by Gail Collins
Weeks understood that no one she knew had ever considered the prospect of a woman going to court to demand a job that had always been held by men. “I even heard about a preacher preaching about women trying to take men’s jobs and things like that. And I was a devout Christian, and I went to church and Sunday school every Sunday and taught,” she said. “Well, I just stopped going to church and Sunday school. I was a loner, really. I felt like I was so alone, and yet I knew I was doing what God wanted me to do. Going way back to the fact that my mama had died working so hard. And I knew women worked and needed a place in the world.”
Weeks lost her case in district court. (The judge, Frank Scarlett, was an infamous segregationist who had attempted to dismiss a school-integration case on the basis of “expert” testimony from witnesses who said blacks were less intelligent than whites.) Her attorney—who was paid for by the same union that had tried to tell her the job should go only to a man—assured her that the situation was hopeless. When she got the news, Weeks could hear her supervisor and some other men “standing outside my office door, laughing and having the biggest time over it you had ever heard in your life.” The next morning, when she came into work, instead of lifting her typewriter onto her desk, she began writing out her reports by hand. When her supervisor protested, Weeks pointed out that she had just lost a lucrative job because of a machine that weighed thirty and three-quarters pounds. “I said, ‘This typewriter right here weighs thirty-four and three-quarters pounds.’ I said, ‘Now if you will reach under the desk and lift it out for me and put it up here where I can type, I’ll type all day long. But I don’t intend to break a Georgia rule.’ ” The supervisor told her she was suspended and sent her home.
“It hurt me so much I didn’t know what to do. I loved the telephone company. So I went home and I cried all weekend,” she said.
It was about then that Weeks found Marguerite Rawalt, who told her NOW would take the case and represent her without charge if she would promise to stick it out.
“I was meant to do this,” Weeks told Rawalt.
“YOU WILL BE ON THE JOB TOMORROW.”
The closest lawyer to Georgia on Rawalt’s tiny list of volunteers was Sylvia Roberts, the young Louisiana woman who had to work as a secretary in order to get a starting job in a law firm.
“Sylvia Roberts was the one who kept me from drowning, almost,” Weeks said. “She’s never gotten credit and she was the most wonderful thing. And Marguerite Rawalt. She was just wonderful to me.”
Roberts and her client were kindred spirits who had both grown up with an instinctive understanding that women needed to be able to take care of themselves. “I knew at a very early age that if you didn’t have your own money and your own life… that just seemed like a very precarious position,” said Roberts. She wanted a profession of her own, and given her lack of interest in science and math, she gradually determined that she was going into law, “although I had never seen a woman lawyer. So this was all on faith.”
At that point, none of NOW’s efforts to use the new civil rights law to fight discrimination in the courts had been successful. Everyone understood the potential importance of Lorena Weeks’s case. Southern Bell was pointing to a section in the Civil Rights Act that allowed an employer to declare a job was open to men only or women only if there was some reasonable qualification that only one sex could fulfill. Corporations regarded it as “a huge loophole,” Roberts said, while NOW felt it should appropriately be applied only to jobs for “sperm donors and wet nurses.” But there was a distinct danger that the courts might lean more toward the employers’ interpretation. Lorena Weeks’s appeal seemed like the perfect vehicle for putting things straight. The idea that no woman could lift thirty pounds was ridiculous, Roberts said, given the number of Georgia women who routinely carried around thirty-pound children.
“Our argument was that you can’t prejudge,” she said. “Women come in all shapes and sizes. I’m an undersized person. I’m not of average height or weight. So I had things brought into the courtroom and I lifted them.” Perhaps moved by the sight of Roberts hoisting a workbench, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the lower court ruling and decided in favor of Lorena Weeks, in language that thrilled her young lawyer. Southern Bell’s argument was just “romantic paternalism,” the opinion said. The new Civil Rights Act had left it up to the women, not the employers, to decide if they wanted to take on untraditional jobs such as telephone-company switchmen. “It’s been quoted in case after case,” said Roberts.
