The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  On the face of the matter, a civil rights bill could easily have included prohibitions against sex discrimination. Activated by the civil rights movement, the old parallel between race and sex discrimination had already popped up again in American Women. But Esther Peterson and others on the PCSW, the most likely people in the administration to push the matter, saw black civil rights as more urgent. Thus apparently no one mentioned to LBJ the possibility of including sex in the omnibus bill he sent to Congress in 1964.83

  The relationship between race and sex soon surfaced, though, deployed and exploited by opponents. The Woman’s Party, faced with a civil rights bill that had nothing to do with women, objected to legislation that supposedly gave exclusive advantages to black men. Southern Democrats in the House, failing in their efforts to block the bill, seized upon the sex discrimination issue the Women’s Party handed them as a way to discredit the CRA. In debate on the floor of the House, the segregationist Virginia congressman Howard Smith tossed in a rider to the bill—Title VII—that outlawed sex discrimination in employment. His intention was to make the CRA look ridiculous. The point of the rider was that the very idea of discrimination was absurd: People got the jobs that they were suited for; there was nothing unfair about it. Presenting Title VII, Smith inquired of his colleagues with faux naïveté: If the government protected the rights of racial minorities (implicitly unqualified) to get jobs, well, why not protect the rights of spinsters (implicitly unlovable) to get husbands? The joke tickled representatives on both sides of the aisle. Chuckles and guffaws lightened the tense mood. Sexism was nothing if not a unifier of men.84

  Smith was drawing water at the well of one of the deepest presumptions about women in American life. His joke followed the lines of the quip John Adams made two centuries before, when Abigail asked him to remember the ladies. If women were included in the provisions for full citizenship, why then, why not every servant, pauper, and apprentice boy? Anyone who subscribed to any kind of prejudice, anywhere, anytime, could always cite women’s exclusion to buttress their position, because it appeared so natural. If you were going to protect the rights of racial minorities—this is what Smith’s joke really came down to—well why not—heh heh—protect the rights of women, too?

  But it was a fateful turn in the history of the joke. Martha Griffiths, an ERA supporter and well-respected Michigan Democrat, took the floor and like a veteran schoolteacher calling unruly boys to order put a stop to the hijinks. Griffiths supported Title VII for good reasons, not because she was trying to sabotage the CRA. But Griffiths too called up the turn-of-the-century paradigm of women being white. While she took care to note that black women also needed protection, she used racially differentiated language, playing to Southern members with the plea that the CRA was going to leave white women disadvantaged and unprotected. “When the colored woman shows up and she is qualified, she is going to have an open entrée into any particular field,” and that was okay. But the problem was that black men would feast on antidiscrimination measures; black women would get a few bones; and white women would come up with nothing at all. “It would be incredible to me that white men would be willing to place white women at such a disadvantage except that white men have done this before,” she scolded, calling up the nearly forgotten history of the rift over the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments.85

  Liberal Democrats, the backbone of support for the CRA, objected to Title VII. They believed it would endanger the CRA’s passage or, if it did pass, make the legislation too unwieldy to implement. In the end, though, Title VII survived in the House, voted through by a coalition of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. In the Senate, moderates of both parties, led by Margaret Chase Smith, Republican of Maine and one of only two female senators, shepherded the bill through without any further emendations.86

  With such a compromised beginning, there would seem little to expect from Title VII. Yet the subsequent history shows how political outcomes can outrun their origins. The NWP began to come around. The organization would never be a principled exponent of civil rights, but as legal scholar Serena Mayeri points out, “Title VII helped to bring about a significant retreat from the explicitly racialist feminism the NWP had previously sponsored.” “Today it is the negro women who will win for all of us equal rights,” cheerfully observed member Meta Heller. “I only wish all women’s organizations would get behind the civil rights movement, forgetting their prejudices for their own advancement.”87 More important, over the next three years workingwomen responded energetically. In the end Title VII belonged not to the Woman’s Party or racist Southern congressmen but to the workingwomen—black and white—who responded in force and to the political movement they touched off, which no one could have forseen.

  Immediately, women flooded the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency set up to implement the CRA’s provisions. There were more than two thousand complaints the first year, nearly one quarter of the total. Women wrote about the basics of hiring and pay, but also about promotions (more precisely, lack of promotions), differential health insurance and pensions, different job categorizations for the same work, and sex-segregated seniority lists. In an immediate sense, the complaints were futile, since the CRA’s supporters had compromised with congressional opponents by stripping the agency of any enforcement power, thereby making it exclusively investigative. Moreover, EEOC commissioners themselves were divided about the legitimacy of the women’s applications, with four out of the five responding with indifference or antipathy. Aileen Hernandez, from a trade union and civil rights background, was the only woman on the EEOC, and the one member who fought to implement the sex discrimination provision.88

  There were two kinds of objections from liberals. One was that it was too confusing to deal with both sets of problems, and race discrimination was much more serious. The other was an unwillingness to interfere with supposedly natural differences. Obviously men and women belonged in different jobs, and if women got the short end of the stick, that was unfortunate but unavoidable. Unlike race differences, which they were willing to believe were products of prejudice, they saw women as biologically equipped for certain jobs that were somehow menial. Women’s fingers were nimbler and men’s clumsier (which was why they were clerical workers and men were their bosses); women were weaker and men stronger (which was why they were low-paid telephone operators and men were well-paid linemen). Fingers, muscles, and mysterious biological properties made men focused and analytical and women flighty and impressionistic. Jobs that required strength, decisiveness, and dependability—which happened to be men’s jobs—paid better. That was the way things were.

