Muller v. Oregon was a unanimous 1908 Supreme Court decision that upheld an Oregon statute limiting women to ten hours of work per day in factories and laundries. The ruling did two things at once: it carved out a gender-based exception to the Court’s recent hostility toward hours laws, and it introduced sociological and medical evidence into constitutional litigation through what became known as the Brandeis Brief. Both consequences shaped American law for the rest of the twentieth century.
The Oregon Law and the Portland Laundry Case
Oregon enacted its ten-hour law on January 3, 1903. The statute barred women from working more than ten hours in a day at any mechanical establishment, factory, or laundry, targeting industries where women made up a large share of the workforce and conditions were notoriously harsh.1Justia. Muller v. Oregon
On September 4, 1905, Curt Muller, who owned the Grand Laundry in Portland, required an employee to work beyond the ten-hour limit. He was convicted in state court, fined $10, and lost his appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court. He then brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the statute violated his freedom to contract with his employees under the Fourteenth Amendment.1Justia. Muller v. Oregon
Why the Case Looked Like a Loser
Muller’s argument had recent Supreme Court support. In Lochner v. New York (1905), decided just three years before, the Court had struck down a New York law capping bakers’ hours, calling it “an unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract.” Lochner held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of liberty included the freedom to negotiate working conditions, and that states could restrict that freedom only when a genuine public health or safety concern justified it.1Justia. Muller v. Oregon
Under that precedent, Oregon’s law looked vulnerable. If a state could not cap the hours of male bakers on health grounds, it was hard to explain how it could cap the hours of female laundry workers. Winning would require convincing the Court that women’s working conditions posed a distinct public health problem the Lochner rule did not reach.
The Brandeis Brief
The defense of the Oregon statute was organized by the National Consumers League and its General Secretary, Florence Kelley. Kelley and her colleague Josephine Goldmark recruited attorney Louis D. Brandeis, later a Supreme Court justice himself, to argue the case pro bono.2Florence Kelley. 3 Pivotal Court Cases The team had roughly a month to prepare.
The brief they filed changed American litigation. Goldmark did much of the research, and the finished document ran 113 pages, only two of which were devoted to legal argument and case citations. The rest compiled reports and testimony from doctors, factory inspectors, labor experts, and social scientists in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere.3Law & History Review. Bruce W. Dearstyne: Revisiting the “Brandeis Brief” The material catalogued the physical effects of long hours on women, with particular attention to prolonged standing, health, and childbearing. It was the first brief submitted to the Supreme Court that relied primarily on sociological and medical data rather than legal precedent.4Louis D. Brandeis School of Law Library. The Brandeis Brief
The tactic was deliberate. Rather than argue Lochner on its own legal terms, Brandeis flooded the record with empirical claims about women’s health, giving the Court a factual basis to treat the Oregon law as different in kind.
The Decision
The Supreme Court ruled 9–0 to uphold the law on February 24, 1908. Justice David J. Brewer wrote the opinion for the unanimous Court, affirming Muller’s conviction.5Supreme Court Historical Society. Muller v. Oregon
Brewer acknowledged that the freedom to contract was part of the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and that Lochner had recently struck down an hours law on that basis. But he wrote that this liberty “is not absolute,” and that a state may restrict it under its police power to protect health, safety, and general welfare.6Teaching American History. Muller v. Oregon The distinction from Lochner was gender. The Court treated women as a class whose physical differences from men justified regulations that would be unconstitutional if applied to male workers.
The rationale rested on assumptions about biology and social role. Brewer wrote that “healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring” and that “the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race.”7H2O. Muller v. Oregon Women were characterized as dependent on men and less physically able to endure long hours, and the ten-hour cap was framed as a measure protecting both individual workers and future generations. The Court leaned on the sociological material in the Brandeis Brief as evidence of these “facts of common knowledge.”5Supreme Court Historical Society. Muller v. Oregon
The practical result was a separate legal category for women’s labor rights. Men’s freedom to contract remained broadly protected under Lochner. Women’s freedom to contract could be curtailed whenever a state could tie its regulation to maternal health or physical capacity.
What the Ruling Did to the Women’s Movement
In the short term, reformers celebrated the decision. States passed a wave of protective laws for women covering hours, night work, and heavy lifting. But the reasoning that authorized those protections also supplied a rationale for keeping women out of higher-paying jobs and treating them as unequal competitors in the labor market.
By 1923, that tension broke open. Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman drafted the Equal Rights Amendment, and the National Woman’s Party pushed for it in Congress, arguing that legal equality required eliminating sex-based distinctions in law, including protective labor legislation. Labor activists such as Rose Schneiderman and Frances Perkins opposed the amendment because they feared it would strip away the protections Muller had made possible. Florence Kelley, who had organized the Muller defense, fought against the ERA on the same grounds.
The split lasted for decades. Women seeking equal access to jobs and wages ran into Muller. Women in exploitative industries depended on the protections Muller allowed. The case had turned equality and protection into competing goals.
How Muller Was Undone
The Supreme Court began narrowing Muller’s logic within fifteen years. In Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923), the Court struck down a minimum wage law for women in Washington, D.C. The majority reasoned that the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 had given women “equality of legal status” with men, and that the old justification for restricting women’s contractual freedom could no longer stand. Adkins also distinguished hours regulation, which could plausibly be tied to health, from wage regulation, which could not.8Justia. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital
The decisive change came from Congress rather than the courts. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination based on sex, which meant states could no longer impose work restrictions on women that did not also apply to men. State laws limiting women’s hours, barring them from night shifts, or excluding them from certain occupations could not survive under federal anti-discrimination law. The framework Muller built was finally incompatible with the governing rule.
Why Muller v. Oregon Still Matters
The case sits in an uncomfortable spot in legal history. Its gender-based reasoning does not survive modern scrutiny, and its assumptions about women’s dependency and fragility read as products of their time. But it introduced a lasting idea into constitutional argument: that courts should weigh real-world evidence, not only legal abstractions, when deciding whether a law serves a legitimate public purpose. The Brandeis Brief became a template for civil rights, environmental, and public health litigation across the twentieth century. Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1954, drew on sociological evidence about segregation’s psychological effects in a way that traces back to what Brandeis and Goldmark put together in a month for a Portland laundry case.
Muller also stands as a warning about protections built on inequality. What started as an effort to shield women from exploitation became a tool for limiting their economic opportunities, and it took federal civil rights legislation to close the gap. Labor protections tend to work best when they apply to all workers, not only to those a society treats as needing special guardianship.