The World Split Open (16 page)

Many “war babies” clearly recall when adult women began protesting American and Soviet aboveground testing of nuclear weapons. In 1961, as a radioactive cloud from a Russian nuclear test hung over the United States, fear of nuclear fallout sparked demands for the two superpowers to sign a test-ban treaty. Women activists argued that strontium 90—a by-product of nuclear testing—was poisoning their children's milk. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an estimated fifty thousand women in over sixty cities walked out of their homes in an unprecedented one-day housewives' “strike” on November 1, 1961.

Five women who had met while working with the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) organized the November protest. Weary of SANE's ineffective bureaucratic and lobbying tactics, they had pledged to take direct action against the nuclear threat and called themselves Women Strike for Peace. Former members of CAW and other Left and peace organizations, they organized the strike out of their address books and from their Christmas-card lists. For the first time since the 1920s, women emerged not as part of a mass movement, but
as
that movement, ready to take up the political activism that McCarthyism had interrupted.
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But nothing was more inspiring to young women just coming of age than the civil rights movement. Television broadcast into their homes the Montgomery boycott; the violent battles over school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, and at the University of Mississippi; the sit-ins at lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina; the Freedom Rides into the Deep South; the march to Selma, Alabama, and other civil rights struggles. Television also showed stark scenes of racial hatred even as it publicized the bravery of children and adults, black and white, who dared the nation to live up to its ideals. The civil rights movement taught a generation of indoctrinated youthful Cold Warriors that America was hardly a perfect democracy. And it sent a clear message to those restless daughters of the fifties who were heading into college, determined not to become prisoners of the kitchen and nursery. If collective action could destroy racial segregation, which was based on the belief in white superiority, why couldn't women challenge ideas about female inferiority?

Much to their amusement, men opened the July 1962 issue of
Esquire
magazine to discover that a middle-aged Caroline Kennedy had won the most recent presidential election. According to the story, crowds of women cheered as the youthful and charismatic politician assumed her fifth term in office. Apparently, when women usurped power in the early years of the twenty-first century, one of their first acts was to abolish the two-term presidency. Then, they rewrote history, substituting Eleanor Roosevelt for FDR. Nationwide, women fitted themselves with surgical skin grafts so that “men were no longer needed.” Now, the article reported, men crept cautiously around “women's bars” from which they were legally excluded. They dressed decoratively, spoke softly, lest they displease women and incite their wrath and violent retribution.

This absurdist dystopian fantasy, meant to tickle men's funny bones even as it struck a note of horror, appeared in
Esquire's
special issue, “The American Woman.” To the proposition, “Women of America, Now is the time to Arise,”
Esquire
commissioned a “yes” and “no” response. Robert Arthur, who had written this presumably nightmarish satire, assumed that if women gained power, they would simply turn the tables on men and treat them as second-class citizens. Equality between men and women was, for him, unimaginable. Power existed for only one reason: to dominate others.
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Not all men shared his anxiety about women's changing lives.
Esquire
's “yes” article, written by a self-described “unreconstructed male feminist,” argued that women deserved no less than full participation in American society. In fact, the
Esquire
issue reflected an existing ambivalence in the
country at large. Much of American society still accepted the idea that “separate but equal”—while discredited as policy for the races—suited men's and women's separate social roles rather well. You could see it played out in the daily newspaper. In addition to sex-segregated “help wanted” classified ads, most papers buried any news about women, however political or scientific, in a special “women's section.”

It surprised no one, then, when on December 15, 1961, the
Washington Post
tucked the historic news “JFK Seeks Equal Job Status for Women” between two other memorable events of the day: “First Lady Prefers Pastels” and “Skiers to Dance at Ball Tonight,” all of which appeared in its “For and About Women” section. The
New York Times
squeezed the same story between book reviews and its “Contract Bridge” column. What these stories reported was John F. Kennedy's decision to create a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.
²

When Kennedy won the presidential election of 1960, the very last thing on his mind was to serve as a midwife for the modern women's movement. But decades before the phrase “gender gap” entered political discourse, the idea of a “women's bloc” already worried politicians. Less than two months before the election, the
Saturday Evening Post
had interviewed women leaders in both parties and floated the unsettling idea that women might swing the election. Pleased to be recognized, women in both parties argued that “there is no doubt that if women did vote as a solid bloc, they could swing the election. It is a matter of simple arithmetic: There are 3,500,000 more women than men of voting age—although all of them do not vote. . . . If sex appeal, or appeal to housewifely prejudice or issues that would sway career women or college girls or club ladies were the determining factor, then women could carry any contest.” In the weeks before the election, women in the Democratic Party redoubled their efforts to reach female voters through breakfasts and “kaffe klatches.”
³

