Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

by Susan Faludi

  Eager to support their claim of a feminist invasion, the Sears attorneys hauled in dozens of EEOC employees for depositions and demanded lists of EEOC colleagues who were members of women’s rights groups or who had so much as “communicated” with any of twenty-six women’s organizations or thirty-nine feminist leaders. An elderly sales-clerk, who was suing Sears independently, was called before the Sears inquisitors. Isn’t it true, they demanded, that her daughter was a member of a group called Stewardesses for Women’s Rights? The Sears defense even grilled one EEOC employee for having capitalized the word “now” in a memo. Perhaps, the lawyers insinuated, the adverb was a covert reference to the women’s organization.

  The NOW connection proved almost entirely insubstantial. When Sears’s lawyers demanded that Isabelle Capello, the EEOC assistant counsel who had originally proposed the Sears suit, reveal her feminist-group ties, it turned out she had none. The whole fishing expedition netted only one potential conflict of interest: David Copus, former acting director of the EEOC’s National Programs Division, had served on the board of NOW’s Legal and Education Defense Fund for less than a year. The question was murky, since Copus had no role in the EEOC’s decision to file the Sears suit and, at the EEOC chairman’s request, had stepped down from the NOW board a decade before the case came to trial. The Sears legal team tried to discredit Copus, anyway, by raising questions about his relationship with a NOW activist. Sears even submitted deposition testimony that the couple had been observed “walking in the halls . . . together.”

  Finally, the presiding judge called a halt to Sears’s inquisition. But if Morgan hadn’t proved any of his charges, they nonetheless lingered to affect the case’s outcome. Both the trial judge and the appellate justices who reviewed the case all accepted the “conflict of interest” allegation as valid; although they didn’t deem it grounds to dismiss the suit, they took it seriously, chastising the EEOC and devoting extensive space to the “female underground” threat in their written decisions.

  In the end, these legal maneuverings would be almost irrelevant to the outcome of the case. The simple fact was that the government itself had changed sides. Far from desiring to prosecute Sears, the EEOC leadership that came in with the Reagan administration was desperate to back out; they tried twice to settle with Sears, midtrial, without demanding any fines or back-pay compensation. A high-ranking Justice Department official described the Sears suit to the press as a “straw man we would like to have beaten to death to prevent future class-action cases.” EEOC chairman and Reagan appointee Clarence Thomas told the Washington Post in 1985, as his own litigators were arguing the case in court, “I’ve been trying to get out of this since I’ve been here.” Thomas maintained that all the pay, hiring, and promotional inequities in the Sears docket could be easily explained by such factors as education and, curiously, commuting patterns. Thomas was, in fact, so outspoken that the Sears lawyers at one point even considered calling him as their own witness.

  As it turned out, the trial judge, Reagan-appointee John A. Nordberg, didn’t stand far from Thomas on the issues in the Sears case. At one point in the trial, Nordberg actually demanded that EEOC attorneys demonstrate that American women had ever faced employment discrimination; he was skeptical. “It was very bizarre,” Karen Baker, one of the three EEOC attorneys on the case, recalls. “We actually had to go through and explain the history to him.”

  Nordberg’s decision, which was upheld on appeal, threw out the EEOC case. The judge agreed with Sears that the jobs women naturally “prefer” happen to be lower-paying ones. His vision of the squeamish Sears saleswoman was close to Rex Rambo’s. If women weren’t working in men’s clothing departments, he opined in his decision, it was probably “because it sometimes involved taking personal measurements of men.”

  The EEOC drew the most criticism, from Nordberg and also from the press, for relying on statistics alone. Where were the actual victims? the media demanded. The EEOC attorneys said they stuck to the numbers because in the past they found that putting individual women on the stand just sidetracked the case into debates about personal character. But in criticizing the EEOC for this omission, the press overlooked a crucial fact of the Sears trial: the EEOC did put women on the stand.

