The World Split Open (17 page)

But the commission's report did reveal a great deal about women's place in the American imagination. Amplifying the concern of many social and cultural critics of the day, the report repeatedly decried “the erosion of American family life” and praised those wives and mothers who were holding together the nation's transient families and communities. The report also sounded the alarm that working women would only contribute to the atomization of American social life. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead even worried that the report had not sufficiently praised full-time mothers and wives and asked, “Who will be there to bandage the child's knee and listen to the husband's troubles and give the human element in the world?”

Here was a serious conundrum. If the nation's female talent were not deployed in universities and laboratories, the Cold War might be lost to a Communist empire that had no scruples about turning its women into workers and scientists, and sending its children to day care centers, as part of its plan to conquer the world. Yet, if American women did work outside the home, who would care for the children, the families, and the communities? This was a dilemma that would haunt the women's movement for decades.
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Disappointing as the report may have been, the commission was still an historic convocation. As the first official body to study women's status, the commission collected immense amounts of data, most of which supported the complaints and problems reported by housewives and workers. Press coverage of the commission broke out of the ghetto of the women's section and made the front page of the
New York Times.
NBC's
Today
show broadcast a lively interview with Esther Peterson, the Associated Press ran a four-part series on the final report, and, in 1965, a book of its findings appeared. Most important of all, within a year of its publication, the national commission spawned dozens of state commissions (an idea promoted by Esther Peterson), and the government distributed eighty-three thousand copies of the commission's report, with its invaluable data on women's lives, which was quickly translated into Japanese, Swedish, and Italian. By 1967, all fifty states boasted such commissions.
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Charged with collecting local data about women, the state commissions held an annual national conference at which they compared their information and discussed their recommendations for improving women's lives. By 1963, the lives of the women they studied had already changed greatly. Better contraception, more educational and economic opportunity, and the liberalization of attitudes toward divorce were altering a social landscape that had seemed engraved in cement. Later marriages, fewer children, rising divorce rates, and longer life spans meant that more women could expect to spend some part of their lives supporting their families or themselves. Trying to study modern women's status was like aiming at a moving target.
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At about the time that the commission started its work, Congress began considering 432 pieces of legislation on women's rights that it would debate between 1960 and 1966—none of which would have appeared on the political agenda without the behind-the-scenes work of hundreds of political women. Activists pushed the Kennedy administration to respond to all kinds of grievances. In 1962, the president revised, by executive order, an 1870 law used to bar women from holding high-level federal positions. The Supreme Court also ruled that states could no longer ban the sale of contraception or exclude women from juries. Shepherded by the Women's Bureau and strongly supported by the United Auto Workers and other labor organizations, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. The original intent—and wording of the bill—proposed equal pay for
comparable
work; the final act required only equal pay for equal [or the same] work. In the midst of jubilant celebration, some women activists knew that the law would have little impact on the vast majority of female workers. Few of them did “men's work”; they were part of a sex-segregated labor force that paid them “women's wages” for “women's work.” Nevertheless, an important principle had passed into law, and over the next decade, 171,000 employees would be awarded $84 million for equal work done but not rewarded.
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Who were these women who linked the suffrage generation to the generation of feminists emerging in the late 1960s? What kind of leadership and experience did they bring to this job? Who lobbied for the Equal Pay Act? And who used the President's Commission as a way to launch a new women's movement? Veterans in the Left, trade unions, the civil rights movement, and mainstream women's organizations, which demonstrated extraordinary persistence and unfailing commitment, but have remained hidden in history. Most Americans, if they thought about them at all, probably imagined them to be white middle-class
professional women. In fact, feminism was resurrected by women whose ideas had developed in a deeply radical milieu.
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President Kennedy certainly never intended his presidential commission to turn into what Pauli Murray dubbed “the first high-level consciousness group.” But this is what happened. Among its members were leaders from Churchwomen United, the National Association of Catholic Women, the National Association of Jewish Women, the B'nai B'rith, the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women, the Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Teamsters, and the United Packinghouse Workers. There were also representatives of women in religious orders, professors in universities, schoolteachers, and those who had worked for child welfare, peace, and educational reform.
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These leaders brought an incredible range of interests, experiences, and perspectives to the commission. Dorothy Haener, a tireless organizer of women in the United Auto Workers, argued ceaselessly for a higher minimum wage. (Haener later chaired NOW's Task Force on Poverty, a fact that never received as much attention as NOW's efforts to break the “glass ceiling” for professional women.) Addie Wyatt, an African-American leader of the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the NAACP, viewed the commission as a chance for working women to “raise our voice” on a national level and to gain a “sharper focus on women's concerns.” She was also the first person to insist that women needed their own civil rights organization, modeled on the NAACP. Kay Clarenbach, chair of the Wisconsin State Commission, first president of the Association of State Commissions, and author of the first handbook for the state commissions, had been a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin. Later, Clarenbach said that her experience on the commission “not only changed my life, it subsequently
became
my life!” Clarenbach eventually came to see her work in global terms. “Feminism,” she said, “is a vision of a different kind of society.”
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A disproportionate number of these women came from the Midwest, rather than from either coast or Washington, D.C. The heartland, with its progressive political traditions and strong unions, had apparently provided women with greater opportunities to become effective organizers. Dubbed by some politicians the “Wisconsin Mafia,” these seasoned veterans transformed the role of the state commissions. Although they were only supposed to collect data and report on it, they quickly turned data into ammunition that could be used for lobbying legislatures. They
wrote publications, researched the law, held conferences, and gave endless speeches. In a typical year, the indefatigable Kay Clarenbach gave forty speeches. In her view, they “laid the groundwork that was absolutely necessary” for changing women's lives.
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Everything is data, but data is not everything, as sociologist Pauline Bart has warned. To really learn about women's lives, these women would have to learn from one another. And so they did. What Kennedy could not have known was that when brought together, women tell each other stories about their lives. As these commission members began to share grievances and secrets, they began to discover exactly how ubiquitous was sex discrimination.

