The implication reflected in notions such as Clementina Black's of the ‘human machine’, that the welfare of the individual should be guarded to achieve the long-term effective functioning of an economic system, is also conspicuous in the legal discourse around protective measures for workers in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century. So too was the idea that it was up to more prominent and powerful social groups – not themselves likely to be part of the ‘machine’ of labouring people – to safeguard it. It surfaces, for example, in the foreword to Maud Nathan's Story of an Epoch-Making Movement by the prominent progressive Democrat Newton D. Baker. Baker's career moved between state appointments and campaign roles: he had been president of the National Consumers’ League as well as mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, and Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. This experience of both official government and unofficial influences on it lent weight to his assessment of the impact of the NCL. For example, he states:

Baker's language here reads as gendered, with the notion of the NCL as a helpmeet to the state that supplied both information and ‘sympathy and support’ to protect the national ‘health and welfare’. There is a sense of motherliness in this caring role for the NCL as well as of motherhood in the idea of protecting the national health.

This framing readily lends itself to be understood in a context of the NCL's own engagement with such ideas around gendered protection, which had shaped its landmark legal intervention for protective labour laws for women. The United States Supreme Court case of Muller v. Oregon (1908), a legal dispute in which the NCL interceded to defend a state-level maximum working hours law for women, forms the focus of this chapter.