Weeks v. Southern Bell was one of the first big victories on the road to ending job discrimination against women, a huge cause for celebration at NOW. But for Lorena Weeks herself, it was just another marker in a long and tortuous road. She was still in limbo at work and still shuttling to Savannah and Atlanta for hearings, endless hearings. Roberts, who would go on to become an expert in sex-discrimination cases, marveled at the “heroism of the plaintiffs. Their life is such agony while they’re going through this and they don’t know if they’ll get any relief. And all their neighbors think they’re doing the wrong thing.”
For two more years, the telephone company dragged its heels about letting Lorena Weeks take the test for the switchman’s job, let alone finding her a position. Griffin Bell, the distinguished Fifth Circuit judge who would later become Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, had been assigned to mediate. Bell seemed dubious that a woman could handle telephone-routing equipment, Roberts remembered. “We were in his office. It was real hot. He had this rickety air conditioner on. Judge Bell kinda turned to look at the air conditioner and said, ‘I don’t really know how you could do this, Miss Weeks. If I had to fix this air conditioner, I don’t believe I could do it.’ ”
Roberts thought for a moment and said in desperation, “Well, Judge, Lorena’s husband is an electrician.”
It was, she said, as if a lightbulb went on. “He said, ‘Oh well, I guess that’s all right.’ ” Roberts thought Bell might have been instinctively returning to the hoary legal principle that held that husband and wife were one person. Or—she laughed—he might have simply concluded that “if she ever got into a dilemma, she could call Billy.”
Still, the fight kept dragging on. Lorena was using Valium to quiet her nerves, trying to keep a low profile at work, worrying that she might accidentally come in late and face the wrath of supervisors who had warned her that any signs of tardiness would lead to dismissal. Meanwhile, her husband had been severely injured in a car wreck. “She was so worried,” said Roberts. “She had to make sure her child was at school, plus whatever Billy needed.”
At yet another hearing in Judge Bell’s chambers, Lorena bitterly said, “I hope everybody here had a very merry Christmas,” and noted that in her own family, the girls got only miniature sewing machines to make up for the fact that their parents could not afford to buy them clothes.
“Miss Weeks, you aren’t on the job yet?” said the judge in surprise. And then, as Lorena remembers it, he told her, “You will be on the job tomorrow. I’m going to write an order.”
“And that,” she concluded triumphantly, “is exactly what saved everything.”
On the train home, Lorena showed all the other passengers her court order, and during a brief stop at Macon, she jumped off the train to call her husband while the conductor yelled at her to get back on board.
“She believed so much,” said Roberts. “She just had this wonderful faith: we have a law, then it’s got to apply. The system will work.” Lorena received the hard-won check for $31,000 in back pay and the switchman’s job. Southern Bell stopped being a company where the lowest-paid man made more than the highest-paid woman. Once they were sure all the children’s education would be paid for, Lorena and Billy built their long-deferred house.
Later, when Lorena retired and applied for Social Security, the clerk who was processing her claim at the local office said she had never before seen a woman with such a high income.
5. What Happened
?
“IT WAS LIKE—WHAT?”
Not to give the plot away, but the rebellion that began amid all that hilarity over male Bunnies and husband-hungry spinsters is going to go much farther, much faster, than anyone who was there at the beginning might have imagined. Soon, the NOW founders will be joined by more radical women, mostly younger and schooled in the ways of confrontation by the civil rights protests, whose demands will go way beyond antidiscrimination laws. In almost no time, a new women’s movement will be attacking the very core of the social roles assigned to the sexes. It will be known as women’s liberation—although after a few years of jabs about “libbers,” many people will grow tired of the term.
