious edifice of worker protections.

Workers like Seiniger, especially with the rise of the New Deal broker state in the 1930s, envisioned federal officials as sympathetic allies who would believe their testimonies of unfair treatment and address their grievances as they understood them.^{Footnote 3} But the officials who handled claims like hers worked within existing legal frameworks that assigned regulation of intrastate commerce to the states, sorting workers according to sex and treating each sex as a coherent group.^{Footnote 4} When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected states’ efforts to establish sex-neutral labor standards in the 1905 case Lochner v. New York, labor reformers developed a sex-specific strategy that legitimated state intervention into women’s working conditions on account of their presumed vulnerability and their status as current or potential mothers. The Supreme Court affirmed this logic in its 1908 ruling in Muller v. Oregon. In Muller’s aftermath, states passed a flurry of laws designed to shield wage-earning women from exploitation. Underscored by the powerful and coherent logic of sex difference that defined women and men against each other, protective labor laws limited the types of employment women could enter and the hours they could spend on the job, set out the wages and periods of rest women were due, enumerated the restrooms, seats, and water fountains employers needed to provide for them, and more. Federal labor laws established in the 1930s largely affected male-dominated occupations, bolstering the independence of breadwinning men while leaving women subject to state-level constraints. The historian Alice Kessler-Harris has noted that by privileging male autonomy and presuming female vulnerability, sex-specific labor laws proved a double-edged sword: the provisions afforded women some benefits while deepening the gendered division of labor and compounding their workforce subordination.^{Footnote 5}

Since the 1980s, scholars have begun to craft narratives of law and state formation “from below,” foregrounding the experiences of outsiders to the political system in order to reveal the local variation, informal modes of influence, and fissures between lawmakers’ intentions and people’s experiences of the law.^{Footnote 6} These same three decades have seen the expansion of the study of women’s diverse experiences and their critical role in shaping American history. Women’s political historians have fused these fields, demonstrating how women who were removed from established channels of power nonetheless developed strategies for wielding influence. Their accounts of sex-specific labor laws frame women in policymaking and advocacy positions as the actors operating “from below.” Fighting for power within their unions, the activist community, and government agencies, they had to manipulate existing structures by allying with or operating around the men who dominated positions of authority.^{Footnote 7} In particular, scholars have written about the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor as a subordinate federal agency. The historian Judith Sealander describes bureau officials as “insiders as outsiders” who lacked the ability to enforce their directives, suffering frustration and condescension from other policymakers as they fought to forge state-level protections for women into a consistent national regime.^{Footnote 8}

Historians’ focus on bureau officials’ marginal status has overshadowed another critical perspective “below” theirs: that of the women who experienced these laws and offered their own opinions about the state’s proper role in their working lives. This article analyzes the reach of state protections for women in conjunction with the letters many sent to federal officials describing their working conditions and aspirations for state assistance in improving them. I focus on the approximately one hundred letters collected in the Women’s Bureau’s General Correspondence files written between 1930 and 1950 by women in three states: Massachusetts, which established comprehensive sex-specific regulations by the 1910s; Illinois, which adopted a relatively average number of sex-specific labor laws; and Florida, which passed very few. As the legal scholar Michele Landis Dauber notes, such letters must be read as careful arguments: they are more akin to “legal briefs” than “heartfelt confessionals.”^{Footnote 9} While these correspondents surely exaggerated details about their working conditions, their claims evince the types of grievances that motivated them to put pen to paper, the arguments they hoped officials would find persuasive, and the specific redress they sought.^{Footnote 10}

The narrow coverage of protective labor laws—both in terms of the fraction of women and the limited aspects of a single worker’s experiences they affected—created space for laboring women to express their expectations for state involvement in their working lives independent of them. Historians have noted that women have advocated for political rights through campaigns that emphasized their shared qualities and compared their sex with other groups, notably African Americans and men.^{Footnote 11} But the logic of analogy that preoccupied these policymakers and activists did not consistently capture working women’s political imaginations. While the historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has shown that labor-movement women viewed protective labor laws as one element of their campaigns for workplace justice, the rights consciousness of women at the grassroots, many of whom were not union members, has remained unexcavated. Their letters to federal officials reveal that they sought manifest improvements to their personal situations in the form of autonomy, flexibility, and wages and working conditions that matched their circumstances. Some Florida women, whose state established next to no labor standards, sought a floor under their wages and a cap on their hours—protections that women enjoyed in other states. But women in all three states envisioned a more responsive state that could recognize them as members of disadvantaged groups as well as individuals enmeshed in particular families, communities, and labor relationships. This perspective distanced them from reformers’ efforts to create consistent standards for working women under existing policy frameworks. It was further diminished by the legal revolution initiated in the mid-1960s, when the federal sex-equality laws that displaced sex-specific state provisions came to treat laboring women as members of an even larger group of sex-less workers.

