The Limits of Legislation: Katherine Philips Edson, Practical Politics, and the Minimum-Wage Law in California, 1913–1922

Abstract

In 1913 the California legislature took a momentous step to improve the wages and working conditions of its women workers by passing a controversial new form of social welfare legislation, a minimum-wage bill, which established the Industrial Welfare Commission. The mandate gave the commission extensive power: not only to establish a minimum wage for each industry employing women, but to regulate hours and working conditions as well. Although reformers had been building an edifice of protective legislation for women for three decades, the creation of a government body with such wide-ranging authority over virtually every aspect of women's wage work was unprecedented. A handful of states passed similar legislation, but few rose above the challenges by opponents to actually implement the law in a meaningful way. The California Industrial Welfare Commission, in contrast, established wage, hour, and sanitary standards in women's occupations from canneries to movie studios. Responsibility for the success of the California law rested on the administrative brilliance of one woman, Katherine Philips Edson, the law's chief sponsor and then leading commission member. Under her guidance the commission slowly and judiciously improved working women's conditions and won public acceptance of the innovative form of state intervention.