by Gail Collins
Nevertheless, it is important to our story. The commission—and the state commissions on the status of women it spawned—brought together smart, achieving women who might otherwise have never met. And it required them to talk about women’s rights, a subject that seldom came up in their normal work in government or academia. It created a special chemistry, a kind of synergy that made things happen.
Most of the people on the commission and its staff tended to treat discrimination as a simple fact of life. (Mary Eastwood, the brilliant Justice Department attorney, said she had thought nothing of it when she was interviewed for one of her first government jobs and told that she would of course “have to be a lot more qualified for a job than a man in order to get it.”) While many of them had wanted different careers than the ones they got, the women were almost universally successful by 1960 standards. They were polite, well-behaved, and committed to working within the system. But they were about to enter into what Pauli Murray, a commission lawyer, called “the first high-level consciousness group.” By the time they were through, many would realize that inwardly, they had been seething all along.
Marguerite Rawalt, a government tax attorney, was appointed to the commission as a token ERA supporter. She was a tall, middle-aged Texan who never lost her Southern charm, universally described as “a lady” or “a very, very nice woman.” Rawalt had always quietly dreamed of one day becoming a judge. After law school, she had taken a job with the Internal Revenue Service that provided her with security and enough income to help support her family back home during the Depression. Her bosses must have been equally pleased by her impressive work habits and her hesitation about ever asking for a promotion. When she did ask, late in her career, her supervisor expressed amazement that she had never been elevated before—and raised her one grade. When Lyndon Johnson, an old Texas associate, became vice president, Rawalt finally dared to lobby for a judgeship, but she was told she was too old. “She was a lovely woman,” said Mary Eastwood, who worked for Rawalt’s group on the commission. “She had been passed over for the head of her section year after year. She would train the men.”
Disappointed in her work life, Rawalt directed her considerable energies to professional women’s clubs. (She was once simultaneously elected president and vice president of the National Association of Women Lawyers due to an overenergetic write-in campaign.) She used her various posts whenever possible to push for women’s issues, but it was a crusade that often concerned her fellow club members less than it did her. When she was elected head of the DC chapter of the Federation of Business and Professional Women, a Washington columnist enthused that Rawalt, “magnetic and winning instant attention and admiration for her legal acumen, knows the art of correct dressing as well.”
She also knew how to write letters—hundreds and hundreds of letters. It’s hard to imagine how important a talent that was in the era before e-mail. In the early 1960s, long-distance telephone calls were pricey, generally reserved for emergencies or at least special occasions. People did not have access to even the most basic office copying equipment. The only method of duplicating a letter or an announcement, short of shipping it off to the printer, was a mimeograph machine, which could reproduce text that was painfully—and often messily—typed on waxed sheets of paper.
Whenever anything happened in the inchoate struggle for women’s rights, Rawalt reached for her stamps. If a critical congressman needed to be pressured, she urged her fellow letter writers to start sending in petitions. If some minor triumph occurred—a successful meeting or a new volunteer to the cause—she sat down at her desk and dashed out notes to anyone she felt might be interested. Correspondence, for her, was a matter of bulk. Mary Eastwood remembered being in awe of Rawalt’s extraordinary efficiency at sealing envelopes. “She’d lay them all out with the sticky part showing and get a damp sponge and run it down them.” At a time when women who did succeed made every effort to avoid anything that resembled secretarial work, Rawalt was the one who was never afraid to get her hands inky.
One of Rawalt’s chief allies on the commission staff was Pauli Murray, the extraordinary African-American lawyer who had been hired from Yale, where she was pursuing a PhD. Murray, like some other talented black Americans forced to prove themselves over and over, was an almost compulsive academic overachiever. She had worked her way through Hunter College in New York despite financial troubles that left her suffering from malnutrition. She graduated in 1933, one of four blacks in a class of 247. After an unsuccessful attempt to integrate the University of North Carolina graduate school, she went to law school at Howard University, the only woman in her class. Scrimping as always, she lived in an unused powder room in a girls’ dormitory.
While she was at the all-black Howard (which discriminated against her because of her sex nearly as much as other schools did because of her race), Murray wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, criticizing his failure to do more for African-Americans. The president failed to respond. But Eleanor Roosevelt wrote back, defending her husband and calling Murray’s letter “thoughtless.” When Murray stood up for her position, the first lady invited her to come to her New York apartment “to talk these things over.” Their meetings continued, and when Murray graduated from law school, a huge bouquet of flowers appeared at the commencement exercises. The black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier proudly reported that the flowers were sent to the “brilliant, active, strong-willed Pauli Murray” from “Mrs. Roosevelt, wife of the president of the United States.”
