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GREG HALL

The Fruits of Her Labor

Women, Children, and Progressive Era Reformers in the Pacific Northwest Canning Industry

"GIRLS MAKE FOOD FIGHT" WAS the Portland News headline at the outset of a 1913 Oregon Packing Company strike. Women at the plant had had enough of low pay, poor working conditions, and an unsympathetic cannery management. The strikers quickly garnered the attention of local socialists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, religious leaders, and area residents. Still, the newly formed Oregon Industrial Welfare Commission (OIWC) had the most influence in resolving the strike and addressing the concerns of women workers at the cannery and elsewhere in Oregon. The OIWC — an institution that epitomized the Progressive Era — and its sister agency to the north in Washington dealt with a host of issues regarding women and children in the workplace. Studying the rather underdeveloped history of the formative phase of the Pacific Northwest canning industry, its workforce, and the Progressives who sought to reform it offers a unique perspective on the changing role of women as wageworkers in society, growing public concern about child labor, and state governments' evolving social and labor policy.1 1
      At the end of the nineteenth century and during the first few decades of the twentieth, fruit and vegetable canneries in states on the Pacific Coast became primary employers of female workers — adults and children. Canneries, which tended to hire females rather than males for most jobs, were major sources of employment for women and girls. At the same time, Progressives sought to improve working conditions, stabilize wages for women in canneries, and end child labor in the industry.2 Pacific Northwest Progressives improved conditions, but, in the process, they undermined women's empowerment as wage laborers; whether they did so intentionally or not is unclear in the historical record. They fostered a form of paternalistic government intervention that, on the one hand, helped eliminate child labor in canneries but, on the other hand, sought to discipline women into a compliant and domesticated workforce. 2


 
Figure 1
    Oregon was a battleground state for the eight-hour day for women. Here, Marie Michaels poses in an apron advertising the cause for working women. The photographer, Franklyn Sowell, worked in Portland between 1911 and 1915.

    OHS neg., No. 25646
 


 


 
Figure 2
    Women took on temporary and seasonal work in all sectors of farm production, especially during harvest. Sorting and packing apples — such as in this photograph of women and a man taken in Yamhill County in about 1902 — was a common feature of rural life.

    OHS neg., OrHi 91844
 


 
      Progressives generally assumed that women wage workers would eventually become wives and mothers and leave the workforce and, therefore, tended to think of them only in terms of temporary workers. They did not encourage women to organize their own unions, seemingly basing their work on the premise that women and children could not defend themselves in the workplace as well as men could. Labor laws protecting men were sporadic around the country and apparently lacked the comprehensive logic for which Progressives advocated regarding women's and children's labor laws. Progressive reformers worked to protect and preserve what they saw as women's femininity and maternalism. In The Wages of Motherhood, Gwendolyn Mink explores the concept of maternalism, an ideology that assumed that men (husbands) earning a family wage would solve the problem of women having to work for wages. She also explains how Progressive Era reformers chose to lament, rather than to seek empowerment for, wage working women — that is, they supported paternalistic state intervention rather than clear unionization. One of the most ardent groups associated with such maternalist orientation was the General Federation of Women's Clubs, which "opposed the employment of mothers of young children." Operating under similar ideals in Oregon was the Consumer's League, an organization that "lobbied for improvements" in workplace protection for women and children, but not for men, in order to preserve "the future health of the race."3 3
      In their efforts to regulate workplaces, western Progressives were following national trends that have been outlined by Susan Lehrer in Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905–1925. Progressives, according to Lehrer and other scholars, thought of themselves as bringing order to industrial work life and rationalization to the labor process by demanding an end to the exploitation — that is, underpayment and long hours — of women's labor as well as an outright ban on children's labor. The legislation that Progressives promoted was upheld by numerous state and federal court decisions that allowed for regulations based on the worker rather than the work, giving women and children opportunities for protections that male workers in the same industries did not receive. The National Consumers' League defended such legislation in many of those court cases. Arguments by prominent National Consumers' League members Florence Kelly and Josephine Goldmark in the 1908 Muller v. Oregon case, for example, led the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of restrictions on the number of hours wage working women could be employed. Progressives' efforts to bring some rationality to an industrialized society are well documented by Janice Dilg, who argues that "social order" was the goal for Progressive Era reformers. Building on the scholarship of other women's historians, Dilg goes on to explain how protecting "motherhood" among wage working women — white, native-born women, that is — was an overriding factor in labor legislation on the West Coast as well as in other areas of the United States and in other industrialized countries.4 4
      Many of those wage working women in the Pacific Northwest were employed in canneries, an industry that stemmed from commercial fruit growing, which began in Oregon as early as the 1850s. Steamships ferried thousands of bushels of apples to the hungry metropolis of San Francisco, one of the state's largest markets. During the 1870s, eastern markets also became a destination for Oregon fruit, especially plums and dried fruit. Although Oregon had to deal with competition from California fruit growers who marketed their fruits in the state, orchard agriculture was a slow but steadily increasing commercial venture for Willamette Valley farmers during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Access to new markets through more efficient transportation systems, national and international export companies, the invention of the refrigerated railcar, and innovations in pest control helped secure orchard agriculture as a major contributor to the West Coast's burgeoning agricultural economies by 1910. 5
      In Oregon, the canning industry grew along with agricultural production and profits. Following California's lead in canning technology innovations, fruit growers and investors in the Pacific Northwest turned to canning the region's agricultural produce as a means to deal with increased fruit production and to take advantage of greater access to domestic and international markets. The Oregon Packing Company, established in East Portland in 1888, was one of the largest and most successful of the state's early canners. During the following three decades, fruit and vegetable canneries opened in Eugene, The Dalles, Freewater, Monroe, Forest Grove, Ashland, Hood River, Medford, and many other towns west of the Cascade Range. From 1900 to 1910, tree fruit production grew by 190 percent while the value of the fruit grew 268 percent; similar figures document the increased production of small fruit such as strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, and blackberries. Canning production in Salem, Oregon, increased from 36,000 cases of canned produce in 1911 to 1.1 million in 1926.5 By the mid-1920s, twenty-five canneries operated in the state, canning roughly "sixty thousand tons of fresh fruits and vegetables." Canning operations in Oregon were either cooperatives or privately owned companies, which grew at a much faster rate than co-ops. With five privately owned companies and two cooperatives in 1925, Salem and its surrounding area evolved into the largest fruit packing and canning district in the Pacific Northwest.6 6
      In Washington, soils and climates, though diverse, proved highly conducive to the heavy production of fruits and vegetables, including berries, cherries, soft fruits, apples, peas, green beans, spinach, tomatoes, and asparagus. Irrigation made the shift to orchard agriculture possible in Washington, especially in the Wenatchee and Yakima valleys, and produce dominated farms to the east and west of the Cascade Range. As in Oregon, some of the earliest canneries in Washington were cooperatives that grew out of the necessity to market increased production of fruits. From 1907 to 1920, cooperative and, especially, privately owned canning companies expanded operations, and consolidation and development of new canneries typified the industry. The earliest and largest canneries operated in Seattle, Puyallup, Spokane, Wenatchee, and Yakima. The demand for non-perishable foods increased as the domestic urban population expanded in the years leading up to World War I, and military needs in 1917 and 1918 further stimulated the market for canned goods. During the 1920s, Washington had nearly fifty produce canneries, including fish canners that had converted to the increasingly lucrative vegetable and fruit canning market, and the state rivaled other western states in the production of canned apples, berries, and other fruits. The Puyallup, Yakima, and Wenatchee valleys supplied the state's canneries with some of the greatest production of berries, apples, and soft fruits in the United States.7 7


