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11. “WE ARE NOT KEEN ABOUT THE MINIMUM WAGE” Union Women, Clubwomen, and the Legislated Minimum Wage, 1913–1931
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263 11. “WE ARE NOT KEEN ABOUT THE MINIMUM WAGE” Union Women, Clubwomen, and the Legislated Minimum Wage, 1913–1931 rebecca j. mead California women’s struggle for the suffrage coincided with a number of efforts to pass protective legislation in addition to efforts at moral reform. As indicated in chapter 10, the campaign for red-light abatement was linked at crucial points with efforts to define a minimum-wage law for women. When middle-class clubwomen became involved in campaigns for protective legislation, however, they quickly encountered workingclass women who often had their own ideas about the appropriateness of such legislation. Working women sometimes challenged unrealistic middle-class prescriptions for morality, maternity, and domesticity that undervalued their identities as workers. In California, women trade unionists developed a critique of minimum-wage legislation that emphasized self-sufficiency through organization and disputed popular characterizations of female workers as physically or morally weak, defenseless, and thus in need of “protection.” California had a long tradition of political activism by a vigorous labor movement centered in San Francisco. Powerful if unstable progressivelabor coalitions installed a reformist state legislature and elected Hiram Johnson governor in 1910, reelected him in 1914 (with the active support of newly enfranchised working-class women), and passed several important pieces of labor legislation during his administration.1 Male labor leaders had long since offered qualified support to women workers , resulting in a higher than average rate of unionization among San Francisco women that facilitated their politicization. In 1911 the state labor federation endorsed eight-hour-workday legislation for women, but in 1913 women unionists convinced the labor establishment to oppose a legislatively mandated minimum wage.2 Subsequently, working women played key roles in the implementation of the minimum-wage law by the Industrial Welfare Commission (iwc) under the leadership of Katherine Philips Edson (for more on Edson, see chapter 13).3 Such California progressives and feminists as Edson quite consciously rebecca j. mead 264 referred to themselves as “pioneers,” noting that the state’s growing importance as an industrial center made it “an ideal laboratory for industrial experiments.”4 Indeed, such progressive-era bureaucracies as the iwc provided the programmatic prototypes and administrative professionals for the emergent federal welfare state of the New Deal. Nevertheless, another important aspect of this history must emphasize the political and organizational sophistication of the labor movement and the feminism of trade-union women. Wary of the ideological feminism they associated with middle-class women, they developed their own pragmatic version by selectively combining labor’s collective orientation and self-protection rhetoric with the political demands of the women’s movement. An official of the laundry workers’ union, Carrie Parmer, asserted, “If the working women want to become really emancipated they should organize and secure conditions that will make their lot a less unenviable one. . . . When that is done . . . women may then be called emancipated with some degree of truth.”5 Women trade unionists argued that, while protective legislation offered material benefits, it also reinforced pernicious notions about women as inferior and undesirable workers who deviated from the domestic ideal, notions that circumscribed their employment opportunities and placed them at the mercy of government largesse. Alliances with working-class men were burdened by male ambivalence toward women wage earners; to curb female competition, male labor leaders sometimes advocated labor legislation for women that they rejected for themselves. For example, the American Federation of Labor (afl) position on legislated standards remained equivocal and applied differentially to men and women. In a 1913 letter to the San Francisco Labor Council (sflc), afl president Samuel Gompers vehemently rejected the concept of a minimum-wage law for men and stated that “statutory enactment [of] wages . . . will only be another step to force workingmen to work at the behest of their employers, or at the behest of the State, which will be equivalent to and will be slavery.” When it came to women, however, he qualified this position: “I hope you will have none of it, that is, not for men. It may be justifiable and defensible for women, but if so then only on the theory that they are in a sense the ‘wards of the State.’”6 Sarah Hagan, the leader of San Francisco United Garment Workers’ Local #131 (ugw) and an sflc official, responded with [54.144.81.21] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:42 GMT) “we are not keen about the minimum wage” 265 bitter irony: “Men are very kind to women wage-earners...