Adkins v. Children’s Hospital
Appellants
Jesse C. Adkins, et al.; Minimum Wage Board of District of Columbia
Appellee
Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia
Appellants' Claim
That the U.S. Congress has the right to establish minimum wages for women andchildren.
Chief Lawyer for Appellants
Felix Frankfurter
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
Wade H. Ellis
Justices for the Court
Pierce Butler, Joseph McKenna, James Clark McReynolds, George Sutherland (writing for
the Court), Willis Van Devanter
Justices Dissenting
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Edward Terry Sanford, William Howard Taft (Louis D. Brandeis did
not participate)
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
9 April 1923
Decision
Minimum wage laws for women are unconstitutional because they interfere withthe liberty
of contract guaranteed by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Significance
The Supreme Court ruled that Congress does not have the power to set minimumwages for
women as a special group, slowing down the Consumers' League driveto show that a ceiling
on wages without a floor left women vulnerable. It also stopped efforts to equalize pay
between men and women, a discrepancy that remained until the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
Willie Lyons, a 21-year-old elevator operator, desperately wanted to keep herjob. Lyons
worked at the Congress Hall Hotel in Washington, D.C. where manymembers of Congress
and their families lived. She felt that the work was easy, the hours short, and the
surroundings clean and pleasant. She had been happy at work and with her pay--$35 a
month, plus two meals a day.
Then the District of Columbia Minimum Wage Board set $16.50 a week as the base pay for
all female hotel workers. The Congress Hall Hotel had to fire her,or face legal penalties.
Lyons knew she could not find a better job elsewherefor the same salary. So she
petitioned the court for an injunction to keep the board--under Jesse Adkins--from
enforcing its orders on the Congress HallHotel.
On 19 September 1918, Congress passed a law establishing the District of Columbia
Minimum Wage Board. This statute set the minimum wage paid to any womanor child
working in the nation's capital. For example, the board had fixed aweekly salary of $16.50
for women employed where food was served, $15.50 forthose who worked in printing, and
$15 for laundry workers, with beginning laundresses earning $9. Lyons feared her skills
could not realistically commandthese wages in the competitive marketplace, and that her
current wages were the best she could earn. If the Congress Hall Hotel fired her, Lyons
knew shewould not find work elsewhere.
At the same time that Lyons was trying to obtain an injunction against the board's
decision, the Children's Hospital of the District of Columbia was having its own problems
with the Minimum Wage Board. The hospital employed a largenumber of women in a
variety of different jobs. A few of them earned less than $16.50 a week. Like Lyons, the
hospital sued to restrain the board from enforcing its minimum wage ruling on the ground
that it violated the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause.
However, in both cases the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia affirmedthe
constitutionality of the law. On appeal, the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia
affirmed the lower court's decision. Yet after a rehearing,the court reversed its judgment,
and a divided bench declared the law unconstitutional. Further appeals carried the two
cases, Adkins v. Children's Hospital and Adkins v. Lyons, to the Supreme Court of the
United States.
The legal questions the Court faced were whether Congress had the power to prescribe a
minimum wage for women in the District of Columbia, or if such wage-fixing by restricting
an individual's "liberty of contract" (protected by Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and
Fourteenth Amendments) was an unconstitutional use of the state's police power. Further,
it was questionable whether the law was discriminatory, because it protected only
women.
Legal and political controversy swirled about these questions. In Lochnerv. New York
(1905) the Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional for New York to limit the
number of hours male bakers could work to ten per day. However, in Bunting v. Oregon
(1917), the justices upheld a law setting ten hours as the maximum hours per day that
people could work in mills, factories, or manufacturing.
Protective Legislation v. Equality
The First Wave women's movement was also hopelessly divided over the issue ofspecial
rights versus equal rights for women, as it had been since 1908, when the Supreme Court
upheld Oregon's hours law for women in Muller v. Oregon. Alice Paul and supporters Anne
Henrietta Martin and Burbita Shelton Matthews wanted all inequalities between women
and men in the law eradicated from jury service, property, custody, guardianship,
marriage, divorce, and work. They recognized immediately the sexism implied in
legislation to protect only women workers. Paul's slogan "Equality not Protection"
repudiated these statutes.
However, Paul's former colleagues in the suffrage movement--Florence Kelley,Jane
Addams, Julia Lathrop, and Margaret Dreir Robbins--championed the new wages and hours
laws. Their views were shared by groups such as the League forWomen Voters and the
National Consumers' League, whose stated goals includedsocial welfare legislation for
women and children. They were joined by the National Federation of Business and
Professional Women, women in the labor movement, and bureaucrats in the Women's
Bureau (part of the Department of Labor)created in 1920. In their minds, support for the
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) would set back the protective legislation for women that
had been winning support in the states.
But Are they Constitutional?
After the arguments, Justice Sutherland, delivered the opinion of a divided Court. With
reasoning that is reminiscent of modern jurists such as Ruth BaderGinsburg, he said:
We cannot accept the doctrine that women of amature age . . . may be subjected to
restrictions upon their liberty of contract which could not lawfully be imposed in the case
of men under similar circumstances.
In arguing that it was unfair to apply minimum wage laws to women but not tomen,
Sutherland went on:
It is simply and exclusively a price-fixing law, confined to adult women . . . who are
legally as capable of contracting for themselves as men.
And,
If women require a minimum wage to preserve their morals menrequire it to preserve
their honesty.
Sutherland also highlighted the inconsistencies of the board's orders, pointing out that if a
woman employed to serve food required a minimum wage of $16.50, he questioned the
fairness of a beginning laundresses earning only $9 a week.
Finally, Sutherland concluded:
It may be said, that if in the interest of public welfare the police power may be
invoked to justify the fixingof a minimum wage, it may, when the public welfare is
thought to require it,be invoked to justify a maximum wage . . . If in the face of the
guarantee of the Fifth Amendment this form of legislation shall be legally justified, the
field for the operation of the police power will have been widened to a great and
dangerous degree.
Justices Taft and Sanford disagreed, arguing:
Legislatures in limiting freedom of contract between employee and employer . . .
proceed on theassumption that employees, in the class receiving less pay, are not upon a
full level of equality of choice with their employers and . . . are prone to accept pretty
much anything that is offered. They are peculiarly subject to theoverreaching of the harsh
and greedy employer. The evils of the sweating system and long hours and low wages
which are characteristic of it are well known.
While Sutherland had said that the wages paid to an employee were the "heartof the
contract," Taft felt that this opinion exaggerated the importance of one part of the
contract--wages--over other terms, such as hours.
Justice Holmes believed that Congress did have the right to establish minimumrates of pay
for women:
The end, to remove conditions leading toill health, immorality, and the deterioration
of the race, no one would denyto be within the scope of constitutional legislation.
Justice Brandeis, whose daughter, Elizabeth, was the secretary of the District's minimum
wage board, took no part in the decision. This split the Court 5-3, with the majority voting
to overrule the minimum wage law for women. In 1936, Morehead v. New York ex rel.
Tipaldo reaffirmed the Adkinsdecision.
After Adkins, union leaders such as Samuel Gompers railed against theCourt, fuming, "The
Court ranges itself on the side of property and against humanity." He insisted that women
"not only are . . . less than able to defendthemselves on the economic fields, but they are
absolutely without means ofdefense in the political field."
The minimum-wage boards in the states believed that their laws should be enforced as if
the Court had not overruled Congress. Congressmen vowed to curb the Court. Senators,
such as Simeon Fess, proposed that two-thirds vote of theSupreme Court be henceforth
required for decisions. U.S. Senator William E. Borah wanted agreement among at least
seven of the nine judges for future Court decisions. Senator Robert LaFollette suggested
giving Congress the power tooverrule the Supreme Court by reposing a law after an
adverse decision. These reformers saw the Court as overstepping its boundaries and trying
to legislate for Congress.
With the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans came to agree with them. They swept
President Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House in 1932 on thepromise of a New Deal.
In 1936, Roosevelt sent Congress his "court-packing" plan, which would have added six
judges to the Supreme Court, all appointed byhim. The progressives, in the long run, were
victorious.
Today, historians are somewhat more sympathetic to the Adkins Court. In 1978,legal
scholar Lawrence H. Tribe wrote in American Constitutional Law:
While the Court justified the limitation of women's working hours by reference to the
perceived social and biological need to limit the participation of women in the labor force
[in Radice v. New York, which upheld a law prohibiting the employment of women in
restaurants between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. because of their "peculiar and natural
functions"], the Court initially [in Adkins v. Children's Hospital] struck down women's
minimum wage laws, which could not so easily be assimilated to sexist assumptions about
the nature and role of women.
One thing is certain: Adkins v. Children's Hospital and Adkins v. Lyons would further the
disintegration of the women's movement in the 1920s over the issue of equal versus special
rights for women. Three years afterthe passage of the Nineteenth Amendment (1920), and
the same year that the Supreme Court ruled in Adkins v. Children's Hospital and Adkins v.
Lyons (1923), Alice Paul and her militant National Woman's Party introducedthe Equal
Rights Amendment into Congress. Section 1 read: "Equality of rights under the law shall
not be abridged by the United States or by any state onaccount of sex." Then, in 1937 the
Supreme Court overturned its ruling in Adkins with West Coast Hotel v. Parrish. However,
in 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan forced the Republicans to break from
traditionby dropping the ERA plank from its platform, and in 1982, the ERA failed towin
the endorsement of the necessary number of the states. This left open many of the issues
dividing the women's movement in 1923, issues that have not disappeared and which
continue to be debated to this day.
Related Cases