 
Figure 3
    With the introduction of automation in canning, women played an important role as wageworkers in a variety of canning operations. Here, they work with canned fish at the Megler Cannery in Brookfield, Washington, in about 1901 or 1902.

    OHS neg., OrHi 56468
 


 
      Except for the highly skilled tasks necessary in early commercial canning — making the cans and soldering them closed, which machines accomplished after automation during the 1870s — employers tended to prefer women and children's labor to that of men. After the 1870s, men continued to work in canneries as cookers, doing work employers considered to be more highly skilled than the sorting, cleaning, and packing of cans done by female workers. Many employers considered that work to be similar to packinghouse labor, which they considered lighter work. The seasonal, temporary nature of canning jobs motivated employers to find workers who did not have permanent full-time jobs but were eager to earn wages. Women and children, therefore, became a highly sought-after workforce in the canning industries of the Pacific Northwest and throughout the nation. "The canners," one government study found, "depend upon ... women not employed in normal industries, and would have difficulty running their canneries without them."8 Employers also considered labor provided by children to be essential for cannery operations, at least during the formative period of the industry, which lasted from the 1880s through the 1910s. They argued for the necessity of child cannery workers "because of the perishable nature of the crops, the short season, and the scarcity of workers."9 Many people thought of farm work as being beneficial to children's health, and employers claimed that cannery work was similarly healthful. During the industry's early years, advocates of children's labor in canneries considered the work to be less industrial than that done in other factory settings and, therefore, viewed it as less detrimental to childhood development. Legislators in Oregon and Washington concurred with employers by exempting canneries from child-labor laws during the 1910s.10 8
      Other arguments in support of women and children performing cannery labor referred to saving the local crop and bringing prosperity to the community. Farmers often viewed women and children as important auxiliary labor. These "non-workers," usually family members or neighbors, became workers when labor shortages existed, a common occurrence in rural areas. Government reports defined canneries as an extension of farming communities and were tied in the minds of the local residents to the general prosperity of their town, city, or valley. The livelihood of an entire community could rest on the successful harvest of rapidly ripening fruits and vegetables that needed to be picked, boxed, and shipped to market as soon as possible. The production of thousands of cases of canned fruits and vegetables effectively completed the harvest. Successful canneries, furthermore, provided greater consumer buying power to a community or region and contributed to its overall economic vitality by employing dozens, hundreds, or thousands of workers.11 9
      By the beginning of the twentieth century, Oregon's Forest Grove Fruit Growers' Association oversaw several canning operations and regularly employed women and girls as well as some men and boys, though most cannery workers were female. Similarly, according to a 1915 U.S. Department of Agriculture study, most employees at a plant in Eugene, Oregon, were female. The Eugene plant, like most canneries, processed a variety of crops. If the crop being canned was pears, for example, workers would first sort and then peel the fruit. Second, they would split and core the pears. Lastly, they filled the cans. A smaller number of workers directed the filled cans down a conveyer line that took the canned fruit to be sealed and then to the steamers were they would be cooked. Between one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five women and girls worked in the preparing and canning room, where they were supervised by a "forewoman." The smaller number of men and boys — between fifteen and twenty — worked as helpers, receivers, clerks, and warehousemen and were supervised by a foreman. By 1923, Washington was the number one canner of berries and apples in the nation, and, according to a U.S. Department of Labor investigation conducted by the Children's Bureau in 1930, three quarters of cannery workers in the state were female. In that study, investigators found that female children prepared the fruit — by peeling, coring, and splitting it — then packed it into cans. Male children that the investigators encountered did a variety of "odd jobs." While women cleaned and prepared the fruit and vegetables, men cooked and did the heavy work of moving containers; cooking was the one task considered "skilled" by employers. Although some canning operations were heavily mechanized by the 1920s, workers had the necessary skills and flexibility to accomplish specific tasks, especially in regard to soft fruits, that machines of the day could not do.12 10
      Fruit and vegetable cannery workers in Oregon and Washington lacked the ethnic diversity of California's workforce, but many of the trends in age, marital status, and motivations to seek wage work were the same. Female cannery workers' ages ranged from early teenage to sixties. Whereas most female workers had been single in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the balance shifted to a majority married after 1910. In California, Oregon, and Washington, the canning season tended to be longer in urban than in rural areas. The turnover rate was high, and many employees did not work the entire season. Full-time, year-round employment was rare for the era's working class, and many workers — both men and women — frequently experienced layoffs and had to take on new kinds of employment. Canning was one of the few industrial occupations open to women who had limited skills and modest education, and its temporary nature gave women additional flexibility, allowing them to incorporate the work into family responsibilities such as bringing in income and helping raise or care for kin. This was true for both single and married women, as many single women lived with their parents, siblings, or extended family members and needed to contribute to the larger family income. A 1926 government study of orchard, field, and cannery workers in Washington reported that women engaged in wage work needed "to help meet the expenses, or supply the necessities of home and family."13 The cost of living in the Pacific Northwest, especially in urban areas, increased from the 1890s to the 1920s, and some women could not depend on their husband's or father's income to fully support their families. Other women worked to earn money for one-time or occasional purchases, such as a house, household items, or clothing. Some wanted employment while they transitioned to another line of work, and a substantial number worked in order to fund their education. Many young working women did not have to contribute to the family income, freeing them to save money for school. Of Washington women who gave earning a living for themselves as their reason for seeking employment when surveyed in 1926, most were employed in fruit and vegetable canneries.14 11


 
Figure 4
    As this Salem, Oregon, photograph shows, men were employed in canneries, though they tended to work in more limited capacities than women and in what employers considered more "skilled" positions.