The consolidation of industrial capital in the late nineteenth century drew women into the labor force, cemented the sexual division of labor, and sparked a reform movement that sought to use state resources to shield women from the ravages of the labor market. Between 1870 and 1910, the proportion of adult women who worked for wages rose from 15 percent to 24 percent. Women came to dominate the domestic service, clerical, and garment industries, and many of these feminized professions were un-unionized and overcrowded, which weakened women's bargaining power.^{Footnote 12} The 1908 Muller decision legitimized a burst of activism among advocates, legislators, and bureaucrats who cultivated an intricate web of state-level workplace provisions for women.^{Footnote 13} Progressive women’s workplace rights activists, epitomized by the National Consumers’ League and the Women’s Trade Union League, sought to galvanize cross-class support for workplace justice for women, advocating state minimum-wage laws and leading the opposition to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment they feared would only disadvantage women. The Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, established in the aftermath of World War I, conducted research and published reports designed to illuminate working women's need for nationally-consistent protections in conjunction with opportunities. Labor movement women pushed to expand women’s rights to earn wages and to care for their families through both protective labor laws and collective bargaining, intensifying their activism in the 1930s and 1940s. However, the federal 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act set minimum-wage and premium overtime pay rates for only a fraction of American workers, and most female-dominated jobs were deliberately excluded from its protections—creating what the political scientist Suzanne Mettler has identified as a gendered “dual federalism.” During and after World War II, reformers began to advocate for equal pay and expanded opportunities to coincide with sex-specific protections. But reformers continued to pursue state labor standards for women, fearful that eroding government recognition of sex differences would disadvantage women absent stronger protections for men.^{Footnote 14}

A bird’s-eye view indicates that states built and strengthened an interlocking system of protections for wage-earning women over the first half of the twentieth century, as state governments, prodded by Women’s Bureau officials and women’s rights activists, positioned themselves between laboring women and their employers. Limits on women’s hours were the most common and earliest type of restriction, and they spread over time. In 1913, twenty-seven states set limits on women’s daily hours in some occupation, and by 1960 that number had risen to forty-three.^{Footnote 15} States also limited women’s work at night. Four states restricted night work for women in 1906, but by 1944 twenty-two states and the District of Columbia held such provisions.^{Footnote 16} Minimum-wage laws for women gained momentum in the 1910s. Fourteen states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico enacted minimum-wage laws for women between 1912 and 1923. By 1955, twenty-six states had passed such laws.^{Footnote 17} A third type of protective labor legislation addressed women’s working conditions, requiring employers to provide them with adequate amenities, limiting the weight they could lift, and barring them from occupations deemed unsafe or morally compromising. By the mid-1950s, forty-six states required employers to provide seats for women, thirty-two states required adequate and separate toilet facilities for the sexes, and twenty-nine required women’s dressing and lunch rooms. The nature and logic of workplace protections for women changed in the 1940s, as women’s labor union membership and workforce participation multiplied and advocates began to emphasize equal pay and opportunities alongside protections. However, states continued to police and establish new sex-specific provisions, and with a few exceptions, courts affirmed them.^{Footnote 18}

But protective labor legislation did not constitute a consistent legal regime, as many states passed very few provisions—especially in the South.^{Footnote 19} Further, when such laws existed, they were often deliberately exclusionary, vaguely worded, or efficiently evaded. These limits were partially the result of state legislators’ intent. For example, in drafting hours laws, states tended to include women in factories, telephone and telegraph offices, and laundries, while excluding domestic service and agriculture, the two most common occupations for women (and especially women of color) nationwide.^{Footnote 20} Similarly, night-work laws never applied to all working women in a state. Some covered only women in factories, and others limited night work for women in leisure establishments such as bowling alleys or pool halls.^{Footnote 21} Thus, although every state had at least one sex-specific labor law in 1928, only one-third of the nation’s wage-earning women fell under their purview.^{Footnote 22} Further, protective laws’ passage was no guarantee that the intended women would experience them. Where state legislators established minimum-wage laws that required “wage boards” to study and set wage rates for different jobs, these laws remained unenforceable until state officials convened those groups of industry officials, labor representatives, and workers.^{Footnote 23}

