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repealed.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.