“With Wages So Low How Can a Girl Keep Herself?” Protective Labor Legislation and Working Women’s Expectations

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.”¹

Seiniger hoped to draw Truman’s personal attention to her many work-place 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.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.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.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...