The process of reasoning by which learned judges reach the conclusion
that an eight-hour day for men may be decreed without depriving anybody
of his constitutional rights, and at the same time rule that women would
be outrageously wronged by having their working hours limited, may
appear obscure.

The explanation is, after all, simple. The learned judges are men, and
they know something--not much, but still something--about the men of the
working classes. They know, for example, something about the conditions
under which coal miners work, and they can see that it is contrary to
public interests that men should toil underground, at arduous labor,
twelve hours a day. Accidents result with painful frequency, and these
are bad things,--bad for miners and mine owners alike. They are bad for
the whole community. Therefore the regulation of miners' hours of labor
comes legitimately under the police powers of the law.

The learned judges, I say this with all due respect, do not know
anything about working women. Their own words prove it. The texts of
their decisions, denying the constitutionality of protective measures,
are amazing in the ignorance they display,--ignorance of industrial
conditions surrounding women; ignorance of the physical effects of
certain kinds of labor on young girls; ignorance of the effect of
women's arduous toil on the birth rate; ignorance of moral conditions in
trades which involve night work; ignorance of the injury to the home
resulting from the sweated labor of tenement women. In brief, the
learned judges, when they write opinions involving the health, the
happiness, the very lives of women workers, might be writing about the
inhabitants of another planet, so little knowledge do they display of
the real facts.