  During the trial, Sears attorneys kept alluding to the vast numbers of female job applicants who weren’t interested in commission sales work. The EEOC attorneys pressed them to produce some names from this reputedly voluminous list. After much stalling, Sears offered only three. Through social security records, the EEOC’s attorneys were able to track down two of them. And both agreed to testify—for the EEOC.

  “I was after commission work,” Lura Lee Nader recalls a few years after her Sears testimony. A soft-spoken woman nearing sixty, she nurses a cup of tea in a Columbus, Ohio, coffee shop by her home. “I don’t really like office work.” Nader had been working for years before she applied to Sears. In 1965, when she was pregnant with her fifth child, her husband fell off a ladder and died. The very first job Nader took as a widow was making draperies on commission. The only aspect of the job she disliked: it involved working at home. As she told the court later, “I needed to get out into the world, where there were adults to talk to.” So she went to work as a supermarket meat buyer; to supplement her income, she took a second evening job selling Sarah Coventry jewelry—on straight commission. She liked it and soon went full-time. Later, she switched to Max Factor, also on commission; she spent half her job on the road. Then she applied to Sears “because of the volume of sales you could do” at a big retailer. When she did not get the job, she went to work for an eyeglass firm, again on commission.

  Nader was hardly the helpless damsel that Sears officials had described as the store’s typical female applicant. A national roller-skating champion, she also built the garage for her house, installed the shingles on her roof, and repaired her own car. And throughout her life, she was the sole provider for her five children.

  Alice Howland, the other woman who took the stand, was also a sole provider when she applied to Sears. Years earlier in the ’50s, this straight-A student had quit college—she “panicked,” she recalls, after a sociology teacher told the class, “Women who don’t get married by the time they are twenty-five are old maids”—and married a man she met in a car lot. At first she had stayed home because her husband, a department-store salesman, told her, “No wife of mine is going to work.” But after he fell behind on the mortgage, he allowed her to accept a job as a translator. (A World War II refugee who fled Russia as a little girl, Howland spoke several languages.) The longer she worked, the less he liked it. In 1971, they divorced. He never paid any child support. So Howland raised their five children by herself.

  After the divorce, she took a tough commission job with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: straight commission, cold-call, door-to-door sales of chamber memberships. There was no product to sell, only a subscription to the chamber newsletter. She was on the road for weeks at a time. “I was out all hours because some people you couldn’t reach except evenings,” she remembers. “I called on dairy farmers out in the country. I would be out in the winter with the wind blowing, the snow all around my ankles. I’d walk into dirty machine shops; sometimes the men would yell lewd things.” But she remained unfazed. “I’d just try to stay as professional as I could. I just kept going. I don’t give up very easily.” Each subscription was $40, from which she took a 50 percent commission. In her first six months, she made $10,000, a company record. She held the job for three years.

  When Howland applied to Sears, she marked on the form that she preferred full-time work. By then, she had remarried and, with the children from her new husband’s first marriage, they now had ten mouths to feed. She, too, was hoping for commission work. “I like the idea of my income depending on the amount I choose to put out.” She wanted a job selling appliances. “I find selling women’s clothing boring, and you can’t make as much money.” When Sears turned her down, she took her fir
st and last “woman’s” job, as an office clerk. She hated it. “My boss would say, ‘If my coffee cup needs cleaning, I will put it on this side of the desk; if my pencils need sharpening, I will put them in the out-box.’ I don’t like that in an office you are dependent on someone to say, ‘Okay, you are doing a good job, I guess you can have a ten-cent raise.’” In 1982, she quit the office job and she and her husband purchased a run-down marina in Erie, Pennsylvania. He was still working full-time at AT&T, so she managed the marina’s operations, supervised the mechanics, and sold the forty-two-foot boats, motor parts, and bilge pumps.

