The Washington Centre for Equitable Growth has written a deeply misleading intellectual history of the minimum wage.
https://twitter.com/equitablegrowth/status/642031237805305856
There is no doubt about it: the minimum wage for women only was introduced Progressive Era to reduce competition from women for jobs. The advocates for a minimum wage for women only were very blunt about that at the time.
The minimum wage is a rare policy bird. Its employment effects change at the whim of its latest proponents.
Minimum wages were initially introduced in the USA shortly after 1900 solely for women and children. The express aim was to price women out of jobs and raise men’s wages by enough so that they could provide for their families.
These days, some argue that minimum wages actually increase employment. Times change, and the slopes of supply and demand curves must change with them.
Tim Leonard in Protecting Family and Race The Progressive Case for Regulating Women’s Work showed that these women-only minimum wages were justified by political progressive including women on grounds that they would:
(1) Protect the biologically weaker sex from the hazards of market work;
(2) Protect working women from the temptation of prostitution;
(3) Protect male heads of household from the economic competition of women; and
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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