    OHS neg., OrHi 7145
 


 
      For working class and farm families, children's wage labor was also an important component of the annual family income. Children worked at an early age in factories, in mines, and on farms throughout the United States during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and their labor was integral to the canning industry's early growth and development. During the first years of industrialized canning, between the 1880s and 1910s, intensive hand labor that did not require extensive training or knowledge was necessary for preparing fruits and vegetables for cooking. Because the canning season roughly coincided with the summer months, when school was not in session, parents regularly brought their children into the canneries to work with them. In some rural areas, employers hired entire families to work in various capacities in the plant. Children over ten years old tended to work independently, while younger children usually helped their parents. Employers paid workers on a piece-rate basis, so they had little concern that they may be overpaying slow, inattentive child workers. States, urban areas, and rural worksites varied in the percentage of children employed in canning.15 12
      Nationally, minors — people under age sixteen — working in canneries declined from 18 to 3 percent between 1880 and 1920. Several factors help to explain this trend. Employers' desire for greater efficiency in the workplace propelled a decline in child labor in conjunction with legal restrictions enacted by state governments. Economists Martin Brown, Jens Christiansen, and Peter Philips note, however, that declining child labor in canneries was not a uniform trend in the West or in the United States generally. In urban areas, cannery owners could produce a wide variety of food commodities. Innovations in transportation and cannery technology along with a ready supply of adult labor allowed urban canneries to expand their operations as long as they had the capital to do so. That diversification led to longer production periods, increased mechanization, and a more regularly employed and somewhat more skilled workforce that could quickly and efficiently transition from one crop to the next. Urban cannery owners found child labor less desirable, because children simply were not productive enough for a diversified cannery. In contrast to urban worksites, rural cannery owners continued to focus on fewer fruit or vegetable crops; therefore, capital investment remained comparatively low, mechanization was slow to be implemented, and production periods remained brief. Employment practices in rural areas changed little over the years, and children continued to work in canneries there well into the 1920s. In California, Oregon, and Washington, the dichotomy between urban and rural cannery employment practices tended to match national trends.16 13
      Washington experienced an overall reduction of child labor by 1920, as Progressives there had successfully restricted child labor, which they hoped would curtail social problems that had arisen in more industrially advanced states. They used government as an agent for the protection of children as a means to rationalize the labor process, which, in their minds, meant the eventual elimination of child labor. Their goal was not easily attained. In 1907, a state law in Washington prohibited the employment of children younger than thirteen years old in a variety of occupations, except when incidents of poverty required them to work. In that case, workers could obtain a permit from a superior-court judge. Washington state law did require work permits for boys under the age of fourteen and for girls under the age of sixteen "employed in factories or any inside employment not connected with farmwork or housework." The 1909 law also required "school-exemption certificates issued by school superintendents for all children under 15 employed at any work during school hours."17 Washington's Progressives failed, however, to persuade the state's legislature to enact a law that went beyond those statutes to regulate the hours children could legally work in canneries. In 1922, furthermore, the 1907 law was repealed, leaving "no State law ... in effect fixing a minimum age for work in factories or canneries."18 In 1923, the U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, completed an investigation into child labor in fruit and vegetable canneries in Washington. The resulting report documented at least one ten-year-old girl sorting berries in a western Washington cannery and concluded that 86 percent of workers under the age of sixteen in Washington's canneries were female. Nevertheless, only a small percentage of the overall cannery workforce in the state was actually comprised of minors, defined at different times as either under age fourteen or sixteen; the vast majority were adult women.19 14
      Oregon's Progressive reformers and religious leaders were early supporters of restrictions on child labor. Beginning their campaigns for reform in 1902, they were ultimately more successful than reformers in Washington. Father Edwin O'Hara was especially eloquent in his concern about the health of Oregon's next generation of adult citizens. In 1903, the state enacted its first child labor law, which included the creation of a Child Labor Commission, but the legislature did not appropriate funding for enforcement. In 1905, legislators strengthened the law, making a concerted attempt to keep children under age fourteen in school and out of the wage working environment, but that statute "was declared inoperative by the Attorney- General of the State" later that year.20 In response to the attorney general, the state labor commissioner sought to amend the compulsory education law so that children between the ages of eight and fourteen were required to be in school for the entire academic year. 15
      The legislature did have a compulsory school attendance law in 1905, but special permits could allow children to work. Cannery owners evidently took advantage of that allowance. In its 1913 report, Social Welfare Survey, the Consumers' League of Oregon, led by Father O'Hara, declared that "fruit and vegetable canneries are probably the most flagrant violators of the labor law, both as to length of hours of women's work and age of children permitted to work." Investigators found "children under 11 years of age with their parents, and sometimes unaccompanied, work[ing] more than the ten hours a day allowed an adult."21 Yet, in the long run, the strategy of linking education with a delayed entry into wage employment proved politically successful. The state's Bureau of Labor and its Child Labor Commission became staunch supporters of compulsory public education in Oregon, and, in 1919, the state legislature enacted a law prohibiting children under the age of fourteen to be employed in canneries and certain other factory employment. Although enforcement of the new law was sporadic, children under the age of seventeen apparently made up a small percentage of the state's fruit and vegetable cannery workforce during the 1920s.22 In OIWC reports from the 1920s, no mention was ever made of a problem with child labor in the canneries, contrasting sharply with reports from the 1900s and 1910s, which expressed concern about child labor in the canneries. 16


 
Figure 5
    As temporary and seasonal workers, women and children proved essential to the successful harvest of perishable crops. Here, two women and a young boy carry freshly filled berry boxes in Marion County in about 1920.

    OHS neg., OrHi 12173
 


 
      Progressive Era activism aimed at eliminating children's wage labor was part of a national trend that manifested in the creation of bureaus and departments directed by legislators to regulate industries in terms of working conditions, safety, hours, and wages. All three West Coast state legislatures moved to regulate both child labor and women's labor during the initial decades of the twentieth century. Progressives considered women, like children, to be a dependent class of workers in need of protections that were not accorded men (except in regard to workers' compensation legislation). Concern about women's labor stemmed in part from the increasing number of women employed in the paid labor force over the course of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Women had always worked in American industry, but, until the late-nineteenth century, most were young, single, and only stayed in the wage workforce until they married. By 1900, the number of married and widowed women who worked outside their home increased to about 15 percent of the overall female wage workforce. That percentage would continue to rise as the century unfolded. More women also worked longer into adulthood, and some spent all of their adult lives in the paid workforce. State officials in Washington recognized this trend in the 1910s, and in 1920, they estimated that sixty thousand women were the "breadwinners" in their state among twelve million such workers nationally.23 17


 
Figure 6
    These workers were photographed at a Hood River cannery between 1900 and 1910. Cannery labor was part of an annual work cycle that many women depended on to assist with family financial needs.