  If discrimination against women was a consequence of inalterable sex differences, the naysayers maintained, then Title VII held employers to a silly standard of sexlessness. Under the new law, how could a railroad turn down a woman who applied to be a locomotive engineer? What was an airline to do the day a licensed woman pilot applied for a job? And what about a Playboy Bunny: Could a man apply for that job? And could he complain to the EEOC when he was turned down? Title VII came to be known as “the Bunny problem,” as if legions of men were clamoring to don rabbit ears and puffy tails and be pawed by customers in cocktail lounges. “You can’t even safely advertise for a wife anymore,” wisecracked The New York Times on the EEOC’s quandaries with the Bunny problem.89

  It was a sign of the protest gathering under the surface that the jokes bumped up against resistance, since this kind of humor normally floated free. “Let us have our fun out of the sex angle—if we must,” Esther Peterson chided in a letter to The New York Times about the Bunny editorial. “But let us also treat the plight of the woman worker with the seriousness it deserves from a great newspaper.”90 The Johnson administration was divided, with some officials diffident or hostile to Title VII, and others—including LBJ himself and Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz—avowing a commitment to putting the plight of the woman worker on the Great Society agenda. On the fl
oor of the House, Martha Griffiths attacked jokes about Title VII as disrespectful of the law and actually drew applause.91

  When the spotlight turned on the jokes, the unspoken assumptions behind them came under scrutiny. The old sexist clichés could be dressed up in contemporary motifs—men as Playboy Bunnies, how funny. But under pressure the humor was getting labored (what about a man who wanted to work in a corset shop?). Suddenly the setup of a woman wanting to be treated fairly in the workforce didn’t seem so funny. Millions of women had jobs and paychecks that their families depended on. Why was it, again, that they could only work in certain jobs? And actually, yes, why was it that they couldn’t fly airplanes or drive locomotives?

  Women in labor unions had thought about these matters for years, but now the civil rights movement pushed issues of fairness and just deserts to the forefront of popular consciousness. The idea of segregation as something people were forced into rather than something they chose or just stumbled into made the vast congregations of women clustered in menial and badly paid jobs look suspicious, just as did the masses of black people congregated at the bottom of the labor market. Occupations deemed glamorous and feminine, preludes to marriage—secretaries, airline stewardesses, Playboy Bunnies—began to look like dead ends.

  Employers fell back on the defense that some jobs truly required one sex or the other, a loophole the EEOC allowed as “bona fide occupational qualification exceptions,” or BFOQs.92 Sex discrimination was not illegal if sex was a BFOQ A “house mother” in a college dormitory could only be a woman, went the reasoning, and possibly a Playboy Bunny required a bona fide female as well. But the obligation to spell out BFOQs opened up a Pandora’s box, because the assumptions about why only the female sex could perform a job, once they were examined in the hard light of day, turned out to be insulting and contradictory to other views of American women that were woven through civic discourse.

  That is, if you thought about the work a Playboy Bunny really did, one EEOC official pointed out, you’d conclude she served drinks.93 Logically, a man could work as a Bunny drink server, unless someone spelled out that in truth the real Bunny job was to service men’s sexual fantasies. Often BFOQs depended on stamping jobs with sexual components that were weird and disgusting once they were articulated. When the flight attendants’ union complained to the EEOC that the airlines discriminated by refusing to hire men as attendants, newspapers joked that a passenger might have to ask a man instead of a woman for a pillow (“A Pillow, Please, Miss … Er, Mister,” was the title of a bemused editorial on the subject). What was that about? What was the passenger supposed to be thinking when he asked for a pillow? The airlines’ argument that they could only attract customers with pretty girls trained in the skills of “make up, hairdo, and even how to walk” began to look like high-level pimping—at a moment when the public was newly alert to the perfidy of racial stereotypes.94

  Caught off guard, employers gave signs of backpedaling from sexual stereotypes even as they got tangled up in language that two years earlier was unobjectionable. “In our culture, a female is a target for a ‘pass,’ ” a business executive noted about what we would call sexual harassment, putting the slang in quotes as if it were a word he himself would never use. “I probably should be more broad-minded—no pun intended,” professed another, wanting to be sure readers wouldn’t mistake him for a man who called women broads.95

  The ideological justifications began to buckle under the analogy of race and sex. The EEOC dug in by searching for ways to justify sex discrimination rather than to address the outpouring of grievances. Commissioner Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., son of the late president, expressed a common opinion when he charged that the sex provision was there only because civil rights opponents had thrown it in to undermine the CRA’s real intent.96

  The renaissance of the women’s movement in the 1960s is usually attributed to an explosion that was inevitable given the building pressure, or to the breaking of a “wave.” In this version of the story, the President’s Commission broached a few suggestions for improvement, The Feminine Mystique took the lid off resentments, anger erupted, and women got organized. The account is useful in capturing the unexpected strength and suddenness of developments. Unquestionably, the feminism that emerged later in the decade marked a sea change in women’s politics, generating a scrutiny of relations between the sexes that was more thoroughgoing than anything that came before. But the origins of the renaissance lay earlier; rather than amazing alchemy, the reappearance of women’s rights can better be seen as a dialectic between Washington politics and popular politics, Democratic Party elites and workingwomen, and women with some access to power and those with none. That is, there was a longer, quieter route to the new feminism, one that is overlooked when historians are too quick to fasten on to the combustion of the late 1960s.

