Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (11 page)

Victories were never simple, however. Each had its own behind-the-scenes story about the combined strategic impact of policy-oriented feminists, Washington insiders, and ordinary working women who generated outside pressure by using their newly acquired rights to initiate EEOC complaints and court actions against discriminatory employers and their unions alike. Each story played out against the background roar of the cultural debate on “women’s place” in kitchens, bedrooms, and offices. The media described women’s political activism with implicitly raised eyebrows, as in this 1973
Boston Globe
report on a National Women’s Political Caucus meeting with state Democratic Party leaders:

In short, the women are refusing to be taken for granted any longer and are insisting that their voice be heard and that their gender be represented in Democratic decisions and leadership. That’s what they’ll tell the party brass at a breakfast at the Parker House Wednesday for which the ladies will defy all tradition and pick up the tab.
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Critical to women’s new political clout were the thousands of women who asserted new rights as soon as they had them. With the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 and Tide VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, working women had at hand new and powerful legal tools, which they seized vigorously. The Equal Pay Act made it illegal to pay women less than men for the same job. Title VII added “sex” to “race, religion, and national origin” as categories protected by federal law from employment discrimination. The Civil Rights Act also established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to hear complaints and enforce
compliance with its antidiscrimination rules. In the first year of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, nearly 2,500 complaints (27 percent of the total) came from women charging sex discrimination. Individual women often filed their complaints without the support of their unions and in some instances charged the unions with discrimination. Even progressive unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE) that had a history of attention to women’s issues and provided leadership to the President’s Commission on the Status of Women found their female members restless and willing to use governmental remedies against their unions as well as their employers. The commissioners, however, were for the most part unprepared to consider sex discrimination a significant issue and for their first year made no response to such complaints. Commissioners Aileen Hernandez and Richard Graham and EEOC lawyer Sonia Fuentes, disturbed by their colleagues’ inaction, began to articulate the need for an “NAACP for women” to pressure the EEOC to enforce the law. This, of course, was the idea behind the creation of NOW.
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Unions and companies often tried to claim that denials of access to overtime and higher paying jobs were necessitated by state protective laws.
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These laws, many on the books for half a century or more, “protected” women from exploitation by limiting the hours they could work and specifying allowable working conditions, such as limits on the amount of weight a woman could be asked to lift. Such rules, of course, resulted in the exclusion of women from many of the better paying occupations and from opportunities for promotion. Under feminist prodding, courts began to rule that protective laws could in fact discriminate and thereby violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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A landmark case began when Lorena Weeks sued Southern Bell Telephone Company for refusing to promote her to a job she had handled many times as a substitute and instead hired a man with less seniority. When she lost her case in 1967, Marguerite Rawalt of the NOW Legal Committee offered assistance on appeal. Attorney Sylvia Roberts from Baton Rouge prepared the case with Rawalt and argued it before the appeals court. Standing only 5 feet tall, Roberts marched around the
courtroom carrying the equipment required for the job in one hand while arguing that the company rules that placed weight lifting restrictions on jobs for women were not a “bona fide occupational qualification.” The decision handed down in March 1969 in
Weeks v. Southern Bell
denied the validity of the “bfoq” exemption for Bell’s weight-lifting restrictions and set a new standard of proof. No longer would a demonstration that many, or even most, women could not perform a specific job requirement justify such a restriction. Instead, employers (and states) would have to show that all or “substantially all” women could not do so. The choice to accept a particularly difficult job should rest with women as it already did for men.
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The greatest political goal of all, the Equal Rights Amendment, had divided supporters of women’s rights for nearly half a century. A legacy of the suffrage era, the ERA had first been proposed in 1923 by the National Women’s Party, to remove in one fell swoop the remaining obstacles to full legal equality. With a constitutional amendment mandating that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” legal restrictions like Southern Bell’s would tumble in a hurry. Progressive reformers and their labor union allies, however, who had fought long and hard for laws to protect working women from excessive low wages and harsh working conditions, were horrified. To them, legal equality would only worsen the situation of the most disadvantaged, forgetting that protective laws were passed solely for women in an era when that was the only way to get any kind of protection. Since the 1930s, however, courts had dropped their opposition to legislation protecting all workers, such as minimum wage or occupational safety and health rules. Leaders’ realization that protection could be discrimination grew in response to initiatives and protests from below.
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By 1970, however, the ranks of ERA supporters had come to include most of its former opponents: the League of Women Voters, Business and Professional Women, the YWCA, the American Association of University Women, Common Cause, and the United Auto Workers. Together they formed a coalition capable of mounting a massive 2 year campaign that generated more mail on Capitol Hill than the Vietnam War.
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The ERA received “official” support in 1970 in the report of President Nixon’s short-lived Task Force on Women’s Rights and Responsibilities, appointed to gather information for his State of the Union address. Under the leadership of Virginia Allen, the Task Force produced a sharply worded pro-ERA report,
A Matter of Simple Justice
, which the administration quickly suppressed. Elizabeth Koonz, Director of the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor, finally succeeded in publishing the report (after it had circulated underground for several months) in time for the Women’s Bureau’s Fiftieth Anniversary Conference in June 1970.
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Among the 800 contentious women at the Women’s Bureau Conference was Arvonne Fraser, a longtime activist in the Democratic Party. She had managed her husband’s successful campaigns for election to Congress and then staffed his congressional office. She listened raptly to Elizabeth
Koonz
, an African-American Republican, speaking about unity among women toward the goal of women’s full participation in American life. Fraser jotted notes to herself so that she wouldn’t forget: “
Koonz
—standing ovation—beautiful voice, resonant, deep with a lilt and humor …. At [the] end of her speech a young women’s lib type stood up and said she didn’t see many lower class women or many young women in the audience … immediately to her left an older black woman in [a] pink outfit came up and demanded: ‘what do you expect a lower class woman to look like?’ [T]he whole audience hooted and clapped and Mrs. K responded: ‘we don’t judge people by their outward appearance.’” Koonz indicated that some welfare mothers had been invited and when she asked young women to stand, “… they included young black women as well.”
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Even as this feminist intergenerational clash occurred at the Women’s Bureau Conference, Representative Martha Griffiths filed a discharge petition to force the ERA out of the House Judiciary Committee and onto the floor of the House. The previous month the ERA had received its first congressional committee hearing since 1956 as a result of a NOW demonstration in February. Twenty women from the Pittsburgh chapter, under the leadership of Wilma Scott Heide, had disrupted a hearing on the vote for 18-year-olds to demand immediate
action on the ERA. With a constant flow of letters and telegrams to reluctant congressmen, the petition reached the necessary 218 signatures on July 20 and thus bypassed a committee vote. On August 10 (after a debate in which Emanuel Celler argued that there was “as much difference between a male and a female as between a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse”), it passed the House 350 to 15.
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On March 22, 1972, both houses of Congress finally approved the ERA. By the end of the year, 22 of the needed 35 states had ratified it. No one could know that the rate of ratification would decelerate sharply as opposition forces began to organize themselves. The early victories, however, were a sign of women’s political self-organization at the state level that paralleled and reinforced their new national visibility. Political caucuses and commissions on women in most states coordinated their efforts to increase women’s political participation, to press for the elimination of discriminatory laws, and to generate new initiatives. In Minnesota, women formed feminist caucuses in both major political parties.
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In Congress, 1972 turned out to be a banner year for women’s rights legislation. In addition to the EEA, Congress passed Tide IX of the Higher Education Act, providing “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance,” setting the stage for the growth of women’s athletics later in the decade. The Equal Opportunity Act broadened the jurisdiction of the EEOC and strengthened its enforcement capacity. Working parents received a tax break for their child care expenses. Representative Bella Abzug recalled 1972 as “a watershed year. We put sex discrimination provisions into everything. There was no opposition. Who’d be against equal rights for women? So we just kept passing women’s rights legislation.”
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Arvonne Fraser was one of the Washington insiders whose linkages with feminist outsiders made for such a powerful alliance in these golden years. As she describes her own story, she came into the women’s movement much the same way thousands did around the country, by organizing her own support group. Schooled in organizations, she tried first to join NOW in 1968 or 1969, but her letter was returned—probably
a casualty of NOWs disorganization after the UAW withdrew financial support or perhaps NOWs early policy of restricting membership to professional women.
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So, she invited 20 women to her home to talk about the new women’s movement. They would not have called themselves a consciousness-raising group. That was a label for younger radicals. But they easily adopted the small group-organizing strategy of women’s liberation. At the first meeting, women decided not to introduce themselves in terms of their relationships with men precisely because most of them were in Washington because they were on the staff of, or married to, prominent male politicians. As word of the group spread, reporters tracked Fraser down at her husband’s congressional office. “The reporter’s first question was: ‘Who are their husbands?’ I refused to answer, and the group began to call itself ‘the Nameless Sisterhood.’”
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The Nameless Sisterhood linked an important underground of feminists in key policy-making positions in Washington. It spun off organizations—as when Bernice Sandler urged Arvonne Fraser to organize a Washington chapter of the Women’s Equity Action league (WEAL), which rapidly became a major source of activism on both legal and legislative fronts. It also initiated legislation. The story of the Women’s Education Equity Act (WEEA) shows how informal networks can work when the timing is right.