    OHS neg., OrHi 11290
 


 
PUBLIC DESIRE TO REGULATE WOMEN'S labor was tied to concern about potential injury to future generations of Americans. Activists believed working in the harsh industrial environment could hamper what they saw as women's natural roles as wife, mother, and homemaker. In 1908, when attorney Louis Brandeis successfully defended Oregon's ten-hour-day law for women before the U.S. Supreme Court in Muller v. Oregon, he "based his argument on four 'matters of general knowledge': first, women are physically weaker than and otherwise physically different from men; second, damage to a woman's health might affect her future reproductive capacity; third, the health of a child may be damaged by overworking its mother; and fourth, excess hours of labor deprive the family of her services in the home."24 In addition, Progressives linked state intervention on behalf of women to their physical "weakness." Organizations such as the Consumers' League of Oregon put political pressure on legislators in Salem to create an Industrial Welfare Commission that would address women's workplace issues. Prevailing views of women's weakness and their primary roles as mothers combined with political pressure to lead to regulation of women's labor in the workforce. That protective legislation, in turn, created government agencies specifically focused on regulating both women's and children's labor. In 1913, state legislatures in California, Oregon, and Washington established industrial welfare commissions. According to the Oregon legislature, "The welfare of the State of Oregon requires that women and minors should be protected from conditions of labor which have a pernicious effect on their health and morals, and inadequate wages and unduly long hours and unsanitary conditions of labor have such a pernicious effect ... that there shall be created an industrial Welfare Commission."25 18
      An early test of the effectiveness of the Oregon Industrial Welfare Commission (OIWC) was the summer 1913 Oregon Packing Company strike. On June 27, female employees at the Portland cannery struck over a change in pay scale after managers asked them to prepare a new crop for canning. Previously, workers could earn approximately one dollar a day stemming strawberries, but, with the introduction of cherries, some workers found that they were only making forty cents after a day's labor. Because of the poor quality of the fruit, some women worked three hours to earn just ten cents. Several women complained to their supervisors, and, when management did not increase the piece-rate, fifty walked off the job. After several days, as many as two hundred female employees had left work to picket conditions at the plant. The picketers carried a variety of signs, but one that reflected the social concern for working women earning poor wages was a banner that read "Forty cents a day makes prostitutes."26 The striking workers received support from the local community soon after the strike began. One woman who lived close to the factory opened her home to the striking workers so they could have a headquarters from which to organize the strike. Local socialists organized a street gathering so workers could describe their working conditions to the public. Women as young as fifteen and as old as sixty-three testified to the assembled gathering.27 19
      Area socialists, including English immigrant Tom Burns, helped the workers form a strike committee, which worked to negotiate with the company and encouraged other workers to stay on strike until rates were increased. Management, however, refused to meet with the strikers. Cannery superintendent O.L. McPherson adamantly argued that the company could not afford to increase wages because of the business' small profit margin. He claimed that the cannery had to compete with California canneries and market its product in the East, which required it to reduce payroll expenditures. Ultimately, his rationale for the company's low wages rested on an assumption that "virtually every woman working as a picker does not have to work for her support.... Many of them are girls who want to make some extra pin money."28 McPherson either did not understand or was willfully ignorant of the economic situation of his employees, for many did need their cannery wages for basic financial support. Despite McPherson and the company's intransigence, the women strikers and their socialist allies continued to picket and organize.29 20
      The recently created OIWC entered the conflict, initiating an investigation of working conditions and pay at the cannery within days of the strike's beginning. OIWC members Father V. O'Hara, Bertha Moores, Amedee Smith, and Caroline Gleason interviewed workers, inspected the plant, and examined the company's books to ascertain expenditures and profits. The commission negotiated with the company and won a one-dollar minimum daily wage for females. Workers could earn more than the minimum daily wage because the piece-rate system was still in effect. The company also agreed to make some improvements in washroom facilities. The OIWC's goals were to bring some rationality to the system in order to avoid conflict and, more importantly, to deal with a serious problem of underpaid working women in the city. Some factories in the city paid women a maximum of only $3.50 to $4.50 a week, while the commission argued that even $6.00 a week was too little income for a self-supporting working woman.30 21
      A majority of the striking workers initially refused the terms of the settlement, but those holding out became a minority as the strike wore on. Their more comprehensive demands included a minimum daily wage of $1.50, a nine-hour day, overtime pay, and workplace improvements such as a lunchroom, a sickroom, and a dressing room with lockers, towels, and aprons. They also demanded no discrimination against the strikers once they returned to work. The company refused the strikers' demands and tried to undermine community support for the strike by enticing nearby residents of the plant to complain to the police about the strikers' behavior on the picket line. Still, striking workers continued to receive a great deal of public support. Labor unions sent donations. Local socialists and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as Wobblies, solicited donations on behalf of the striking women. On July 8, two groups of women marched to City Hall to discuss the situation with Mayor Harry Albee. One group was supportive of the changes brokered by the OIWC and complained of their treatment at the hands of the strikers. The other group argued their case regarding the merits of the strike. Albee was sympathetic toward the strikers but did not approve of the "language" they directed at cannery workers who continued to work at the plant. Eventually, Governor Oswald West decided to intervene. He listened to representatives from both sides of the strike and to members of the OIWC. He seemed sympathetic to the strikers' demands for a higher minimum wage and for more sanitary working conditions; however, he was adamant that the strikers, their representatives, and supporters had to work with the company and the OIWC.31 22
      The strike was essentially over by mid-July, though a free-speech fight continued to the end of the month. The workers' strike led to an increase in pay and substantial improvements in working conditions, particularly in terms of washrooms and other much needed sanitary improvements at the cannery; but, despite radical and mainstream labor support for the strike, no union organization emerged from the women's struggle. Neither the IWW nor Portland's Central Labor Council assisted women strikers in establishing an organized cannery workforce, and there is no evidence that they made an effort to organize themselves. That lack of union organization may have resulted, in part, from the OIWC's undermining solidarity among striking women workers. Under the commission-brokered agreement, conditions improved enough for some employees to decide to return to work, while others, who strove for greater improvements, continued to strike. That lack of solidarity could have worked against the labor movement's efforts to organize the workforce. It is just as likely that male labor leaders never considered low skilled, seasonal women workers a worthy constituency for labor organizing. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss the accomplishments of the OIWC. Although strikers put pressure on employers to improve wages and working conditions, it was the OIWC that proved instrumental in working out an actual agreement. Commission members were not entirely satisfied with the agreement, however, and they continued to challenge the labor policies of the canning company during the following years. That women had little choice but to accept the commission-brokered agreement cast them in the role of a dependent class of workers without the power or opportunity to craft their own agreements with employers.32 23
      The cannery strike in Portland was an anomaly among Pacific Northwest cannery workers during the 1910s and 1920s. The high turnover rate among such workers was the more standard form by which employees addressed poor wages and unsatisfactory working conditions. Moving on to other employment was far more common than staging a strike. Still, Progressives were concerned that financially sustainable employment was not available to women. Members of the Washington Industrial Welfare Commission (WIWC) and the OIWC investigated the wages, hours, working conditions, and cost of living for women workers in their respective states. Industries subject to investigations included manufacturing, retail, laundry, restaurants, telephone and telegraph, and canneries. Fruit and vegetable canneries featured prominently in the investigations because they employed so many women. The OIWC held a special conference in 1914 "because of the seasonal character of the fruit and vegetable canning industry and the large number of women and children employed."33 The OIWC was interested in issues such as regulating box weight for employees who were paid for the number of boxes they filled, standardizing "daily time and piece work checks," and adjusting piece rates to the current minimum wage.34 The commission recommended that adult women workers could not be employed in a cannery, unless they were able to earn the minimum wage of $8.25 per week, and allowed employers to make accommodations for women who did not work a full workweek so that the minimum wage reflected less than full time employment for that week. The workweek itself was allowed to exceed ten-hour days but had to remain limited to sixty hours. Two constitutional challenges, Stettler v. O'Hara and Simpson v. O'Hara, were made against the OIWC in 1914, and the Oregon Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the commission's authority. The commission had the legal authority to establish minimum wage rates, but it did not do so in canning. The OIWC exempted canning from minimum weekly wage rates in other manufacturing industries and from the ten-hour day because of the seasonality and piece rate nature of the pay until 1917, when it stipulated minimum piece rates, a minimum hourly wage, and the ten-hour law for cannery workers, including overtime pay. 24
      In 1914, the commission also solicited employers' and employees' recommendations regarding improvements in working conditions, wages, and hours. Employees' primary concern was the inadequacy of pay when based on a piece rate, and they lobbied for an hourly wage. Employers resisted the hourly wage because they feared workers would labor at a slower pace, knowing that, regardless of their productivity, they would receive a predetermined wage. OIWC representatives of the employees argued that more problems were associated with poor canning practices due to the need to can as much as possible to earn an adequate salary. Some workers did not clean the fruit very well or stuffed leaves and other materials into the cans, covering the top portion of the can with fruit. Employees' representatives argued that laborers would work at a more measured pace and be more conscientious if there was less pressure and they were assured of a decent wage. The piece rate was not abolished, but a compromise was reached after the 1914 conference on canneries. Workers were paid at a piece rate, but the resulting wage could not fall below a minimum hourly pay. Employers more readily agreed to address workers' other concerns, particularly having to do with seating, toilet facilities, and other amenities. Through the 1920s, the commission increased the rate of pay and prosecuted cannery owners who violated the OIWC's policies. A missing player in the negotiations was Oregon's organized labor movement. Labor leaders, though supportive of some of the OIWC's work, feared that a minimum wage would have a leveling affect and become a maximum wage for working women in the state. Labor leaders in California and Washington echoed that sentiment.35 25


