Читать книгу A Matter of Simple Justice - Lee Stout - Страница 14

CHAPTER ONE

Some Historical Background

Today we rarely give the gender of a working person a second thought. We are as accustomed to seeing female police officers as we are to seeing male nurses, female doctors, and male elementary school teachers. This is not to say that the old traditions of certain jobs being predominantly male or female have completely disappeared; women still fill the majority of positions in teaching, nursing, and libraries, for example. Rather, it is the certainty that most jobs will be composed exclusively of men or women that has disappeared. There are still some glass ceilings, but in the 2008 election, we almost had a woman as a major party candidate for president and, for the second time, we did have a woman as a major party candidate for vice president.

Other benchmarks have also been reached: women now constitute more than half of the American workforce. They are the majority of university graduates and the majority of professional workers in the United States. There are now women CEOs in many important companies. It could well be that the growing economic power of women is the biggest social change of the last half century. Nevertheless, the advancement of women and the concerns of the American women’s movement have focused as much on the achievement of civil rights for women as they have on equal participation in the economy and the job market.

The evolving role of American women in our society has a fascinating history, but it is generally accepted that World War II marked a turning point. Some 350,000 to 400,000 women eventually served in uniform during the war as nurses, in communications, in staff positions, and, on the home front, in all manner of jobs, as well as in the Women Airforce Service Pilots, who despite their high-risk duties were recognized as official veterans only in 1977. Several million more women joined the workforce to help support the war effort. “Rosie the Riveter” is their symbol, but women served in many other roles in manufacturing, farm labor, and office work as well as in traditional female-dominated professions, such as nursing and teaching. Compared with these millions, however, few women had cracked the barriers to enter business management and other professions.

FIGURE 2

In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman candidate for vice president from a major party. Alice Marshall Women’s History Collection, Penn State Harrisburg Library.

FIGURE 3

A World War II army recruiting poster for women focused on the many roles they could fill. Alice Marshall Women’s History Collection, Penn State Harrisburg Library.

From 1940 to 1945, women as a percentage of the workforce grew from 26 percent to 36 percent; in real numbers, this meant an increase from 13 million to 19.3 million women. By the end of 1946, however, more than half of those 6.3 million additional women had left the workforce, largely because of the men returning from the war. Some had taken jobs out of patriotism, others because they needed the money or wanted something interesting to do. Now many were happily returning to their families and homes, although some did not leave voluntarily. Although the culture still saw women’s primary role as wife and mother, women had changed; the idea of the working mother, either out of necessity or preference, would increasingly become commonplace and gradually be accepted as normal over the next thirty years.

In that great resumption of prewar normalcy, between 1945 and 1950, women as a portion of the workforce fell back from 36 percent to 29 percent, but in the 1950s it would gradually begin to climb again, reaching 35 percent in 1960 and 42 percent in 1970. However, women were still consigned, because of sex segregation or stereotyping, to lower paying positions—one study found three-quarters of all women even in the late 1950s working in “women only,” low-wage jobs.

Although more women than men completed high school, college attendance on the part of women lagged behind. In 1951, women made up only a third of all college students, but from 1952 on, women’s enrollment grew faster than men’s. The tipping point was reached in 1979, when, nationally, out of 11.6 million college students, women outnumbered men by more than 200,000. The gap continued to widen, and by 1995, it was nearly 1.6 million.

While more women were earning degrees in the 1950s and 1960s, the concerns of both working women and homemakers were growing as well. The G.I. Bill of Rights, which educated hundreds of thousands of veterans (male and female), also helped those new graduates, now working in America’s booming postwar economy, to buy new homes. Some of them were in suburban housing developments, where men would leave, often with the family car, to commute to work. Women stayed home to raise their children, aided by electric and gas appliances in a new world of labor-saving devices. Although wives were more frequently in the job market now to help support the increasing costs of meeting all the family’s expectations and desires in this new consumer-driven society, they tended to be looking for a job, rather than a career.

FIGURE 4

Women student debate team members record speeches to advance their work in forensics, 1948. Penn State University Archives.

Still, many suburban women found themselves isolated to a degree that was not common before in city or town environments; they began to feel frustrated in their existence as homemaker and mother. Betty Friedan, in a 1960 article in Good Housekeeping, found “a strange stirring, a dissatisfied groping, a yearning, a search that is going on in the minds of women,” looking for a “chance for self-fulfillment outside the home.” Friedan did not have a name for this phenomenon yet, but two years later she filled out the picture in The Feminine Mystique, a book that would connect not only with middle-class women but also with working-class and minority women, who still were largely stuck with low-wage, sex-segregated jobs, and with those with children and little or no access to affordable day care.

