The limitation of the hours of women workers had become a part of English factory legislation as early as 1844. A factory report of the previous year had pointed out that women were physically incapable of enduring a continuance of work for the same length of time as men, and that deterioration of their health was attended with far more injurious consequences to society.[58] The need of hygienic protection had thus been brought to the attention of the legislature. At the same time the economic aspect of the measure appears to have been the more prominent. The men desired shorter hours for themselves, but thought an appeal to parliament hopeless; thus women and children were put forward in the hope, which events justified, that the legal reduction of their worktime would accomplish without legislation the same purpose for men.[59] The agitation was in fact conducted as one for shorter hours all around, although the bills as drawn did not include adult men. There appears on the other hand to have been some apprehension on the part of women that the men sought to impose restrictions upon them to make them less desirable employes and thus crowd them out of work, and for a long time the equal treatment of adult women and men was demanded by the leaders of the women themselves. Factory legislation, as first conceived, was to apply only to those who were not free agents, namely to children. True, the married woman was not legally a free agent, but she was struggling for emancipation, which eventually came, and the female sex as such labored under no disabilities. Prominent economists urged that the state had no business to dictate to the adult woman the terms of her employment. But the exclusion of woman from underground mines paved the way for her subjection to state control, and the act of 1844 put her in the same class with children and young persons. The separate and distinct treatment of women thus became an established feature of English factory legislation. In America the sanitary or hygienic argument in the movement for limitation of hours of female labor in factories was prominent from the beginning. The legislation in Massachusetts enacted in 1874 had been preceded by official investigations and reports concerning the detrimental effect of long hours upon the constitution of women. If woman was to be accorded the fulness of individual liberty and equality with man,--and barring the denial of the active political franchise, the tendency as manifested in married women’s legislation and in admission to business and professional pursuits, was in that direction--a peculiar danger in her case from overwork and a special need of protection had to be made out.