It seemed that overnight everything that America had taken for granted about a woman’s role was being called into question. Her place was in the home, and then—zap—she was applying to medical school or going for an MBA. She was supposed to defer to her husband as head of the house—except suddenly there she was, holding consciousness-raising meetings in the living room to discuss his failure to give her help with the baby or the right kind of orgasm. “I always felt bad for the guys who had gotten married under the old rules,” said Nora Ephron wryly. “It was like—What?” One day coeds were in school just to earn an MRS degree, and then—whoops—there were so many qualified, competitive young women winning the best places in the best colleges that the media worried about what would become of the boys. One year little girls were learning the importance of losing gracefully, and the next they were suing for admission to the Little League. It left many people shaking their heads, wondering what propelled such extraordinary changes so rapidly.
The apparent suddenness of it all was not due to the arrival of a great leader, although some of the leaders were amazing. If the only thing women needed was a powerful voice to articulate their grievances, everything would have been worked out in the nineteenth century when Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were around. The female colonists and pioneers, the early-twentieth-century settlement-house workers, and the World War II nurses who lived with the old gender biases were not less resourceful or insightful than the women of 1968. There was something else—or a collection of something elses—buried deep in the social fabric.
“EXPERIENCE IN BUSINESS BROADENS A WOMAN’S MIND.”
Now that we’ve marveled at the rapidity of the change, we have to acknowledge that it didn’t really happen overnight. Women’s lives had been evolving throughout the century. They had been having fewer children, marrying later, and taking jobs outside the home more often. In a placid world, the changes might have looked like a gentle slope on a chart. But the Americans had to struggle through two world wars, with the Great Depression sandwiched in between. All of this left the charts looking less like a gentle slope and more like the peaks and valleys of an EKG for a heart-attack patient.
There was no “normal” in the twentieth century, but there was one near constant: a changing economy put a higher value on women’s skills. Telephone companies started by hiring men as operators, but they found that women were better at handling customers and less likely to argue with the people on the other end of the line. American businesses found they needed fewer laborers and more customer-service representatives. At the same time, work conditions became more pleasant. Once glamorous department stores took the place of small, dingy shops, and the growing office bureaucracies needed typists, clerks, and receptionists, not-so-poor young women who would have shunned a job in a factory were tempted to think about working. And as the economy’s demand for women to take these positions grew, society regarded their participation in the workforce with increasing benevolence.
This was an old pattern. Whenever the nation suddenly required a large supply of new workers—particularly literate workers for relatively low-paying jobs—the answer was women, and the nation’s position on women’s place adapted quickly. When the public-school system began growing after the Revolutionary War, society decided teaching was a maternal function that respectable women could perform. (And, as one nineteenth-century school superintendent in Ohio happily reported, perform at half the male teachers’ wages.) When the industrial age produced far more clerical, sales and other low-paying white-collar jobs than the male population could fill, the nation readily agreed that a few years of typing or manning department-store counters was an excellent preparation for marriage. “Experience in business broadens a woman’s mind and makes her views more practical,” concluded Harper’s Weekly in 1903.
During World War II, women were asked—actually the better word would be nagged—to go to work. There were more than three million jobs going begging as men left civilian work for the military, and the government propaganda machine warned housewives that if they refused to join the factory assembly line, defective weapons might go uninspected and airplanes might be improperly welded. A soldier might die, the stay-at-home women were told, and it would be their fault. Those who responded were celebrated for breaking out of their sexual roles and becoming streetcar conductors or welders. (“She’s making history, working for victory, Rosie the Riveter…”) The Office of War Information urged newspapers and magazines to run “stories showing the advent of women in logging camps, on the railroads, riding the ranges, and showing them not as weak sisters but as coming through in manly style.”
Some of the women who responded—particularly married women who had always worked but who loved the higher pay in the war-industry jobs—were dismayed to find themselves elbowed out of the way when peace broke out and the soldiers came home. But most of the single women readily complied with society’s demand that they go back home and leave the jobs for the returning veterans. They made up for lost nesting time by marrying early and having several children in rapid succession. The government generously underwrote the impulse to domesticity with cheap mortgages, college scholarships, and a huge program of public works that sent incomes shooting up.