The social milieu was changing as well. The younger sisters and daughters of the women workers of World War II had seen women in different roles; this would also lead to changing values. A sexual revolution had been brewing since the turn of the century. Arguments over birth control, advocated nationally by Margaret Sanger, melded into the liberating days of the 1920s. In that era, the divorce rate rose, and there was a growing awareness that premarital sex—always present in the past but furtively hidden—had now become an open topic of discussion.

After World War II, many of the social trends reverted to earlier norms. People married at a younger age, and the percentage of single people in the population declined. Similarly, women had more children and did so at a younger age. Divorce rates declined, as did college attendance rates for women. The long disruptions of the Great Depression and World War II had made the possibility of a secure, “normal” life very attractive once again.

But as it turned out, family life was different: women did more housework (in part because “hiring a girl to help around the house” had become less common than in the past). The new popular culture, as represented in television, film, magazines, and books, generally emphasized the proper role of women as homemakers and mothers. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, however, women’s roles were gradually called into question more often. At the same time, men were periodically jolted into a new consciousness that women were increasingly looking for new opportunities, not just to contribute to the family income but also to both earn a living and achieve the satisfaction of meaningful work. These were times of economic growth and a fondly idealized golden era of placid and orderly life. But it was, of course, the 1960s that was the linchpin of all that would culminate in the modern women’s movement. “The Sixties”—love ’em or hate ’em—were a tumultuous time when the cultural, social, and political changes that are now so familiar to us first began to accelerate.

Society had received a wake-up call with the Kinsey Reports on sexual behavior in, first, the human male in 1948 and, then, the human female in 1953. Their “cold” statistics, with “hot” implications, staggered social conservatives. Playboy magazine (first published in 1953) and the mega-selling novel Peyton Place (1956) further stoked the fires. With the introduction of the birth control pill, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960 and later backed by the 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized the sale of contraceptives and introduced the constitutional right to privacy, Victorian sexual mores were on the ropes.

This was only one aspect of an increasingly unpredictable and edgy social environment of rock ’n’ roll music, liberalized dress and hairstyles, a growing interest in recreational uses of drugs, health warnings against tobacco, concern for the environment, and the youth culture’s increasing rejection of adult authority and expertise. Along with these changes came increasingly ambitious government programs to fight poverty, improve life in the cities, enhance healthcare and education and a variety of other initiatives, matched by anxiety over nuclear war and genuine anguish over the country’s involvement in Vietnam. As the Woodstock generation confronted the Cold Warriors, the generation gap became absolutely frigid.

Another key element of the 1960s, the civil rights movement to seek justice for long-oppressed African Americans, had entered its most active phase in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott. It continued with sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, voter registration drives, and other nonviolent protests over the crumbling Jim Crow culture of the South and the more subtle prejudices of the North. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 would be the signal pieces of legislation of the Johnson administration that began to move the nation beyond one of America’s greatest social conflicts.

However, in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, forbidding discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion, or national origin, an older member of the House of Representatives, Judge Howard W. Smith of Virginia, who was chairman of the House Rules Committee, had kindly added sex to the list of aggrieved classes as an ostensible favor to Representative Martha Griffiths (D-MI) and other women in the House. Privately he thought adding women to the bill made it so outrageous that it would surely be voted down. Much to the surprise of many, it made it all the more attractive, and the bill passed and was signed into law. The act also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as an arbiter for complaints of failure to comply with the law.

The EEOC did not accept women’s complaints for adjudication until 1968, however. Feminists’ frustration with the EEOC, among many other concerns, led to the creation in 1966 of the National Organization for Women (NOW), with Betty Friedan as its first president. Their lobbying, along with that of other women’s groups in 1967, helped add sex to the list of causes for discrimination in President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which forbade discrimination by federal contractors.

Of course, Betty Friedan had gained her fame as the author of The Feminine Mystique, which was published in 1963. Her critique of the occupation of housewife and what that role entailed argued that women had become “dehumanized.” Friedan said that society should encourage women to develop their intelligence and broaden their capabilities for the greater good of the nation as well as their own self-actualization. Her book landed like a match in a tinder-dry forest. It sold three million copies in its first three years in print and today is seen as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Although Friedan’s analysis covered all women who struggled with feeling trapped at home, it spoke in particular to the younger, college-educated women who had, by and large, been Friedan’s survey research subjects, providing much of the data and sensibilities on which the book was based.

Women were now increasingly searching for more challenging work, but the political context in which they were doing so had remained unchanged for decades: women’s civil rights had hardly advanced since the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, on August 19, 1920, when Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify, thus giving the amendment the three-fourths majority required to become law. (The remainder of the forty-eight states would all ratify the amendment as well.)

While many women became politically active in the 1920s through the League of Women Voters, the successor to the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, women’s clubs in the two major parties kept women focused on mainstream political issues and avoided consideration of the lack of women’s rights. The small, activist National Women’s Party, led by Alice Paul, struggled alone to advance the concept of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. It was first introduced in 1923, by two Kansas Republicans, Senator Charles Curtis and Representative Daniel R. Anthony Jr. (who was suffragette Susan B. Anthony’s nephew), but the parties paid it only lip service. The ERA was eventually passed by Congress in 1972, though it failed to gain ratification once it passed to the states for approval.

