Story

The Case of the Chambermaid and the Nine Old Men

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Authors: William E. Leuchtenburg

Historic Era: Era 8: The Great Depression and World War II (1929-1945)

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December 1986 | Volume 38, Issue 1

When, on a spring day in 1935, Elsie Parrish walked into the office of an obscure lawyer in Wenatchee, Washington, to ask him to sue the town’s leading hotel for back pay, she had no idea she was linking her fate to that of exploited women in a Brooklyn laundry a whole continent away. Still less did she think that she was setting off a series of events that would deeply affect President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plans for his second term. Least of all did she perceive that she was triggering a constitutional revolution that, even today, remains the most significant chapter in the two centuries of existence of the United States Supreme Court. All that Elsie knew was that she had been bilked.

Late in the summer of 1933, Elsie Lee, a woman of about 40 who would soon be Elsie Parrish, had taken a job as a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, entrepôt for a beautiful recreation area reaching from the Columbia valley to the Cascades, and the country’s foremost apple market. “Apples made Wenatchee and apples maintain it,” noted the WPA guide to Washington; “it is surrounded by a sea of orchards, covered in spring with a pink foam of blossoms, mile upon mile, filling the valleys and covering the slopes; the air of the town is sweet with the fragrance.” Here, in the land of Winesaps and Jonathans, where “in summer and fall the spicy odor of apples is everywhere,” Elsie worked irregularly over the next year and a half at cleaning toilets and sweeping rugs for an hourly wage of 22 cents, later raised to a quarter. When she was discharged in May 1935, she asked for back pay of $216.19, the difference between what she had received and what she would have gotten if she had been paid each week the $14.50 minimum wage required for her occupation under state law. The Cascadian, which was owned by the West Coast Hotel Company, offered to settle for a total of $17.00, but she would not hear of it. Instead, she, together with her husband, Ernest, brought suit for all that was due her.

Elsie and Ernest rested their case on the provisions of a statute that had been enacted by Washington State a quarter of a century before when, catching the contagion of reform from neighboring Oregon, the state legislature had taken steps to wipe out sweatshops. The 1913 act declared it “unlawful to employ women or minors … under conditions of labor detrimental to their health or morals; and … to employ women workers in any industry … at wages which are not adequate for their maintenance.” To safeguard the welfare of female employees, the law established a commission that was authorized to call together employers, employees, and representatives of the public who would recommend a wage standard “not detrimental to health and morals, and which shall be sufficient for the decent maintenance of women.” On