Kennedy, who only beat Richard Nixon by the slimmest of margins, knew how much women had helped him. Turning his eyes toward the future, he couldn't ignore their growing disgruntlement. One indefatigable female party activist complained that women formed the “hard core” of political organizations but received little recognition for their efforts: “They work at the neighborhood level as block captains, poll watchers, checkers, election-day baby sitters and chauffeurs. They staff party and campaign headquarters. They get out the vote and raise funds. . . . In short, woman power has the same untapped creative potential as atomic energy!”
⁴

Democratic women also complained about the “antediluvian male
politicians” who “talk down” to the “dear little women” and “try to flatter their looks, rather than their aspirations.” “I get awfully tired,” explained a former leader of women in the Democratic party,

of being treated as if I were the English-speaking delegate from another planet. . . . There are too many popular cliches about women. Why must we be typed as fluttery females or bespectacled battleaxes? The public image of women has reached an all-time low—not in fact, but in print. More of us are working, more of us hold better and more responsible positions than ever before—but you'd never know it if you had to depend for information on what you read about women. We are constantly pictured as a limp, indecisive lump, quivering with uncontrolled emotions. . . . Let's insist on speaking and acting as individuals who have a rightful place on the human planet.
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Impatiently, these party activists waited for their political payback. But Kennedy disappointed them, offering very few women high-level positions. Margaret Price of Michigan, one of the few Democratic women who had any influence with Kennedy, flooded him with women's résumés, but with little result. When Kennedy appointed no woman to his cabinet, the well-known journalist Doris Fleeson wrote in her
New York Post
column: “At this stage, it appears that for women, the New Frontiers are the old frontiers.”
⁶
Veteran Democratic activist Emma Guffey Miller informed Kennedy that “It is a grievous disappointment to the women leaders and ardent workers that so few women have been named to worthwhile positions. . . . As a woman of long political experience, I feel the situation has become serious and I hope whoever is responsible for it may be made to realize that the result may well be disastrous.”
⁷
Depressed and disillusioned, another party activist predicted that fifty years would pass before the country elected a woman president. Yet another activist grimly joked—as it turned out, accurately—“Man will walk on the moon before there is a woman chief executive.”
⁸

Esther Peterson, Kennedy's newly appointed head of the Women's Bureau, a division of the U.S. Labor Bureau, quickly mobilized a coalition of women in liberal and labor organizations to pressure Kennedy to
create a special commission to explore women's status in the United States. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a towering presence, visited the president “to express her concern over the failure of the New Frontier administration to recognize and utilize fully the talents of women.” In the view of black activist and lawyer Pauli Murray, that conversation “was the catalytic event which signaled the rebirth of feminism in the U.S.”
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To Kennedy, a commission seemed a cheap political payoff, a way to reassure the American people that all was well, that women required no drastic or dramatic changes. By creating a commission, he also avoided the far more contentious alternative, that of supporting the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). After the suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, Alice Paul, the leader of the National Woman's Party (NWP), submitted the ERA to Congress in 1923, and every year afterward. The members of the NWP, a conservative and relatively well-to-do group of women of means and professional women, sought formal equality with men and argued that a constitutional amendment was necessary to guarantee women's equality with men. With one fell swoop, they argued, the ERA could wipe out all state laws that discriminated against women.

But the amendment, which simply stated, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” stayed on the back burner, resisted by labor unions, who were afraid of losing protective legislation for working women. Ever since 1923, women activists remained deeply divided over the ERA, and not until 1970 did female labor and leftist activists give up their strong opposition to the ERA. In their view, protective legislation, which regulated the hours and conditions of women's work, had protected female laborers from extreme exploitation. If the ERA were passed, protective legislation would be eliminated and employers would be free to exploit women. Now Esther Peterson and other women in the Democratic Party, whose roots were in labor, pressed for a commission, rather than the president's support of the ERA. For Kennedy, it was a blessing; labor constituted an important part of his political base.

To justify a commission concerned with women's needs, Kennedy cast it as part of the post-Sputnik Cold War effort to free women's talents for public service. He appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as its chair and charged the commission to “make studies of all barriers to the full participation of women in our democracy.”

In 1963, the President's Commission on the Status of Women issued
The Presidential Report on American Women.
Not surprisingly,
it mirrored the culture's ambivalence about women's proper place in society. The report reaffirmed their roles as wives, housekeepers, and rearers of children, while documenting the inequalities they faced as workers. Most of the tepid recommendations, as Betty Friedan later noted, were “duly buried in bureaucratic file drawers.” The report, a thoroughly political and diluted document, avoided offending any group's sensibilities.
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