 
Figure 7
    Growing demand for canned fruit matched by new technological innovations led to mass production, which stimulated expansion of the canning industry on the West Coast during the early years of the twentieth century. Here, one day's work of 6,000 cans of Bartlett pears is displayed.

    OHS neg., bb003592
 


 
WASHINGTON'S IWC HAD A SHORTER life than its counterpart in Oregon. Nevertheless, unlike Oregon and California, it established an eighthour day for women workers in all industries, including canning, by 1923. The commission in Washington began with great support from Governor Ernest Lister, who appointed to it men and women who were committed to Progressive Era causes. One such appointment was the controversial Theresa McMahon, a crusading academic who defied conventional wisdom regarding the independence and privacy of wage-working women. Armed with a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and a stint at Hull House in Chicago, McMahon and her coterie of female assistants surveyed company records regarding the hours and pay of women in a variety of occupations and discovered that some employers spied on their female employees. If the employer deemed the employee's actions "immoral," he fired her, a practice McMahon spoke out against in one of her public addresses as a representative of the commission. She argued that what a woman did off the worksite was no concern of the employer as long as it did not interfere with her performance at work. An outcry erupted as newspapers spread her comments around the state. Lister was inundated by church leaders and business interests calling for McMahon's removal, believing she was advocating immoral behavior. McMahon received support, especially from educators and labor leaders who approved of her work at the WIWC, but Lister did not reappoint her to the commission in 1914.36 26
      The commission also used concerns about "morality" to the advantage of its work. An early achievement of the agency was the 1914 publication of a report based on its extensive research into working conditions, wages, and hours for women and child workers in all of the state's major industries. The commission found that, in fruit and vegetable canneries, a majority of women earned less than six dollars a week. The commission was concerned that low-wage employment would contribute to declining "morals" of underpaid women workers. Commissioners feared that women would succumb to the advances of men who could alleviate their "slow starvation" — that is, that the women would become prostitutes. The report concluded that "once having entered upon a life of degradation and having enjoyed again the comfort of pleasant shelter and plenty of nourishing food, the inadequate wage she has left and the impossibility of receiving a higher one is the effectual bar which keeps her from returning to a moral life." The solution, from the point of view of the commission, was to establish a weekly minimum wage.37 27
      In order to determine an adequate minimum weekly wage for working women, the commission set out to document the cost of living for the "average" wage-working woman. The WIWC distributed a "Female Wage Earner's Expense Report" form and asked women workers to fill it out at the end of each week for six months. The form included a list of expenses from food to rent to clothing to medical needs. The commission noted, though, that "the plan has not been entirely successful as it is most difficult to persuade the young women to keep the weekly account and send it in."38 Commissioners received some responses, conducted interviews with working women, and made use of other data gained from investigations at canneries to calculate an annual cost of living for women working in factories, mercantile stores, and laundries. With that cost of living analysis, the agency began to formulate weekly minimum wage rates for specific industries, which did not, however, include fruit and vegetable canneries, mainly because the WIWC had no idea what the piece rates were in the industry. The commission therefore began an investigation of the pay standards in Washington's canneries.39 28
      "Considerable agitation ... in favor of establishing minimum wages for women and minors employed in the fruit industry" and "the fact that ... California has recently promulgated orders covering such occupations" helped spur a WIWC investigation of fruit and vegetable canneries.40 The commission began to survey the industry in the summer of 1916 and soon discovered that it was going to be a difficult undertaking; only two canneries answered the request for information about pay rates it had sent to every cannery in the state. The WIWC then tried to survey the workers directly with wage report forms. Again, the commission was stymied, for only one worker out of several hundred filled out the form. Instead of chalking the lack of response up to apathy, the commission believed that employers had deterred workers "from submitting the requested information." The commission then chose to "conduct a personal, house to house, survey of the communities wherein the cannery workers resided." An important element of the cannery investigation was determining the nature of the working conditions. One commission member found a lack of first aid available to injured workers, a chronic problem of "fruit poisoning" (a condition attributed to fruit acids severely irritating workers' skin), a lack of adequate toilet facilities, and other problems.41 The WIWC found that reforming working conditions was easier than establishing a minimum weekly wage that employers would accept, and it decided to place fruit and vegetable cannery work under the rubric of manufacturing labor, meaning that cannery workers would receive the same protections as other manufacturing wage workers. Unfortunately for the commission, Lister's death in 1919 removed an important state advocate. 29
      In 1920, Louis Hart, who was far friendlier to the state's business associations than Lister had been, became Washington's governor and supported business' interests in a dispute with the commission over an increase in the weekly minimum wage. Cannery owners, in particular, vigorously protested the increase from $13.20 to $18.00, which was set to be implemented in 1920. Believing that they could no longer serve the interests of women workers in the WIWC, several commissioners resigned, and Hart replaced them with more pro-business political operatives. The weekly minimum wage was not increased. The successor to the commission was the Industrial Welfare Committee, an agency within the Department of Labor and Industries. That agency worked out a compromise with cannery owners: workers would be paid at a piece rate that had to equal the minimum weekly wage rates for manufacturing employees for at least 75 percent of the workers in the state's canneries. Twenty-five percent, presumably older workers, minors, and beginners, were allowed to fall below the minimum wage rate.42