Murray went to New York, struggling to find a job and living on such cheap food that she got a tapeworm. Eventually she landed a spot with a major law firm, but because she was the only woman, the only minority, and twenty years older than her peers, she was never comfortable. She accepted a post teaching in Ghana and then a fellowship at Yale, where she was doing graduate study in law. Later in life, after receiving her Yale doctorate and teaching at Brandeis University, she would attend divinity school and end her career as an Episcopalian minister. “Pauli was like a pixie—petite and energetic, even when she was in her 60s,” said Mary Eastwood, who worked with her on the commission staff. “She was afraid of nothing in terms of action. She even submitted her résumé when there was a vacancy on the Supreme Court—applied for the job!”
One constant in her life had been Eleanor Roosevelt, who continued to exchange letters with Murray and invite her for afternoon teas and weekend visits. But Mrs. Roosevelt died in 1962, before the Commission on the Status of Women could finish its work. “It became my memorial to her last public service,” Murray said.
“I AM ALWAYS STRONG FOR WOMEN, YOU KNOW.”
In 1964 Representative Howard Smith of Virginia appeared on Meet the Press to answer questions about the Civil Rights Act, which was moving through Congress. Its most controversial section was Title VII, prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. For once, there was a woman among the reporters doing the questioning. May Craig of Gannett News Service asked Smith if he would add women to the minority groups to be protected from discrimination in Title VII.
“Well, maybe I would. I am always strong for women, you know,” he said.
Smith, 80, was the chairman of the Rules Committee, a post that gave him enormous power to stop or at least delay any legislation of which he disapproved. And there was a lot Smith disapproved of—including aid to education, welfare, and minimum-wage laws. He kept Alaskan statehood bottled up in his committee for nearly a year, and he once delayed civil rights legislation by simply disappearing for several days and making it impossible for his committee to schedule a time for the measure to be considered in the House. When he returned, he claimed he had been called home to his dairy farm when a barn burned down. “I always knew Howard Smith would do anything to block a civil rights bill, but I never supposed he would resort to arson,” said Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House.
Of all the forces of progress Smith wanted to stop, civil rights was at the top of the list. “Congressman Smith
would joyfully disembowel the civil rights bill if he could. Lacking the votes to do so, he will obstruct it as long as the situation allows,” said a writer in the New York Times Magazine.
When the Civil Rights Act came up for a vote in the House, Smith got up and offered an amendment that would add women to the groups who would be protected from job discrimination. In case anyone might have imagined he was actually concerned about a serious social issue (Smith was, after all, a friend of Alice Paul’s), he began by jocularly reading a letter from a woman complaining about the lack of marriageable men: “Just why the Creator would set up such an imbalance of spinsters, shutting off the ‘right’ of every female to have a husband of her own is, of course, known only to nature. But I am sure you will agree this is a grave injustice to womankind and something Congress and President Johnson should take immediate steps to correct, especially in an election year.”
The proposal that women should have equal opportunity to be considered for any job was an idea that struck a great many otherwise open-minded people as absolutely ridiculous. The debate over Smith’s amendment reflected that. Emanuel Celler of New York, who was managing the Civil Rights Act and attempting to deflect any amendment that might endanger it, stood up. “I can say as a result of forty-nine years of experience—and I celebrate my fiftieth wedding anniversary next year—that women, indeed, are not the minority in my house… ,” he said. “I usually have the last two words and those words are ‘yes, dear.’ ”
Amid the hoots from the other male legislators, Representative Leonor Sullivan of Missouri turned to Martha Griffiths. “If you can’t stop that laughter, you’re lost,” she said.
Griffiths, unlike much of the House, was dead serious about adding women to Title VII, but she knew that between the lawmakers who flat-out opposed the idea and the ones who simply feared doing anything to endanger the Civil Rights Act, there would not be enough votes to support her if she offered such an amendment. When she heard Smith’s comments on Meet the Press, she saw a new opening. Smith had the consistent support of dozens of Southern conservatives in the House. Add those to the numbers she could round up on her own power, and there might be a majority. Griffiths had some chips in the favor bank herself. (She was the first woman to serve on the Ways and Means Committee, which approved all those obscure little tax exemptions so dear to the hearts of campaign contributors.) She had been working to collect votes, and she had thought carefully about what she would say when she rose to her feet. “I presume that if there had been any necessity to point out that women were a second-class sex, the laughter would have proved it,” she said.
That got their attention.
“In my judgment, the men who had written the Equal Employment Opportunity Act had never even thought about women,” Griffiths said later. She was convinced the authors wanted to “give black men some rights, and that black women would be treated about like white women.” But whatever their motives, Griffiths said, “I made up my mind that if such a bill were going to pass, it was going to carry a prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex, and that both black and white women were going to take a modest step forward together.”
Eleven of the twelve women serving in the 435-member House rose to support the act. The holdout was Edith Green of Oregon. A member of the Commission on the Status of Women, Green had just finished a long and depressing struggle to pass a bill prohibiting employers from paying men and women different wages for the same job. Her Equal Pay Act had been amended until it was riddled with holes, including an exemption for professional, executive, and administrative positions. (Green remembered a male colleague asking her incredulously if she would actually “pay a woman administrative assistant in your office as much as you would pay a male administrative assistant.”) For the minimal reform that was left, Green had still had to fight every step of the way. At one point, when she went looking to make sure the bill hadn’t disappeared in committee, she found that a male colleague had filed it under “B”—for “broads.” It was no wonder, really, that Green had a reputation for crankiness.
