The Manufacturers' Association, through the W.C.Ritchie Paper Box Manufactory, of Chicago, immediately brought suit to test the constitutionality of the law.

Two Ritchie employees, Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth, made appeal to the Illinois courts.

Their appeal declared that they could not make enough paper boxes in ten hours to earn their bread, and that their constitutional rights freely to contract, as well as their human rights, had been taken away from them by the ten-hour law.
There was a terrible confession, on the part of the employers, involved in this protest against the ten-hour day, a confession of the wretched state of women's wages in the State of Illinois.

If women of mature years--one of the petitioners had been an expert box maker for over thirty years--are unable, in a day of ten hours, to earn enough to keep body and soul together, is it not proved that women workers are in no position freely to contract?
For who, of her own free will, would contract to work ten hours a day for less than the price of life?
There was sitting in the Circuit Court of Illinois at that time Judge R.S.Tuthill.

When Judge Tuthill, in old age, reviews the events of his career, I think he will not remember with pride that he was blind to the real meaning of that petition of Anna Kusserow and Dora Windeguth.