 30
BY THE BEGINNING OF THE 1920S, a degree of order and rationality had come to the Pacific Northwest canning industries' workforce. Women workers gained some improvements in their pay and working conditions through the IWCs and other government agencies, while child workers were largely removed from cannery labor because of government intervention and the enlightened self-interest of employers. Those changes were part of a larger Progressive reform agenda that affected other industries in the region and throughout the United States. Women wage workers, however, were no more empowered by the changes in canning than they were in other industries that employed a majority female workforce. Limits as to what state activism could do for workers in the Pacific Northwest's fruit and vegetable canneries resulted from representatives of employers' interests — rather than that of working women — dominating the bureaus and commissions designed to help workers. The OIWC's compromises with employers over piece rates and the outright elimination of the WIWC demonstrate the commissioners' tendency to side with business. Other factors that contributed to the limits of Progressive Era reform were ideological assumptions that women belonged in the home and not the workplace and that working women were anomalies who would eventually take up their duties of full-time motherhood. Those assumptions, of course, flew in the face of a changing economy that required more and more women to work for a wage to support themselves and their families. Some scholars, furthermore, argue that protective legislation merely "gendered" women's labor, undermining women's credibility as independent workers in their own right and "reinforce[ing] the subordinate position of women in the work force while at the same time ameliorating some of the worst abuses of their working situation."43 31
      Industrial or trade unionism could have been the mechanism for women's empowerment as workers, but that path was retarded by the very leaders of labor agencies who sought to aid women. Such organizing did not occur until the New Deal, when a different form of government activism encouraged workers, including women, to organize. A prescient indicator of such a change in ideology was heard from none other than representatives of the short-lived WIWC. At a gathering of trade unionists in 1919, commissioners called for labor leaders to "unionize your working women and girls, and through economic organization compel their employers to pay them a living wage. Don't look to the government boards and commissions to do for labor what labor can do better for itself."44 Washington's nearly allmale labor movement, however, did not follow such candid advocacy for organizing. Labor leaders and rank and file union members in Washington and Oregon, as well as the rest of the country, tended to believe that women workers, like children workers, were a social problem that needed to be addressed by paternalistic government intervention. Women themselves, furthermore, were slow to organize themselves in their temporary, seasonal employment at fruit and vegetable canneries. High turnover rates in the industry reflected time-honored strategies of workers, whether women or men, who left unsatisfactory employment for something more amenable. Cannery workers were a diverse group, ranging from those seeking employment for short-term goals because of the temporary nature of the employment to those working for their very economic survival, making the cannery an important part of their annual income. The latter group became more pronounced as the twentieth century wore on and contributed to an explosion of labor organizing during the 1930s, when a substantial majority of wage-working women were in Pacific Northwest canneries out of necessity rather than by choice and when a new spirit of labor organizing emerged out of the hardship of the Great Depression.45 32


NOTES

The author thanks Ginny Boynton, Peter Cole, David Coon, Cynthia Wright, Nan Enstad, Srigley Katrina, Joshua Freeman, Eliza Canty-Jones, and the thoughtful reviewers at OHQ for their helpful suggestions on this article. Versions of this essay were presented as papers at the 2006 Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association Conference at Stanford University and at the 2007 Social Science History Association Conference in Chicago.

1.  See Portland News, June 28, 30, 1913; Portland Journal, June 30, 1913; Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 63.

2.  On California cannery workers, see Jaclyn Greenberg, "Industry in the Garden: A Social History of the Canning Industry and Cannery Workers in the Santa Clara Valley, California, 1870–1920" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1985); Elizabeth Reis, "AFL, the IWW, and Bay Area Italian Cannery Workers," California History 64 (Summer 1985), 174–91, 241–42; Patricia Zavella, Women's Work and Chicago Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987); Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Donald Anthony, "Labor Conditions in the Canning Industry in the Santa Clara Valley of the State of California" (Ph.D. diss., Leland Stanford Junior University, 1928); Martin L. Brown, "A Historical Economic Analysis of the Wage Structure of the California Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1981); and Joan E. Cradling, "Industrial Location: A Case Study of the California Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry, 1860–1984" (M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1984). On Pacific Northwest canneries, see Adam Hodges, "The Industrial Workers of the World and the Oregon Packing Company Strike of July 1913" (M.A. thesis, Portland State University, 1996); William Lucas, Canning in the Valley: Canneries of the Salem District (Salem, Ore.: William Lucas, 1998); John James, "A Study of the Development of the Berry Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry in Washington, 1900–1938" (M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1942). On child labor in canneries, see Martin Brown et al., "The Decline of Child Labor in the U.S. Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry: Law or Economics?" Business History Review 66 (Winter 1992), 723–70; and Hugh D. Hindman, Child Labor: An American History (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002). On Progressive Era reform for women workers in the Pacific Northwest, see Janice Lynn Dilg, "'By Proceeding in an Orderly and Lawful Manner': Protective Legislation, Working Women, and Progressive Politics 1913–1924" (M.A. thesis, Portland State University, 2005).