West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937).

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S.833 (1992).
History of the Minimum Wage
Federal law under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 requires and controlsa minimum
hourly wage that governs all employers doing interstate business. In addition, most states
have similar minimum wage statutes. The fight for a minimum wage began in the
nineteenth century and grew out of state-level outrage over the rise of sweatshops, which
forced workers-- especially women, children, and immigrants-- to work over 10 hours a
day for low wages often in hazardous conditions. Minimum wage supporters argued that all
workers deserved living wages. In 1912, Massachusetts became the first state to enact a
minimumwage law. In the 1920s and 1930s, other states followed Massachusetts' example,
some motivated by the Great Depression. However, state supreme courts andthe U.S.
Supreme Court struck down minimum wage legislation as unconstitutionally violating the
freedom-to-contract rights of employers.
President Franklin Roosevelt worked with Congress to pass the National Industrial Recovery
Act of 1933, which gave the president the authority to create aminimum wage as part of
the federal government's power to regulate interstate business. However, the Supreme
Court disagreed and again declared minimum wages unconstitutional. President Roosevelt
tried once more in 1937 to have minimum wage legislation enacted with the Fair Labor
Standard Act. Finally, theSupreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the act in 1941.
Beginning at25 cents an hour and rising to $5.15 an hour in 1997, the minimum wage
increases only by congressional approval.
Sources
West's Encyclopedia of American Law, vol. 7 Minneapolis, MN: West Publishing, 1998.
Further Readings

Goldstein, Leslie Friedman. The Constitutional Rights of Women, rev. ed. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Hoff, Joan. Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women. New York:
New York University Press, 1991.

Tribe, Lawrence H. American Constitutional Law. Mineola, New York:The
Foundation Press, 1988.