Poor local enforcement practices could also undermine state protections. Steelworkers in Canton, Ohio, wrote to U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in 1937 to protest that a state inspector was misled in her thirty-minute visit to their plant. The women claimed that their supervisor lied about their hours and wages and forbade them from mentioning “our unsanitary drinking fountains, our over crowded and oily floors, [and] the unsafe steps over the dept. conveyor.”^{Footnote 24} Elsewhere in the state, employers evaded protective labor laws through creative timekeeping. An Ohio restaurant owner in 1937 skirted the state’s eight-hour law by taking his waitresses “off the clock” when an evening’s business slowed down, then restarting the measure of their working hours when the flow of customers increased.^{Footnote 25} Whether local administrators earnestly sought to enforce state provisions or deliberately allowed employers the leeway to bend them, inconsistencies like these frustrated the Women’s Bureau’s efforts to create a strong and consistent network of protections. One official wrote in 1934, “I feel so keenly the futility of efforts spent in promoting labor legislation, unless we have some assurance that the laws, when passed, are going to be honestly and intelligently administered.”^{Footnote 26} Frances Perkins, the secretary of labor between 1933 and 1945, had been a strong advocate of state and local labor protections in her previous leadership of the New York Consumers League and the Committee on Safety of the City of New York. But as labor secretary, she increasingly pushed for federal provisions rather than state protections due to what she termed the “runaway shop,” which saw employers depart states that established strong protections for states with relatively few.^{Footnote 27}

Bureau officials’ vision of nationally uniform standards was also threatened by variations among the states. In northeastern states, which shared an industrial economy and tradition of workers’ collective agitation, legislators were at the forefront of regulating women’s work. By contrast, in the South the construction of the Jim Crow regime of disfranchisement and terror for African Americans also prevented working-class solidarity and marginalized women. Most southern states established very few protective laws, instead safeguarding employers’ prerogative to control their own workplaces. Western and Midwestern states typically fell between these poles.^{Footnote 28} Thus, Massachusetts established some of the earliest and strongest protections for working women; Illinois adopted a comparatively moderate amount; and Florida had very few. Massachusetts passed the nation’s first enforceable sex-specific hours law, limiting to ten hours per day women’s work in “mechanical and mercantile establishments” in 1874. Out of fear for women’s own safety and that of their unchaperoned children after dark, Massachusetts passed the nation’s first night-work law in 1890, which banned women’s work in manufacturing establishments after 6 p.m. In 1912, Massachusetts established the nation’s first minimum-wage law for women industrial workers. Massachusetts also led the way in regulating women’s working conditions, passing the nation’s first workplace safety law for female industrial workers in 1877. In 1911, Massachusetts also became the first state to ban women’s employment before and after childbirth—in that case, four weeks before and four weeks after delivery. State legislators also strengthened these laws over time, establishing the nation’s strictest night-work provision in 1907, extending its minimum-wage and hours limits coverage beyond industrial workers to those in feminized occupations such as hairdressers, clerical workers, and switchboard operators, and adding requirements for meal and rest periods, “suitable seats,” “separate toilets,” and “pulleys or casters” to help women with heavy lifting in industrial jobs. Over this four-decade span, Massachusetts led the way in regulating women’s work, establishing some of the earliest protective laws and strengthening them over time.^{Footnote 29}

Illinois lawmakers shared Massachusetts’ impulse to regulate women’s working conditions, but Illinois trailed the northeastern state in establishing fewer regulations on a slower timeline. In 1910, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld a ten-hour day for women industrial workers, but the state did not establish a minimum-wage law until 1933. Further, unlike Massachusetts, which dedicated $18,000 to convening minimum-wage boards and was one of five states to transfer administration of minimum-wage laws to a permanent state agency to ensure their enforcement, Illinois never established wage boards for many feminized occupations. Thus, protections were uneven. For example, as of 1941, Illinois limited women in retail establishments to eight hours per day and forty-eight per week, but had not yet set a minimum wage for retail women. Like Massachusetts, Illinois strengthened its protections over time. By 1955, Illinois had established a maximum hour law of eight per day, forty-eight hours and six days per week for women in a range of occupations; required employers to provide meal periods for women; was one of seventeen states prohibiting women from working in mines or quarries; and was one of ten states to restrict women’s work in saloons. Between 1943 and 1952, Illinois and Massachusetts became two of eleven states that enacted equal-pay laws, bringing the nationwide total to thirteen. However, unlike the Massachusetts law’s broad coverage, Illinois’ provision applied only to manufacturing.^{Footnote 30} Illinois hovered near the average in terms of sex-specific labor legislation. The state established some protections for laboring women but never created a broad and consistent safety net of enforceable provisions akin to Massachusetts’.