3.  Social Service Committee, Report of the Social Survey Committee of the Consumer's League of Oregon on the Wages, Hours and Conditions of Work and Cost and Standard of Living of Women Wage Earners in Oregon with Special Reference to Portland (Portland, Ore.: January 1913), 6. Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917–1942 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995).

4.  Dilg, "'By Proceeding in an Orderly and Lawful Manner'," 2–7. See also Mink, The Wages of Motherhood, 46–48; Kathryn Kish Sklar, "The Historical Foundations of Women's Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830–1930," in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, eds. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (London: Routledge, 1993), 64–65; Elaine G. Z. Johnson, "Protective Legislation and Women's Work: Oregon's Ten Hour Law and the Muller v. Oregon Case, 1900–1913" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1982), 384–85; Susan Lehrer, Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women, 1905–1925 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 3–22 ; Julie Novkov, Constituting Workers, Protecting Women: Gender, Law and Labor in the Progressive Era and New Deal Years (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 111–29; Landon R.Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 44–59; 37–38, 156–57. For a comparative study of women's protective legislation, see Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Jane Lewis, eds., Protecting Women: Labor in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995).

5.  See J.R. Cardwell, "The First Fruits of the Land: A Brief History of Early Horticulture in Oregon," Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 7:1 (March 1906), 37–40, 45; Carlos A. Schwantes, The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 295–99; United States Department of the Interior, Census Office, Compendium of the Eleventh Census: 1890. Part 3 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1897), 658, 663–64; United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Abstract of the Fourteenth Census of the United States 1920 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1923), 865–83. On the automation of canning in the United States, see Martin Brown and Peter Philips, "Craft Labor and Mechanization in Nineteenth-Century American Canning," The Journal of Economic History 46 (September 1986), 743–56; William Braznell, California's Finest: The History of Del Monte Corporation and the Del Monte Brand (San Francisco: Del Monte Corporation, 1982), 29–30, 43; United States Commission on Industrial Relations, Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1916), 4921; H.M. Williamson, "Growth of the Fruit Industry in Oregon in the Last decade" in Twelfth Biennial Report of the Board of Horticulture (Salem, Ore.: State Printer 1913), 77–80; W.G. Allen, "The Cannery as a Market for Small Fruits and Vegetables," in Eighteenth Annual Report of the Oregon State Horticultural Society (Salem, Ore.: The Pacific Homestead, 1926), 112–13; Eleventh Biennial Report of the Board of Horticulture of the State of Oregon (Salem, Ore.: Willis S. Duniway, State Printer, 1911), 157; William Lucas, Canning in the Valley: Canneries of the Salem District (Salem, Ore.: published by author, 1998), 11–13; and Eighth Biennial Report of the Board of Horticulture of the State of Oregon (Salem, Ore.: J. R. Whitney, State Printer, 1905), 187–89.

6.  Allen, "Cannery as a Market," 112–13.

7.  See John James, "A Study of the Development of the Berry Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry in Washington, 1900–1938" (M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1942), 11–31, 51–76 ; Washington State Commissioner of Horticulture, Fifth Biennial Report of the State Commissioner of Horticulture (Olympia, Wash.: C.W. Gorham, 1907), 17–18; Walter V. Woehlke, "Red Raspberries and Teamwork: Canning and Selling Cooperation That Squeezes Out Profits," The Country Gentleman 79 (August 29, 1914), 3–4; U.S. Department of Labor, Women in the Fruit-Growing and Canning Industries in the State of Washington: A Study of Hours, Wages and Conditions (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1926), 3–4; State of Washington, Fifth Biennial Report of the Department of Agriculture (Olympia, Wash.: Frank M. Lamborn, Public Printer, 1922), 80–81; and Schwantes, Pacific Northwest, 211.

8.  U.S. Department of Labor, Women in the Fruit-Growing and Canning Industries, 162.

9.  Ellen Nathalie Matthews, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries: A Survey in Seven States, United States Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, publication no. 198 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1930), 1.

10.  United States Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, Including Testimony, With Review and Topical Digest Thereof, vol. 10, (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1901), 953; U.S. Department of Labor, Women in Fruit-Growing and Canning, 162 ; and Matthews, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries,, 1–7.

11.  See Matthews, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries, 6.

12.  State of Washington, Ninth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Factory Inspection, 1913–1914 (Olympia, Wash.: Frank M. Lamborn, Public Printer, 1914), 14–15; Second Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Inspector of Factories and Workshops of the State of Oregon (Salem, Ore.: J.R. Whitney, State Printer, 1907), 97–98; United States Agriculture Department Northwest Cannery Survey Collection, box 1, folder "Forest Grove," and box 2, folder "Eugene," Oregon State University Archives, Corvallis; Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Special Reports: Occupations at the Twelfth Census (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1904), 140–41, 150–51; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United State: Volume 3, Manufactures 1909 General Report and Analysis (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1913), 289, 381–82; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States: Volume 9, Manufactures 1919 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1923), 1237, 1558; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, Vol. 9, Occupations by States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1933), 1360, 1695; Matthews, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries, 178–83; and U.S. Department of Labor, Women in Fruit-Growing and Canning, 93–94.

13.  U.S. Department of Labor, Women in Fruit-Growing and Canning, 35.

14. Third Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of California for the Years 1887–1888 (Sacramento: State Office, J.D. Young, 1888), 20–21, 57–58, 72–74; Bureau of Labor Statistics, Special Report on the Fruit and Vegetable Canneries of the State of California (Sacramento: F.W. Richardson, Superintendent of State Printing, 1913), 33–34; Twelfth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of California, 1905–1906 (Sacramento: W.W. Shannon, Superintendent of State Printing, 1906), 90, 172 ; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, Vol. 3, 289, 381–82; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census, Vol. 9, 85; Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census, Vol. 9, 177, 193, 195; Industrial Welfare Commission, The Regulation of the Fruit and Vegetable Canning Industry of California (Sacramento: California State Printing Office, 1917), 9; U.S. Department of Labor, Women in Fruit- Growing and Canning, 35–37, 162–63; and Governor Ernest Lister Papers, box 114, folder "Industrial Welfare Commission," Washington State Archives, Olympia.

15. Eleventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the State of California, 1904 (Sacramento: W.W. Shannon, Superintendent State Printing, 1904), 14; Fourteenth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the State of California, 1909–1910 (Sacramento: W.W. Shannon, Superintendent State Printing, 1910), 20–21; Matthews, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries, 180–81; and Brown et al., "Decline of Child Labor," 725–29.

16.  Brown, et al., "Decline of Child Labor," 730–37; Matthews, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries, 180–82.

17.  Wash., Laws of 1909, p. 890, sec. 195 (Pierce's Code 1921, sec. 8833); Laws of 1909, ch. 197, sub-ch. 16, sec. 2 (Pierce's Code 1921, sec. 5220), cited by Matthews, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries, 180.

