When proposing to protect women, progressives portrayed women as weak and defenseless. But when proposing to control women, they portrayed women as dangerous threats to their husbands, children, and the health of the race. Indeed, progressive arguments for regulating women’s employment invoked women’s obligation to society at least as often as it did society’s obligation to women. As Chicago economist and reformer Sophonisba Breckenridge (1866–1948) recognized in 1906, regulation of women’s employment was not “enacted exclusively, or even primarily for the benefit of women themselves.”

The tension between protecting women from employment and protecting employment from women manifested itself regularly. Leading the campaign for minimum wages for women, Florence Kelley cited the success of the Victoria, Australia, minimum wage law. The Victoria minimum wage law, enacted in 1894, was one of the first of its kind. Labor reformers worldwide made the long journey to the antipodes to study its workings. The Australians succeeded, said Kelley, because the minimum wage eliminated the “unbridled competition” of women, children, and Chinese, who had been “reducing all the employees to starvation.”

Kelley’s formulation excluded women workers from the category of “employee,” grouping them with children as exploited victims in need of state protection. Women and children were, she said, “the weakest and most defenseless breadwinners in the state.” At the same time, Kelley also placed women with the Chinese, whom she represented as low-wage threats to white Australian men. Thus, Kelley accused women of undercutting white men. The low female standard, like the low Chinese standard, made women workers a competitive danger requiring state restraint. The tension between protecting women and restraining women was often overlooked, in part because the remedy was same in either case: removal from employment. The claim that women’s employment was dangerous to others generally took one of two complementary forms. The first class of argument, “the family wage,” still resonates today. The family-wage argument said that women’s employment was bad for their families. It undercut the wages of their breadwinning husbands (indeed, all men), and it also threatened their children’s wellbeing. The second class of argument, the “mother of the race” argument, reflected the deeply engrained hereditarian thinking of the day. It said, as “mothers of the race,” women were obliged conserve human heredity and should not risk the race’s health with overwork and fatigue (at least not with paid overwork and fatigue).

The family-wage principle portrayed employed women as usurpers of jobs that rightfully belonged to men. As Florence Kelley put it, any industry that hired women instead of men was socially subnormal. Returning women to the home had the additional benefit of ensuring that women properly carried out their eugenic duties as mothers of the race.

Premised on traditional sex roles, the family-wage and mothers-of-the-race principles argued not for women’s rights but for their obligations, not for women’s welfare, but for the welfare of men, children, and the race. Nonetheless, the family-wage and mothers-of-the-race principles proved immensely popular among progressive labor reformers, not least the women among them.