They also learned a great deal about the diversity of the female experience. Rural women taught urbanites who had never milked a cow about the isolation and precariousness of farm life. African-Americans tried to teach their white counterparts about how racism affected every aspect of their lives. Trade unionists described the conditions under which they worked to professional women. Lawyers and professors revealed, in turn, the kinds of discrimination and ridicule they encountered. Housewives tried to convince union activists and minority women that they, too, felt devalued as individuals. Gradually, they taught each other what women needed. Kay Clarenbach, for instance, recalled how Pauli Murray convinced her during an airplane trip why reproductive control of women's bodies was a precondition for women's other freedoms. Charlotte Bunch's articles—which other members gave her—helped her grasp, for the first time, the problems lesbians faced in society. Recalling those heady years, Clarenbach deadpanned, “Days when you don't learn something can be a drag.”
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The cumulative impact of these conversations and revelations gave rise to a collective awareness that whatever women did, their work was devalued, and that most women—wherever they worked, whatever the color of their skin, whatever their ethnic or regional background—did not participate in the same educational, economic, or political worlds as their male counterparts.

Nineteen sixty-three had been a banner year. The Equal Pay Act, the
Presidential Report on American Women
, and
The Feminine Mystique
all
helped to publicize a growing sense of gender consciousness. The next year was no less momentous. After President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Congress began considering the comprehensive civil rights bill. Congressman “Judge” Howard Smith, the southern chairman of the House Rules Committee, offered an amendment to add “sex” to Title VII, the section of the bill that prohibited discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin by private employers. A longtime supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, as well as an ardent segregationist, Smith saw his amendment as purely a win-win proposition. A prohibition on sex discrimination would give northern representatives a reason to vote against the act without facing the accusation of being racists. And if it passed, at least he wanted to be sure that “white women” would be the beneficiaries.
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At first, Smith's colleagues did not even take the amendment seriously. In an excessive display of chivalric oratory, Smith regaled the House with a letter from a woman who complained of the paucity of men available as husbands. Playing for laughs, he asked the House to take these “real grievances” seriously. The House erupted in riotous laughter. Emmanuel Celler, the liberal New York chairman of the Judiciary Committee, added to the jocular spirit when he announced that it was he—never his wife—who always had the last two words in his household, and those were “Yes, dear.”
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When the laughter subsided, coalitions began forming for and against Smith's amendment. Prodded by the Virginia members of the National Woman's Party—never known for its progressive views on race—these women now turned to Smith as a natural ally. Democratic representative Edith Green, the sponsor of the 1963 Equal Pay Act, worried that the amendment would gather opposition to the civil rights bill and risk African-Americans' chance to win their civil rights. She decided to vote against Smith's amendment. On the other hand, yes votes came from those representatives who had decided that they would not endure another “Negro's hour”—the post-Civil War moment when suffrage was granted to black men, but not to black or white women. Representative Martha Griffiths, a Republican who had long sought to include a prohibition on sex discrimination in the civil rights bill, helped forge a bizarre coalition of southern congressmen and their feminist supporters who seized the unexpected opportunity. The amendment passed.

Women activists immediately began a lobbying campaign to ensure passage of the entire bill itself. Betty Friedan, Martha Griffiths, Pauli
Murray, members of the National Women's Party, the Business and Professional Women's Clubs, and dozens of other women's organizations invaded legislators' offices, warning of the consequences if they dared vote against half of their constituency. Supported by President Lyndon Johnson's wife, Lady Bird, and various members of the administration, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—including Title VII—passed.
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Nearly every American social movement can point to some specific legal victory that decisively raised their members' sense of entitlement. For black Americans, it was
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling against “separate but equal” education. For the women's movement, it was Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The legislation created a new agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), charged with investigating complaints of racial and sexual discrimination. But women quickly discovered that its director, Herman Edelsberg, considered sex discrimination a joke, or at least a distraction from the more important work of assisting black men. Edelsberg called Title VII “a fluke . . . conceived out of wedlock.” “There are people on this commission,” he informed the press, “who think that no man should be required to have a male secretary and I am one of them.” When it was signed into law at the White House ceremony, no women were present, and the
New York Times
's account of the bill did not even mention that the new legislation prohibited sex discrimination in employment.
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