The fight for equal rights for women extends back into the nineteenth century, to the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Two longtime abolitionists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, convened a two-day meeting of three hundred women and men in 1848. Calling for justice for women in a society that barred them from exercising civil rights, the convention adopted a Declaration of Sentiments and twelve resolutions, including one for female suffrage.

AMENDMENT XIX

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT (AS PASSED BY CONGRESS IN 1972)

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

After the Civil War, attempts to attach sex to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which had given freed slaves the right of citizenship and the right to vote, failed to gain a hearing. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull of the Equal Rights Party was the first woman nominated as a candidate for president of the United States, and although there may have been votes for her, there is apparently no record of them being counted.1 An 1875 Supreme Court decision confirmed women as citizens but said that this did not give them the right to vote unless states permitted it. The Wyoming Territory granted women the right to vote in 1869, and by 1900, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho had also granted women suffrage; more western states would follow.

Through the course of the twentieth century, the majority of women labor leaders, settlement house movement reformers, and women political leaders opposed the ERA, fearing that it would lead to the repeal of protective legislation for women workers that had been won through long, hard battles. These included laws restricting the number of hours women were required to work and the physical demands placed on women in a job. Nevertheless, both the Republican and Democratic Parties included some mention of the ERA in their party platforms starting in the early 1940s.

FIGURE 5

“Mrs. Woodhull Asserting Her Right to Vote.” Alice Marshall Women’s History Collection, Penn State Harrisburg Library.

FIGURE 6

“Packing bacon”: early women factory workers in the food industry. Alice Marshall Women’s History Collection, Penn State Harrisburg Library.

Actual participation in the government by women, however, was relatively uncommon. The numbers of female members of Congress who were not widows of deceased members (who often held the seat for the party until the next election) was small. The number of women officeholders in the government was equally minute. In many cases, Civil Service regulations specified that jobs were for men only, regardless of the physical demands of the position.

President Harry Truman was quoted in 1945 as saying that women’s rights were “a lot of hooey.” Whereas President Franklin D. Roosevelt had selected the first woman cabinet member, Frances Perkins as secretary of labor in 1933, Truman appointed none, and Eisenhower appointed only Oveta Culp Hobby as secretary of health, education, and welfare in 1953. Truman had appointed twenty women to positions requiring Senate confirmation; Eisenhower did slightly better with twenty-eight; Kennedy, slightly worse with twenty-seven.

John F. Kennedy’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) was created at the end of 1961 and delivered its report in October 1963 (about seven months after the publication of The Feminine Mystique). Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the commission until her death in 1962. The PCSW was a pathbreaking exercise, but it also had to balance feminists’ demands with a political desire to placate the labor movement, which wanted to preserve women’s protective legislation. Proclaiming motherhood to be the major role of America’s women, the commission report was less than feminist, but at the same time, it resulted in the creation of state commissions on the status of women across the country, which contributed to grassroots consciousness-raising. It had been preceded, in 1961, by Executive Order 10925 forbidding discrimination in the Civil Service and applying the term “affirmative action” to measures to achieve nondiscrimination, which proved to be less than useful for women since discrimination against them was not covered by the order.

FIGURE 7

Catherine May Bedell (R-WA), one of the sponsors of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, here stands directly behind President Kennedy at the signing, on June 10, 1963. A Few Good Women Oral History Collection, Penn State University Archives.

If nothing else, the PCSW was another step in arousing the expectations of a growing women’s movement. In 1962, a Gallup poll indicated that one-third of women felt themselves to be victims of discrimination. By 1970, the figure was one-half of women, and by 1974, two-thirds of women felt they were discriminated against.

It was clear that the times were changing. With the 1968 election of Richard M. Nixon as president, America entered what one historian termed “the peak years of feminist activism”—1969 to 1973. Hundreds of new women’s organizations formed at the local, state, and national levels, all dedicated to advancing women’s rights and opportunities. Dozens of new periodicals came to press supporting this interest, including Ms. magazine, published for the first time in July 1972 and selling 250,000 copies in eight days.

FIGURE 8

Campaign button for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which was approved by Congress in 1972. Alice Marshall Women’s History Collection, Penn State Harrisburg Library.

In retrospect, discussion of the Nixon presidency is dominated by Watergate, the Vietnam War, the economy, and foreign policy masterstrokes like the opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union. Little remembered is a domestic record of legislation and other achievements that make him, in the words of historian James T. Patterson, “the most liberal Republican American President, excepting Theodore Roosevelt, in the twentieth century.”2 An even less well-known part of that record is the Nixon administration’s program for advancing women’s role in government.