to
substitute a ten-hour bill, an exact duplicate of the "Oregon Standard"
established by the Supreme Court of the United States. The principle of
limitation upon the hours of women's work once established in Illinois,
the workers could proceed with their fight for an eight-hour day.

The manufacturers lost their fight, and the ten-hour bill became a law
of the State of Illinois. The Manufacturers' Association, through the
W.C. Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit
to test the constitutionality of the law. Two Ritchie employees, Anna
Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts. Their
appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours
to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to
contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them
by the ten-hour law.

There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved
in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched
state of women's wages in the State of Illinois. If women of mature
years--one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over
thirty years--are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep
body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no
position freely to contract? For who, of her own free will, would
contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?

There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge
R.S. Tuthill. When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his
career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the
real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth. For
Judge Tuthill issued an injunction against the State Factory Department,
forbidding them to enforce the ten-hour law.

Immediately a number of women's organizations joined hands with the
women's trade unions in the fight to save the bill. When it came up in
the December term of the Illinois Supreme Court, Louis D. Brandeis of
Boston, the same able jurist who had argued the Oregon case, was on
hand. This time his brief was a book of six hundred and ten printed
pages, over which Miss Pauline Goldmark, of the National Consumers'
League, and a large corps of trained investigators and students had
toiled for many months. The World's Experience Against the Illinois
Circuit Court, this document might well have been called. It was simply
a d