Green herself had thought of proposing an amendment to add women to the Civil Rights Act. But the Johnson White House had convinced her that it could endanger the legislation’s chance of passage. In this matter, she decided, black Americans had to come first. “For every discrimination that has been made against a woman in this country, there has been ten times as much discrimination against the Negro,” she said.
It was a very old and very painful debate. The fight for women’s rights and the struggle for racial justice had almost always been linked in America. Abolition of slavery had been the first political issue that brought large numbers of women into the public world, and many of them pointed out the similarities they saw in the treatment of women and African-Americans. Black leaders were grateful for the support but tended to feel that however bad and repressive Victorian marriages were, they were not quite as grim as slavery and lynching. From the beginning, each cause was keenly aware that when they presented a joint front, critical support tended to dwindle away. Many male politicians who supported abolition felt very strongly that a woman’s place was in the home, and many Southern politicians who were willing to consider legislation of benefit to women drew back fast when civil rights were added to the equation. During the Civil War, abolition leaders felt that it would be much harder to amend the Constitution to give African-Americans the full rights of citizenship if women had to get the vote as well, and they decided that the black cause was by far more urgent. Women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were furious, and Stanton shocked her old friend and ally Frederick Douglass by denouncing the idea of immigrants and freed slaves—“Patrick and Sambo and Yung Tung”—making laws for the disenfranchised “daughters of Adams and Jefferson… women of wealth and education.”
When women once again rose up and demanded the right to vote during World War I, Alice Paul and her lieutenants had no intention of alienating Southern supporters with a show of sympathy for African-Americans. When Paul staged the famous women’s rights parade of 1913 in Washington, she ordered black suffragists to march at the back of the line in order to spare the feelings of Southern sympathizers. (Ida Wells-Barnett, who had been leading a group of black women from Chicago, vanished into the crowd along the sidewalk, then stepped back into the street as the Illinois delegation marched by, joining her white friends and integrating the demonstration.) A half century later, Paul ignored pleas that she decline to accept support for the ERA from the segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace.
In 1964 black Americans were still in a far more perilous position than white women. But women, especially poor and working-class women, desperately needed better protection. And there was no reason that a fabulously prosperous nation founded on equal rights for all shouldn’t be able to attack both injustices at the same time. While all the black legislators were worried about the amendment’s effect on the Civil Rights Act, they were not unanimously convinced that Griffiths was wrong. Griffiths recalled that, several days after the vote, as she was walking into the House, William Dawson, a black representative from Chicago, came up and shook her hand. “Mrs. Griffiths, during the weekend I thought about that speech you made on behalf of women and I would like to tell you that if all of your training and all of your experience had been for that one moment, it has all been worthwhile,” he said.
The amendment passed the House, as Griffiths had calculated. (“We made it! We’re human!” cried a woman from the gallery.) The Civil Rights Act then moved through the Senate, where Everett Dirksen, the powerful minority leader from Illinois, wanted to remove it. While Marguerite Rawalt organized one of her letter-writing campaigns, Senator Margaret Chase Smith picked up the fight on the Senate floor.
“THIS LITTLE LADY HAS SIMPLY STEPPED OUT OF HER CLASS.”
Smith was another widow—at 33, after years as a single working woman, she married Clyde Smith, a 54-year-old soon-to-be congressman from Ma
ine. She stepped into his seat when he died, and then, after four terms in the House, she shocked everyone by running for the Senate in 1948. “This little lady has simply stepped out of her class,” said a state politician. Smith campaigned for the seat during the congressional session, returning home on weekends in an era when flying—especially flying to Maine—was an airborne version of taking a wagon train west. Smith headed for Portland, which required one or two changes of planes along the way. When she arrived, there was another hundred-mile trip to her home, where she picked up her car and started driving. As she traveled from stop to stop, she sometimes wound up having to ask for shelter for the night in a local farmhouse. When she slipped on the ice and broke her arm, it simply made her two hours late for her next speaking engagement. She had no paid staff, no campaign manager. And in the end she got more votes than all three of her opponents.
In 1950, when Washington was quivering under Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crazed anti-Communist campaign, Smith took to the floor and became the first lawmaker to dare to stand up to McCarthyism. “I don’t like the way the Senate has been made a rendezvous for vilification…. I am not proud of the way we smear outsiders from the floor of the Senate and hide behind the cloak of congressional immunity…. As an American I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves,” she said. Bernard Baruch, one of the most influential political advisers of the era, said that if the speech had been made by a man, that man would have been the next president. In retaliation, McCarthy had her tossed off the Permanent Investigating Committee and tried to run a candidate against her in Maine in 1954. She simply ignored the challenger. “My record is so outstanding and so effective that there isn’t any use running around the state defending it,” she said. And she was right.