18.  Matthews, Children in Fruit and Vegetable Canneries, 180.

19.  Ibid., 178–84; Fourth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor of the State of Washington, 1903–1904 (Olympia: Blankenship Satterlee- Company, 1904), 180–84; State of Washington, Seventh Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Factory Inspection 1909–1910 (Olympia: E.L. Boardman, 1910), 114–15; State of Washington, Eighth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Factory Inspection, 1911–1912 (Olympia, Wash.: E.L. Boardman, 1912), 46; State of Washington, Bureau of Labor, Eleventh Biennial Report, 1917–1918 (Olympia, Wash.: Frank M. Lamborn, Public Printer, 1918), 45–49.

20. First Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Child Labor of the State of Oregon (Salem: J.R. Whitney, State Printer, 1905), 3.

21.  Social Service Committee, Report of the Social Survey Committee, 33–34.

22. First Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Child Labor of the State of Oregon, 3–7; Fourth Biennial Report Bureau of Labor Statistics and Inspector of Factories and Workshops of the State of Oregon (Salem: Willis S. Duniway, State Printer, 1910), 7–9; Digest of Laws Regulating Child Labor in Oregon, Oregon State Library, Salem, Special Documents; White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, Child Labor: Report of the Subcommittee on Child Labor (New York: The Century Company, 1932), 221–53; Social Service Committee, Report of the Social Survey Committee, 33–34; and Oregon Wage and Hour Commission Study, Child Labor Regulation in Oregon: An Historical Study, 1903–1960 (Salem: Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries, 1980), 1–13.

23.  State of Washington, Bureau of Labor Twelfth Biennial Report, 1919–1920 (Olympia: Frank M. Lamborn, Public Printer, 1920), 10.

24.  Nancy S. Erickson, "Muller v. Oregon Reconsidered: The Origins of a Sex-Based Doctrine of Liberty of Contract" Labor History 30 (Spring 1989), 247.

25.  Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 109–10, 185–88. On women's protective legislation, see Judith A. Baer, The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Women's Labor Legislation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978); Erickson, "Muller v. Oregon Reconsidered," 228–50; Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 51–53; Ninth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Factory Inspection, 1913–1914 (Olympia: Frank M. Lamborn, Public Printer, 1914), 53–54; State of Washington, Bureau of Labor Twelfth Biennial Report, 1919–1920, 10; Greenberg, "Industry in the Garden," 156; First Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Oregon, 1913–1915 (Salem: State Printing Department, 1915), 4–15; Social Service Committee, Report of the Social Survey Committee, 6; Edwin V. O'Hara, Welfare Legislation for Women and Minors (An Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Consumers' League of Oregon, held at the Portland Hotel, Portland, Ore., Tuesday, November 19, 1912), no page number; and Session Laws of the State of Washington, Thirteenth Session, 1913 (Olympia: Frank M. Lamborn, Public Printer, 1913), 602–608.

26. Portland News, June 28, 1913; and Oregon Journal, June 30, 1913.

27. Oregon Journal, June 30, 1913.

28.  Ibid.

29.  Hodges, "IWW and Oregon Packing Company Strike," 69; Portland News, June 28, 30, 1913; and Oregon Journal, June 30, 1913.

30. Oregon Journal, July 1, 3, 1913; Hodges, "IWW and Oregon Packing Company Strike," 72–73; and Dilg, "'By Proceeding In an Orderly and Lawful Manner,'" 119–20.

31. Oregon Journal, July 8, 1913; Portland News, July 2, 4, 8, 1913; Morning Oregonian, July 9, 1913; and Dilg, " 'By Proceeding In an Orderly and Lawful Manner'," 123–24.

32. Portland News, July 10, 12, 14, 1913; Morning Oregonian, July 10, 11, 14, 1913; Oregon Journal, July 10–13, 1913; Hodges, "IWW and Oregon Packing Company Strike," 69–95; and Dilg, "'By Proceeding In an Orderly and Lawful Manner,'" 128–29.

33. First Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Oregon, 1913–1915, 11.

34.  Ibid., 12.

35.  Ibid., 5–15; Third Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Oregon, 1919 (Salem: State Printing Department, 1919), 18; Helen J. Poulton, "The Progressive Movement in Oregon" (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1949), 71–74; Oregon Journal, July 19, 1913; Fifth Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Oregon, 1923 (Salem: State Printing Department, 1923), 6–29; Seventh Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Oregon, 1927 (Salem: State Printing Department, 1927), 5–6; Ninth Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Oregon, 1931 (Salem: State Printing Department, 1931) 15–16; and Portland Labor Press, August 11, 1913.

36.  Biographical note on Theresa McMahon; McMahon to Olsen, October 8, 1913; Mc- Mahon to Swanson, November 19, 1913; Carr to Lister, November 25, 1913; and Swanson to Lister, January 3, 1914, all in Governor Ernest Lister Papers, box 2H-2–61, folder "Industrial Welfare Commission," Washington State Archives, Olympia.

37. Fifth Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Oregon, 7; and Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Washington on the Wages, Conditions of Work and Cost and Standards of Living of Women Wage-Earners in Washington (Olympia: Frank M. Lamborn, Public Printer, 1914), 90.

38. Second Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission, 1915–1916 (Olympia: Frank M. Lamborn, Public Printer, 1917), 13.

39. Third Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Oregon, 1919, 9–12; Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission of the State of Washington on the Wages, Conditions of Work and Cost and Standards of Living of Women Wage-Earners in Washington, 12–17, 47–52.

40. Second Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission, 1915–1916, 213.

41.  Ibid., 227–28.

42. Second Biennial Report of the Industrial Welfare Commission, 1915–1916, 213–28; Minutes, Sixteenth Formal Meeting of the IWC, September 11–12, 1917, IWC Official Record of Activities, 1913–1963, Washington State Archives, Olympia; McCoy to Hart, May 22, 1920, McLeush to Hart, May 26, 1920, Wright to Hart, May 26, 1920, newspaper clipping, Governor Louis Hart Papers, box 2J-1–32, folder "IWC, 1919–1920," Washington State Archives, Olympia; First Report of the Department of Labor and Industries, 1922 (Olympia: Frank Lamborn Public Printer, 1922), 105–107.

43.  Lehrer, Protective Labor Legislation, 228.

44.  Newspaper clipping Box 2H-2–114, Folder "IWC," Lister Papers, Olympia.

45.  Dilg, "'By Proceeding in a Lawful and Orderly Manner,'" 171–72 ; Lehrer, Protective Labor Legislation, 227–39; Newspaper clipping Box 2H-2–114, Folder "IWC," Lister Papers, Olympia.

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