  The impasse at the EEOC invited exasperation from women who worked in government agencies, especially PCSW veterans. Meetings and discussions continued after the commission closed up shop. Esther Peterson, Marguerite Rawalt, Catherine East, Martha Griffiths, Aileen Hernandez, and Mary Keyserling were in the thick of Washington politics, occupying (except for Griffiths, the one elected official) secure, if narrow niches and, through powerful male patrons, marginal positions in the Democratic Party. Rawalt, for example, was from Texas, and had long benefited—if “benefited” is the word for being stuck in a mid-level job—from her acquaintance with Lyndon Baines Johnson.97 Beltway insiders, these women followed the imbroglio over Title VII closely.

  The mood in Washington was fractious. As the Vietnam War escalated, LBJ made magnanimous and grandiose promises calculated to mollify various constituencies. In regard to top Democratic women, his vow to appoint fifty women within thirty days to top federal positions fizzled. He continued to hold back from forcing the EEOC to abide by Title VII.98 Everywhere in the country—as well as among Democrats in Congress and in the administration—cynicism crept into views of the president, with opposition building on the left to the war, and hostility on the right to civil rights. At the edges—and women were one group at the edges—the liberal accord that had underwritten Johnson’s Great Society unraveled. In the midterm elections in 1966, Congress turned sharply rightward, with the Democrats losing forty-eight House seats and four Senate seats.99

  Thus when the Labor Department convened a meeting in 1966 to follow up on the PCSW, unrest was palpable. The commission had spawned state committees on women, and those veterans, too, came to Washington. Aggravation with the EEOC boiled over and malcontents huddled away from the main meeting to talk about the need for another organization, “an NAACP for women” that would push uncomfortable matters that Mary Keyserling, the new head of the Women’s Bureau, was trying to keep in check, holding the line for the Johnson administration. The analogy between race and sex was irrepressible. The previous year, Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood, another PCSW veteran, made a constitutional argument using the race-sex parallel in a groundbreaking law review article, “Jane Crow and the Law,” using Murray’s Fourteenth Amendment arguments as well as drawing on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Murray and Eastwood compared the Supreme Court’s sanction of sex classifications in Minor, Bradwell, and Muller v. Oregon (1908) (which concerned a protective law) to the Plessy decision on separate but equal facilities for blacks.100

  On the spot, the dissidents established the National Organization for Women (NOW) as a pressure group, a “select” association of influential women and men. Within months, they had three hundred charter members: lawyers, policy makers, federal officials, academics, and businesswomen. Members of state commissions were a large contingent. Kay Clarenbach, for instance, from the Wisconsin commission, was a college graduate and homemaker whose career path in short-term, part-time jobs typified one avenue into women’s politics. While raising her children, she worked through the 1950s and early ’60s in a series of jobs with no clear direction except a desire to be involved in women’s
issues. A veteran volunteer, she was a force in the League of Women Voters and a pioneer, at the University of Wisconsin, in adult education for women. A patient and kind woman with a gift for associational work, she was elected to a NOW office at the first meeting and stayed in the leadership, always a counterweight to the temperamental Betty Friedan, who became the first president. Other charter members were Gerda Lerner, then a graduate student in history at Columbia University and on the brink of a distinguished career as a pioneer of women’s history; Marlene Sanders, the only high-ranking female television producer in New York; Muriel Fox, the one high-power female advertising executive in the city; and several nuns from Milwaukee and Chicago: Sisters Mary Claudine, M. Bernardin Deutsch, Mary Austin Doherty, and Mary Joel. Labor feminists were critical: Dorothy Haener of the United Auto Workers, to name just one, provided office support for the first year of NOW’s existence. Thus to call NOW a middle-class white woman’s organization, as many do, is to miss the nature of its early structural supports, the character of its founders, and the direction of their aims.101

  Friedan’s domineering and vain personality posed problems, many NOW colleagues privately agreed, in 1966 and long after. But she was the only one famous enough to draw national attention, and publicity was critical. Unlike some of the others, she had no solid experience as either a volunteer, a labor leader, or a professional in a workplace. She was a writer. “Betty had never organized anything in her life,” Clarenbach put it bluntly. “And that made it difficult to work together.”102 Friedan’s four-year tenure at NOW was tempestuous and often acrimonious, the feuds and splits worsened by her egotism. A fast, bold writer and speaker who didn’t bother with details, she was never a diplomat or politician. She always left that to others, the worker bees to her queen.