"We Were Put Out of Good Jobs": Women Night Workers in New York and the Origins of the Women's Equal Opportunity League

In the 1910s, U.S. social reformers advocated for labor laws to protect women who workedin factories. The laws included bans on women working at night. In New York, a small con-tingent of night-working women who had lost their jobs objected. Arguing that the lawswere paternalistic and harmful, they formed the Women's Equal Opportunity League. Thegroup opposed all single-sex laws and ultimately won repeal of New York's night work banfor printers, elevator operators, and transit workers. Night work was the stage on whichreformers' ideas about the greater good conflicted with arguments for women's autonomy.Whether and what kind of work women should do at night was a conflict about class, moth-erhood, and self-determination. This article profiles three leaders of the Women's EqualOpportunity League-printer Ella M. Sherwin, transit guard Margaret Hinchey, and street-car ticket agent Mary A. Murray. All three were devoted union members whose oppositionto women-only laws made them dissidents within their unions. They remained shift work-ers their entire lives while lobbying state legislatures and Congress to demand formal legalequality for women. Histories of the early Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) have empha-sized the support of upper- and middle-class women. These working-class women, who hadlong opposed protective legislation, later demanded the ERA-not in spite of the prospectthat it would nullify single-sex labor laws, but because they hoped it would. Theirs was aminority position, and paying attention to it reveals the complexity of class conflict at theroot of a feminist dispute which persisted long into the twentieth century