By contrast to Massachusetts and Illinois, Florida put in place very few protective labor laws. The state was one of a small minority that established no sex-specific minimum wage or maximum hours laws. For example, Florida was one of only four states that placed no restrictions on women’s working hours between 1921 and 1947.^{Footnote 31} Until the postwar period, Florida’s only protective labor law was a 1920 provision that required employers to furnish seats to both male and female workers “for purposes of necessary rest” when they were “not engaged in their active work.”^{Footnote 32} The state’s legislators tapped into the national climate of reregulating women’s morals in the aftermath of World War II when they established a 1947 law prohibiting employers from sending female employees to “any questionable place,” “house of ill-fame or assignation house,” or “any house or place of amusement kept for immoral purposes.”^{Footnote 33} In the absence of any floor under their wages, or ceiling upon their hours, or substantive safety provisions, the thousands of women who staffed Florida’s service industries were largely at the whim of their employers and the local labor markets.

Although a handful of states like Florida established very few protective workplace regulations, by midcentury every state intervened between laboring women and their employers in some way. These regulations included all states legislating some aspect of safety and working conditions for women, forty-three setting limits on women’s working hours, twenty-six establishing a minimum-wage law that applied to women, and fifteen passing equal-pay laws.^{Footnote 34} Thus, while sex-specific protective labor laws expanded in number and coverage in the first half of the twentieth century, they remained highly irregular in terms of state-by-state variation, scope, and enforcement.

When women’s experiences and expectations of state involvement in their working lives are taken into account, protective labor laws appear even more uneven. The working women from Massachusetts, Illinois, and Florida who corresponded with the Women’s Bureau in the 1930s and 1940s joined millions of other Americans who sent personal letters to federal officials in those years. Seismic shifts in American politics and that era’s particular political leaders help explain these letters and their content. In claims that narrated their personal grievances to federal officials, laboring women imagined a direct connection to the national state characteristic of their era. The historians Lizabeth Cohen and James T. Sparrow and the legal scholar Michele Landis Dauber have demonstrated that the mutual despair of the Depression, the enormity of the resources deployed at the federal level in the New Deal, and the shared sacrifice demanded by World War II instilled in many Americans a new sense of federal citizenship by the 1940s.^{Footnote 35}

But these correspondents’ sincere expectation that they would receive federal assistance for their workplace problems was also the result of the specific federal officials in power in those years. These women overwhelmingly addressed their letters to one of three people: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, or U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, whose offices forwarded the letters to the Women’s Bureau. The Roosevelts cultivated reputations as champions of the working class, and they encouraged citizens to send them mail.^{Footnote 36} Further, Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt were unusual in their status as highly visible and powerful women. Eleanor Roosevelt crisscrossed the country in well-publicized trips to observe working conditions and the effects of poverty and the New Deal, and she published regular columns in women’s magazines. Frances Perkins, the first female secretary of labor (and the first woman in any Cabinet position), was an outspoken advocate of workplace protections and other components of a broad social safety net. Actively cultivating a grandmotherly appearance, Perkins was commonly and affectionately referred to as “Ma Perkins,” and her speeches on the plight of everyday Americans, broadcast on national radio, were eagerly received by the ears of millions of American women.^{Footnote 37} In their letters to the Roosevelts and Perkins, working women sought empathy and intervention from allies whose concern for common people was well documented. “You a woman would understand my viewpoint,” Massachusetts factory worker Cecelia Dulak wrote to Perkins in 1947, emphasizing their shared sex in the hopes of capturing the sympathy of a powerful federal official whom she had never met.^{Footnote 38}

Letters women wrote to federal officials between 1930 and 1950 reflect the chasm between lawmakers’ ideal of consistent state protections and women’s experiences of them. Massachusetts women described violations of their state’s laws and employers who tried to evade them. Illinois women told of inconsistent coverage. Florida women gave accounts of the long hours and low wages they experienced absent any protections. Massachusetts tourist camp clerical worker Audrey Cadorette wrote to FDR in 1940 to inquire which hours and wages laws applied in her case. The $10 wage for sixty-three weekly hours she claimed to receive posed clear violations of established Massachusetts limits of forty-eight hours and $16 per week for full-time women office workers. But depending on her annual schedule, Women’s Bureau Director Mary Anderson explained, her employer might be in compliance with the less rigid standards for seasonal work. Anderson informed Cadorette that she was sending a copy of her letter to the Massachusetts Department of Labor and Industries, the agency responsible for policing labor laws in the state. For Massachusetts women like Cadorette, the bureau served the important role of monitoring and interpreting the state laws, informing the women when their employers seemed to violate them, and passing their claims along to the state agency that enforced them.^{Footnote 39}