“SO THEY HIRE WOMEN.”
After the war, the economy didn’t just improve. It exploded. Americans were producing half the world’s goods in the mid-’50s, even though they made up only 6 percent of the world’s population. Business was expanding by leaps and bounds, but the available workforce was relatively small. The “baby-bust” generation of men born during the Depression could not supply enough labor to fill the need. In the 1960s, as the economy was constantly creating employment, two-thirds of those new jobs went to women.
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find—So They Hire Women,” announced Time in November 1966. That year, President Johnson urged employers to consider hiring women (along with teenagers, the handicapped, and immigrants) to fill their openings. Large firms such as IBM and Texas Instruments targeted stay-at-home moms in recruiting campaigns. So did temporary-employment agencies. “First, we must overcome the married woman’s prejudice against returning to work, and this prejudice, in most cases, boils down to her conviction that a mother’s place is in the home so long as there are children there,” said Manpower’s public-relations counsel.
The idea of married women working was indeed hard for middle-class Americans to swallow. Their benevolent attitude toward women employed in department stores or business offices was limited, in the main, to young singles. Even during World War II, very few stay-at-home wives took off their aprons and signed up to become welders or streetcar conductors. But the ones who answered the call were proud. “Darling—you are now the husband of a career woman. Just call me your Ship Yard Babe!” wrote one new defense worker to her husband in the service. And after the fighting was over, as single women left the workforce in droves to start families, many of the older married women continued on the job. They were joined by other housewives who were attracted by the pleas of employers and the rising salaries they could earn—especially for part-time white-collar jobs. These working wives and mothers still tended to be below the top of the social scale, so it was easy to underrate the trend. That was particularly true since, as we’ve seen, the natio
n preferred to ignore the fact that they were working at all.
The fact that the percentage of married women in the workforce kept quietly going up was really the key to women’s liberation. The nation had to accept the idea that most women would work through their adult lives. That didn’t mean, of course, that every woman had to hold down a job all the time. But as a sex, they were not going to have standing in the public world unless men saw them as having an important economic role. If young women did not expect to work after marriage, most of them would not plan for serious careers. Most schools would not want to train them. The nation might honor them for their roles as wives and mothers, but they would not be taken seriously in business, academia, the arts, or politics.
Even within the family, women who made a substantial contribution to the household’s finances tended to have more power and respect. And, of course, the ability to support themselves gave them far more independence when it came to handling an unsatisfactory spouse, or filling in for one who vanished.
“A DESIRE FOR ALL THE ADVANTAGES OF THE ‘TWO-INCOME’ FAMILY.”
The consultant for Manpower who was trying to figure out how to lure married women into the postwar workforce had another suggestion beyond eliminating the prejudice against working wives. “Second, we must develop a desire for all the advantages of the ‘Two-Income’ family,” he proposed.
Business was not only offering women incentives to work; it was in overdrive when it came to wooing them to spend. American families were willing consumers, but before World War II their vision of what they should—and could—acquire was limited. A significant minority of households had no electricity to power modern conveniences. Louise Meyer of Wyoming was hardly the only housewife laundering clothes with boiled water and eliminating wrinkles with a piece of iron heated on a wood-burning stove. During the war, the nation’s premier washboard manufacturer churned out more than a million boards a year for housewives who were still doing their clothes by hand. Half of American homes had no central heating, and a quarter lacked flush toilets. Even in the best times most people could remember—the boom years before the Depression—less than a third of the country had a middle-class standard of living. But after the war, thanks to the stunning economic boom and generous federal spending in the 1950s, 60 percent of American families reached the middle class. Family income, adjusted for inflation, rose 42 percent in the 1950s and 38 percent in the 1960s.
