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Making Minimum Wage
Elsie Parrish versus the West Coast Hotel Company
Published by: University of Oklahoma Press
Imprint: University of Oklahoma Press
396 Pages | 6 x 9 | 21 b&w illus., 3 maps, 5 tables, 8 graphs
$85.00
$26.95
$24.95
The US Supreme Court’s 1937 decision in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, upholding the constitutionality of Washington State’s minimum wage law for women, had monumental consequences for all American workers. It also marked a major shift in the Court’s response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. In Making Minimum Wage, Helen J. Knowles tells the human story behind this historic case.
West Coast Hotel v. Parrish pitted a Washington State hotel against a chambermaid, Elsie Parrish, who claimed that she was owed the state’s minimum wage. The hotel argued that under the concept of “freedom of contract,” the US Constitution allowed it to pay its female workers whatever low wages they were willing to accept. Knowles unpacks the legal complexities of the case while telling the litigants’ stories. Drawing on archival and private materials, including the unpublished memoir of Elsie’s lawyer, C. B. Conner, Knowles exposes the profound courage and resolve of the former chambermaid. Her book reveals why Elsie—who, in her mid-thirties was already a grandmother—was fired from her job at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, and why she undertook the outsized risk of suing the hotel for back wages.
Minimum wage laws are “not an academic question or even a legal one,” Elinore Morehouse Herrick, the New York director of the National Labor Relations Board, said in 1936. Rather, they are “a human problem.” A pioneering analysis that illuminates the life stories behind West Coast Hotel v. Parrish as well as the case’s impact on local, state, and national levels, Making Minimum Wage vividly demonstrates the fundamental truth of Morehouse Herrick’s statement.
West Coast Hotel v. Parrish pitted a Washington State hotel against a chambermaid, Elsie Parrish, who claimed that she was owed the state’s minimum wage. The hotel argued that under the concept of “freedom of contract,” the US Constitution allowed it to pay its female workers whatever low wages they were willing to accept. Knowles unpacks the legal complexities of the case while telling the litigants’ stories. Drawing on archival and private materials, including the unpublished memoir of Elsie’s lawyer, C. B. Conner, Knowles exposes the profound courage and resolve of the former chambermaid. Her book reveals why Elsie—who, in her mid-thirties was already a grandmother—was fired from her job at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, and why she undertook the outsized risk of suing the hotel for back wages.
Minimum wage laws are “not an academic question or even a legal one,” Elinore Morehouse Herrick, the New York director of the National Labor Relations Board, said in 1936. Rather, they are “a human problem.” A pioneering analysis that illuminates the life stories behind West Coast Hotel v. Parrish as well as the case’s impact on local, state, and national levels, Making Minimum Wage vividly demonstrates the fundamental truth of Morehouse Herrick’s statement.
Helen J. Knowles is Research Director at the Institute for Free Speech and author of The Tie Goes to Freedom: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on Liberty.
“In Making Minimum Wage, Helen J. Knowles ingeniously draws on a wealth of sources to make one of the most important of all the Supreme Court’s New Deal decisions come alive. With remarkable humanity, Knowles transforms the story of Elsie Parrish into an illuminating prism on the history of minimum wage legislation for women.” —Laura Kalman, author of The Long Reach of the Sixties: LBJ, Nixon, and the Making of the Contemporary Supreme Court
“This book brilliantly turns West Coast Hotel v. Parrish inside out, revealing the human struggles and experiences behind the doctrinal revolution of 1937. Helen J. Knowles rightfully places Parrish and her advocates at the center of New Deal labor politics and recovers a critical piece of the forgotten struggle over women’s minimum wages. This highly readable book will delight and fascinate anyone interested in labor history, constitutional development, or the regulation of women’s work in the United States.” —Julie Novkov, author of The Supreme Court and the Presidency: Struggles for Supremacy
“This was an era when American workers were learning to assert that they deserved better working conditions. Making Minimum Wage highlights how one chambermaid’s challenge to the status quo broke new ground for workers’ well-being in the New Deal era and beyond.”—Discover Our Coast
“Knowles’s ability to weave an engaging story together with a deep consideration of constitutional law and development is a rare skill, one that few scholars writing in this area possess.”— Pacific Northwest Quarterly
“Making Minimum Wage is a model for how to write a case study of a landmark Supreme Court decision. The political and legal contours of the case are deftly presented, allowing readers both law-trained and not to follow the development of precedent, while Knowles’s flair for dramatic storytelling keeps readers engaged and rooting for Elsie and her attorney. This rich work deserves wide attention from historians, political scientists, and law scholars and practitioners, as well as general readers concerned about the future direction of rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.”—California History
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