Other Massachusetts women wrote to federal officials to describe their employers’ creative efforts to evade the state’s labor standards. In 1938, the Massachusetts legislature raised the minimum wage for women in textile factories to $14 per week. In a letter to Perkins, Blanche Defossi of the mill town of Fall River explained that the Ankerback Bath Robe Company was replacing seasoned workers like her with recent high school graduates at a special “learners” salary of $10.^{Footnote 40} Another Fall River resident, Irene Porter, wrote to Perkins the same year to describe the conditions at a neighboring plant, the Novelty Boys Washsuits Company. Porter’s employer attempted to offset the cost of the new minimum-wage law by asking female employees to solicit notes from their physicians describing them as in poor health. Officials hoped that such documentation would permit them to reclassify the women as physically handicapped and thus subject to a lower wage rate. Porter explained that when their own doctors declared them to be in good health, officials asked the women to visit a company physician. Those who refused were sent home. In response to the Fall River women’s claims, the Women’s Bureau prodded state officials to investigate these efforts to circumvent legislators’ intended boost to women’s wages.^{Footnote 41}

Similarly, some of the women who wrote to federal officials from Illinois described clear violations of state laws. Eleanor Gray Agins of Chicago wrote to Francis Perkins in 1941. She explained that her employer, Reliable Laundry, established unequal rates of pay for similarly-situated workers. The bosses “payed every one in this laundry fair wages except the starchers,” Agins explained. Their current rate of $7.50 per week “was $6 until we refused to work for him at that price.” Illinois had established a minimum-wage rate of twenty-eight cents per hour for women in Chicago laundries four years earlier, Anderson explained in her response letter, and depending upon her weekly hours of labor, her employer was likely violating that provision. She promised to send a copy of Agins’s letter to the Division of Women’s and Children’s Employment of the Illinois Department of Labor.^{Footnote 42} Similarly, Martha Davis, a screw machine operator at the ABC Packing Company in the small western Illinois town of Quincy, wrote to the U.S. Women’s Bureau in 1943 to describe low and arbitrary pay rates: “Some are getting as low as twenty-five cents an hour and are doing the same work as ones getting thirty-five cents an hour. None of us are getting over thirty-five cents an hour,” she explained. Anderson sent Davis’s letter to the state Wage and Hour Division and to the president of the Illinois Federation of Labor to investigate the likely violation.^{Footnote 43}

Yet other Illinois women wrote to federal officials to describe low wages only to learn that while state legislators had passed a minimum-wage law, they had not empaneled a minimum-wage board to study and set a rate for their industry. Mrs. Thomas Briley, a waitress in rural Carthage, Illinois, wrote to U.S. Attorney General Homer Stille Cummings in 1937 with a straightforward question about “the wage and hour law.” She explained that she and the other waitress at the Cherrie Sun Café worked eight hours per day and seven days per week at the wage rate of one dollar per day. If they chose to take a rest day, their employer deducted one dollar from their weekly envelope. “We were wondering if there was a set price for that kind of work and if it is legal to deduct our pay for our day off work,” she explained. Mary Anderson responded that the state’s Division of Minimum Wage had not set wage rates for women in restaurant work, and the federal government had no way to offset the problems Briley described. Between 1937 and 1946, women earning low wages in hotel, hospital, and clerical jobs who wrote to federal officials also learned that Illinois lawmakers had not yet set a wage rate for their industries. As a result, they received no redress for their claims.^{Footnote 44}

The Florida waitresses, sales clerks, and laundry and domestic service workers who wrote to federal officials described longer hours and lower wages than the women in Massachusetts and Illinois. Some assumed that labor laws already applied to them, and they sought federal intervention to ensure they were enforced. Mrs. W. W. Etherington of Lake Worth, Florida, wrote to the U.S. Women’s Bureau in 1946: “Please advise how many hours a waitress, working in a hotel dining room with meals and rooms furnished, is allowed to work per week.”^{Footnote 45} Laundry worker Clara M. Harrison wrote to Perkins in 1943 to ask whether her fifteen-dollar weekly wage was legal: “Please send me a list of the hours and prices a laundry should work & pay.” She also asked, “[Aren’t] they suppose[d] to pay overtime all over 40 hours a week[?]”^{Footnote 46} Blanche van der Broeck, a seamstress in a Palm Beach sewing room, wrote to the U.S. Department of Labor in 1940. She asked, “Will you please tell me what is the minimum wage per week for an unskilled worker[?]. . . . We work 6 days from 9 am to 6 pm with an hour for lunch.”^{Footnote 47} A group of women who described themselves as the Committee of Waitresses and Counter Girls of St. Petersburg, Florida, wrote to the National Labor Relations Board in 1945 to describe what they termed the “unbelievable” labor conditions in their city—in particular, at the Dixie Cafeteria and the Rawlson Cafeteria. “The women work behind the counters for 8 ¾ hours a day for 6 days making a total of 52 ½ hours a week for wages of $22.50 per week gross or $16.68 after deductions for social security and income taxes.” They asked, “Can you not make your investigations now and correct these conditions?”^{Footnote 48} As sales clerk Dorothy Firman noted in 1942, “They seem to know no law in Florida.”^{Footnote 49}

