The liberty of that girl was protected by the court—the liberty; she had the liberty to starve or to work under the conditions offered her, and she had no other liberty. [Applause.]
DREADFUL DENIAL OF JUSTICE.
And I hold that it was a dreadful denial of justice to prevent that poor girl from recovering for the accident due to the criminal carelessness of her employer, and I, for one, will never rest when there is a decision like that on the books until we have got it repealed. [“Good! Good!” and cheers.]
I could give you 20 such cases. I will only give you 2 more—only 2 more.
Then in the next case that came up that I refer to we passed a law, modeled on your Massachusetts law, a law forbidding women to be worked in factories more than 10 hours a day or after 9 o’clock at night.
Friends, personally, I thought that was an utterly insufficient law. I felt that it did not go nearly far enough. Your Massachusetts law prohibits them from working more than 9 hours a day and after 6 o’clock at night.
Ours did not go as far. It was with reluctance that I could make myself accept it at all. I did simply because it was the best we could get at that time.
At that time girls and women in factories, in sweatshops, were being worked 12, 14, sometimes 16 hours a day and until 10, 11, and 12 at night.