The Effect of State Maximum-Hours Laws on the Employment of Women in 1920

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of early twentieth-century state maximum-hours laws on the employment of women in manufacturing. Maximum-hours laws are found to have reduced not only women's hours of work in 1920 but their employment as well. Further, the effect was not uniform by race and nativity: While the employment of foreign-born women was significantly reduced--by as much as 30 percent in the most restrictive states--the employment of native white women was largely unaffected. This and other evidence adduced in the paper suggest that early support for maximum-hours legislation for women, especially by the emerging American labor movement, may have been motivated in part by the well-documented hostility to immigration during this period.