The responses from officials of the Women’s Bureau to Florida women’s letters expressed sympathy and frustration that the labor laws that applied to many men and women in other states could not help Florida women in these service jobs. Sanford five-and-dime sales clerk Mrs. R. T. Humphrey described wage theft, involuntary overtime, and grueling hours. Mary Anderson responded, “It is unfortunate that Florida is one of only five states which has no law limiting the hours women may work in any employment.”^{Footnote 50} She similarly wrote to Florence Carder, a department store saleswoman in Jacksonville, Florida, about her low wages. “I can well appreciate how difficult the financial situation is for hundreds of thousands of women who are in these intrastate industries.”^{Footnote 51} Mary Anderson responded to Ruth Brickley’s inquiry about low wages for cafeteria workers, expressing her “hope . . . that the state legislature will take these needs into consideration as soon as possible.”^{Footnote 52} Bureau officials offered extralegal suggestions to help Florida women. To Mrs. W. W. Etherington’s 1946 inquiry about overtime pay for waitresses working more than seventy hours per week, Bureau Director Frieda Miller suggested that she contact a local union official to learn about “the hours usually worked by waitresses in your regional area, the customary rates of pay for regular as well as extra hours, and whether most employers pay for these extra hours.”^{Footnote 53} In a 1943 letter, Mary Anderson expressed hope that the wartime economy might drive up wages for women in sales jobs. “We have noticed that many stores have raised wages because of difficulty keeping employees, due to competition from nearby war industries.”^{Footnote 54} In states that resisted implementing protective labor laws for women, bureau officials could only relay their sympathy and suggest alternatives to state protections.

But the claims from working women in all three states surpassed inquiring about and demanding the protections of state laws that treated women as a unitary class. In their letters to federal officials, women from Massachusetts, Illinois, and Florida reasoned from their own circumstances to demand more autonomy, flexibility, and dignity at work—offering personal and specific claims that cut against bureau officials’ efforts to rationalize and universalize women’s workplace rights. In their letters, some women argued that labor laws should protect their right to flexible schedules. Massachusetts worker Hazel Brown wrote to the U.S. Department of Labor in 1946 to ask whether “an employer can force, under penalty of discipline, woman workers to work nine hours a day.” While her employer paid overtime for the extra hour, Brown sought the right to limit her schedule at her own discretion.^{Footnote 55} Similarly, Libby Kathryn Johnson, a licensed practical nurse at a public sanatorium in downstate Cairo, Illinois, wrote to the labor department in 1948. Johnson explained that she had recently taken two weeks of vacation to care for her sick young son, and she returned to work to find she had been demoted to an attendant position that was well beneath her credentials. One of only a handful of correspondents from these states who revealed her African American race, Johnson explained that she had resigned after reminding her supervisor that white practical nurses had used vacation time without losing their positions. Johnson argued that her local roots, her homeowner status, and her right to use her accrued vacation when she chose entitled her to be reinstated in her job.^{Footnote 56} As these and other correspondents’ claims suggest, these women sought to define workplace flexibility as a state-enforced entitlement.

Other workers framed their claims as demands for more dignity on the job. Livia M. Izzo of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a high school student who worked as a shoe lacer at the Proper Shoe Company, wrote to Perkins to describe her working conditions. Izzo described the “astonishing” low wages earned by the lacers considering the speed and skill their work required. But Izzo was equally upset by her boss’ condescending attitude. She explained that he “had the ‘nerve’ to say, in a roundabout way, that his employees were ignorant, that he wouldn’t dare work on one of the benches for so little pay!”^{Footnote 57} Chicago clerical worker Mary A. Connor wrote to FDR in 1937 to describe her grueling working conditions. Referencing a 1932 speech when the then-presidential candidate called for state programs to aid “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,” Connor suggested that laboring women like her were equally trapped in a vise.^{Footnote 58} She wrote, “The forgotten man (or rather woman) is the white collar drudge whose arms are limp from long tedious hours over the notebook, followed by more long tedious hours of deciphering and transcribing a multiple transaction, in a small, crowded, noisy stenographers’ room, under artificial light, injurious to eyes engaged in this type of work.” Connor also referenced the significant time and financial sacrifice clerical workers dedicated to being “well dressed, well groomed, a patron of the beauty salon, alert, educated, [and] up to date.” Expressing her expectation that workers deserved enough pay to cover their job’s required expenses and adequate rest and leisure time, she asked, “How can life be enjoyed under such conditions?”^{Footnote 59} Izzo and Connor argued that the state should safeguard women workers’ respectability.