The idea for the Women’s Education Equity Act originated with Arlene Horowitz, a secretary on Capitol Hill who had worked for 3 years for a House Education Subcommittee. Frustrated that “the males on this committee felt that women were only good for typing and carrying out their wishes,” she “ran out of typing one day, so I decided to knock off a bill.”
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The idea was to create a Council on Women’s Educational Programs in the Department of Education that could devise programs to address discrimination against women in educational access, in curriculum, and in hiring by funding small, innovative projects that could document problems and develop model solutions. Horowitz approached both Fraser and Sandler, who were initially dubious but responded to her persistence by calling a meeting to work on the draft and to ask Representative Patsy Mink to hold hearings. Fraser recalled,

We met one night in 1972 at George Washington University to draft the bill. Present were Shirley McCune, who was working on sex-equity problems for the National Education Association, and Marguerite Rawalt, who came to ensure that the bill would be consistent with the ERA when it passed. Sandler, Horowitz, I and a few others rounded out the group. When we came to the authorizing of funds, we laughingly entered $30 million, fantasizing about what that amount of money could accomplish.
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As the bill progressed through Congress, sponsored by Representative Mink and Senator Walter Mondale, female networks went into action to generate publicity and support. Hearings aired the issues. Fraser’s longtime political ally, columnist Geri Joseph wrote a widely reprinted column, “Women’s Rebellion Against Dick and Jane,” which linked the proposed WEEA to myriad feminist grassroots efforts to document the ways educational systems tracked girls into traditional roles: a WEAL study on vocational education for girls in Waco, Texas, NOW task forces “around the country poring over children’s readers,” and Princeton NOWs widely read study entitled “Dick and Jane as Victims.” Joseph also quoted Fraser’s own testimony at hearings on the bill: “We have looked at the education of girls as a kind of life insurance, something they need, ‘just in case’—just in case they can’t find a husband or in case they need to support themselves while looking for a husband.”
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The Women’s Educational Equity Act became law 2 years later.