Other women described their poor health in order to buttress their demands for better working conditions. Bernice Anderson of Chicago, an employee of Western Electric Company, wrote to Frances Perkins in 1942 to describe her stressful circumstances. “I am under doctor’s care for a nervous condition caused by driving and forced work that is inhuman, and I am not a piece of machinery.” The pace of work had only intensified when her plant began accepting war orders. The price of her medical care “reduces my salary to below a living wage, caused by slave driving, which unbalances the high cost of living.” Anderson’s physician advised her to bring her medicine bottle to work as proof of her condition and to encourage the boss to call him. When he and his supervisor each refused to telephone Anderson’s physician, she explained, she was stuck in a job whose stresses caused her to require medication that she could not afford.^{Footnote 60} Similarly, chambermaid Miss G. Ferguson voiced her demand for a shorter workday and lower-pressure environment in terms of her physical limitations. She wrote that her daily twenty-room quota and six-day week made her “over-tired and are unable to sleep at night,” and she thought a ten-room quota would solve the problem.^{Footnote 61} In 1948, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, social worker Laura E. Carson wrote to the Women’s Bureau to protest the damp basement at the city infirmary where she worked. The poor working conditions aggravated her arthritis, and she was compelled to choose between damaging her health and trying to find another job.^{Footnote 62} These women argued that their bodily needs should not limit their access to good jobs or force them to choose between equally bad options; to the contrary, the state should ensure that women’s employment could accommodate them as they were.

Another common request by correspondents from Florida, Illinois, and Massachusetts was for assistance in finding and securing desirable employment for themselves as older women. Boston civil servant Jeannette Soule lost her permanent position as a court reporter in the Depression, and she began collecting old-age insurance. However, those payments did not cover the costs she incurred as a self-supporting woman with an aging eight-bedroom house. When the war began, Soule spent two years in pursuit of a job at any local factory, but she was turned away each time on account of her age. In her letter, Soule reminded the War Labor Board that “there is no legal age limit, and official reports state that Airplane factories are employing many women my age.” Soule argued that employers should at least offer her “any trial of War work.” She argued that her age, which she never stated, should not prevent her from obtaining a job because she had to cover her aging home’s many expenses: “water, taxes, insurance, etc.” Soule explained, “I am most anxious to work, enjoying working, and well able physically to work, and my doctor will so state for me.”^{Footnote 63} Illinois resident Mary J. Floesser wrote to the bureau in 1947 requesting “a booklet on jobs for women.” Her previous positions included clerical worker, switchboard operator, and beauty-shop owner. She explained that while her age of forty-eight might seem advanced, she could pass for thirty-six.^{Footnote 64} Laura E. Carson, the Pittsfield social worker, expressed her fear that finding a new job after her bout with arthritis would be “none too easy, at fifty-nine years of age.”^{Footnote 65} Older women saw federal officials as essential confidantes and allies in their struggle for desirable jobs.

Other correspondents made demands for higher wages that they justified in terms of their personal financial obligations. Josephine Hays, a solder (metal worker) in Chicago, wrote to Frances Perkins in 1943. Forty-six cents an hour “is not a living wages,” she explained, and described her situation: “I am a widow and one child to support. Rent to paid and school.” Reasoning from her skill and domestic obligations, she explained that thirty dollars for a forty-eight hour workweek would be fair.^{Footnote 66} Mary Anderson’s response expressed her empathy but offered no solution. “I realize that it is very difficult to make ends meet on 46 cents an hour. Your employer is meeting the requirements of all legal wage regulations by paying as much as 46 cents an hour, so that there is no legal action which can be taken against him.”^{Footnote 67} In her letter to the bureau, fifty-four-year-old hotel maid Mary Sears in Robinson, Illinois, made the case for higher wages by listing her daily tasks and wages and itemizing her recurring expenses. Sears was one of two maids responsible for seventy-four rooms at the Hotel Woodworth. Of her $60 monthly salary, she stated, “One person on that money and get that many of their meals here and never got sick where they had a doctor bill to pay might get by. But I have a husband to take care of that has not been able to work for 17 years he takes 7 doses of medicine per day. My wages is $14.83 1/2 per week. Two weeks is $29.67. I got my check today our life insurance is $6 fire insurance $4.35. Medicine $7. So you can see what we have to live on the next two weeks.”^{Footnote 68} As Florida five-and-dime store clerk Mrs. R. T. Humphrey asked Perkins, “With wages so low how can a girl keep herself?”^{Footnote 69} These women framed their rights claims in terms of simple math. They referenced their domestic obligations and financial need in tandem to give weight to their claims for higher wages. Hard work should earn them enough to afford the basic necessities of life, they claimed, regardless of the wages earned by similarly skilled or situated men.^{Footnote 70}

Still others advocated for higher wages by expressing their belief that their work was more valuable than their salaries reflected. D. Julia Harmon, a Chicago laundry worker, wrote to the U.S. Secretary of Labor “to see if you could help us women that work so hard in the laundries get a living wage.” While she and her fellow laundry workers worked eight hour days with half an hour for lunch, and their wages were above the state minimum at fifty cents per hour, she thought their wages should be higher considering “how tired and worn out we are every night.”^{Footnote 71} Other women argued that their low wages were exploitive. Suburban Boston book-bindery worker Jennie Cosina wrote to Frances Perkins in 1940 to express her belief that her wages did not reflect the value she created for her employer. “I think he is profiting by the girls,” she explained.^{Footnote 72} Even where employers followed local labor provisions, laboring women relied upon their own calculus, supporting arguments for state intervention into their working conditions in terms of what seemed fair to them. At times, their claims intersected with federal officials’ efforts to operate within existing policy frameworks and rationalize women’s claims in pursuit of a universal sexed standard, but often they sidestepped the language of sex difference and women’s universal vulnerabilities in their demands for personal economic justice.

At midcentury, the Women’s Bureau adopted a more nuanced “equality with protection” strategy that started to acknowledge some differences among women.^{Footnote 73} Due to women’s prominence in industrial jobs during World War II, the widespread language of equal pay for equal work in war industry, and the relaxation of public morality standards underpinning bans on night work, many women’s labor activists began to emphasize equal opportunity and extending protections to men.^{Footnote 74} At the same time, the bureau also advocated for accommodations for women workers in the form of special considerations for older women workers and maternity and childcare benefits for younger women, reflecting the variegated voices described above.^{Footnote 75} But in 1964 the ground shifted under their feet with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. While the act was designed to safeguard the rights of racial minorities at work, in public accommodations, and in the voting booth, a ban on sex discrimination was added in the eleventh hour to Title VII, the employment section.^{Footnote 76} Bureau officials initially viewed Title VII with caution, concerned that treating race and sex discrimination as twinned offenses would wipe out their nuanced strategy of promoting both sex equality and sex-specific rights for women. The week the provision took effect, Esther Peterson encouraged the newly empaneled Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioners to use “common sense and good judgment,” evaluating state protective laws one by one to determine whether each was a pretext for discrimination or provided necessary benefits to women.^{Footnote 77}

Title VII gave federal officials new power and shifted the policy paradigm of laboring women’s rights from difference to equality. This development rendered government officials less inclined to provide the kinds of assistance some laboring women expected. Phrasing their claims in simple terms of what they had and what they needed, these women imagined a state that was at once consistent and flexible, establishing both a floor under wages and hours and accommodation for personal circumstances. Reasoning from what seemed fair to them, they expected the state to regard them in terms of the overlapping identities they experienced as simultaneous: uniquely situated individuals, members of a group that shared differences from men, and workers with universal needs. State officials prioritized treating women as a group in an effort to protect them en masse, but policies requiring them to rationalize their claims also denied them the ability to advance more specific claims as individuals. This vision of a strong and accommodating workplace rights policy is reflected in the Americans with Disabilities Act, the 1990 provision that bans differential treatment for disabled individuals while requiring employers to accommodate their specific needs at work.^{Footnote 78}

Excavating the rights claims of laboring women “below” the activists and policymakers scholars have spotlighted suggests that we should rethink the significance of the rights revolution of the 1960s. Just as the legal scholar Risa Goluboff identifies the “lost promise of civil rights” as the Thirteenth Amendment’s challenge to economic subordination, Title VII helped to spark a feminist resurgence while tightening that movement’s focus upon workplace access, opportunity, and nondistinction between the sexes.^{Footnote 79} Title VII dealt a crippling blow to the gendered worldview that provided the intellectual foundation for protective labor legislation while extinguishing the possibility that claims such as the correspondents’ examined here could gain state redress. Viewing Title VII and the federal law of sex equality as largely an improvement upon what came before has impoverished our search for a usable past to support women’s workplace rights struggles in our own day: the tension between caring for and providing for families and the downward pressures on wages and benefits, to name just a few. In that effort, we would do well to consider the pre-Title VII generation of laboring women whose vision of their rights leveraged an activist state to rebalance the relationship between workers and employers in service to women’s diverse needs and complex lives.