  “For Sears to say that I wasn’t interested in commission sales, it was just so—” Howland stops, speechless. She looks around the house that she largely designed and built herself. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

  • • •

  IN ALL the years of government investigation, multimillion-dollar litigation, and intensive media coverage, no one—from the lawyers to the reporters—ever asked any actual Sears saleswomen what their “interests” were. In an admittedly unscientific experiment, I wandered into the Sears outlet in San Francisco one day and walked up to the first salesclerk by the door, an elderly woman in the apparel department, wearing a pink sweater and lace-collared dress. She seemed a likely spokeswoman for traditional “women’s work.” But it turned out she had just been bumped, against her will, from the camera section to the dress department. She was fuming.

  “I’ve been in cameras since 1964,” she said. “I liked it because I learned all about photography, films, projectors. Now, all of a sudden my manager comes over and says, ‘You’re in dresses from now on.’ No explanation, no nothing.” She hates the dress department: “Here it’s just: they try on the dresses, you hang them up again, they try them on again, you hang them up again. Then it’s tear off the tags, ring it up, tear off more tags.”

  Told of Sears’s contention that women don’t have the same interests as men, she waves a gnarled dismissive hand in the air. “That’s a bunch of baloney. I had two kids to raise. If they would have offered me com mission sales, I would have taken it. I needed the job.” What about women preferring to work days, as Rosenberg had maintained. The hand sails in the air once more. “The lady in personnel said to me, ‘Either you come to work the hours we give you or you stay home.’ There was no choice. When I started out, I worked all nights and Saturdays. I didn’t have a baby-sitter, so my kids just stayed home by themselves.”

  In another section of the ladies’ department, Ann Sirni is ringing up sales. She says she remembers the EEOC suit because all of a sudden, store managers were running around, “asking all of us women if we wanted to sell big-ticket items.” She adds, “They had no trouble getting women to take those jobs. A lot of them liked it because there’s more money in big-ticket items.”

  Charlotte Mayfield, a salesclerk in the jewelry department, remembers the suit, too; she was one of the women who signed up when the recruiters came around. “They wanted minority women to get into management when that suit came out,” recalls Mayfield, who is black. “They invited me into this management training program, but I was a little disappointed, if you want to know the truth. We went to this classroom and they gave us a manual and a diploma and everything, but they never did offer us management jobs.”

  She would have taken a commission sales job if they had offered it, she says. “The pay is better.” Would she have been afraid of the “competition,” as the Sears officials said in court? She thought about it. “I probably would have been a little scared at first, but I was scared when I came here and got put on the registers, because I’d never worked a register before. Even if I was nervous, I would have taken the job. I would have challenged myself to do it.”

  But with the pressure off retailers to uphold equal employment laws, women like Charlotte Mayfield would have fewer opportunities to challenge themselves outside of the “ladies’” departments. In the backlash decade, as Labor Department data chronicle, the ranks of women relegated to sales-counter jobs climbed still higher—and the small proportions of women in such “men’s” departments as hardware, building supplies, parts, and furniture began to shrink once more.

  DIANE JOYCE: WOMEN IN THE BLUE-COLLAR WORLD

  It would take Diane Joyce nearly ten years of battles to become the first female skilled crafts worker ever in Santa Clara County history. It would take another seven years of court litigation, pursued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, before she could actually start work. And then, the real fight would begin.

  For blue-collar women, there was no honeymoon period on the job; the backlash began the first day they reported to work—and only intensified as the Reagan economy put more than a million blue-collar men out of work, reduced wages, and spread mounting fear. While the white-collar world seemed capable of absorbing countless lawyers and bankers in the ’80s, the trades and crafts had no room for expansion. “Women are far more economically threatening in blue-collar work, because there are a finite number of jobs from which to choose,” Mary Ellen Boyd, executive director of Non-Traditional Employment for Women, observes. “An MBA can do anything. But a plumber is only a plumber.” While women never represented more than a few percentage points of the blue-collar work force, in this powder-keg situation it only took a few female faces to trigger a violent explosion.

  Diane Joyce arrived in California in 1970, a thirty-three-year-old widow with four children, born and raised in Chicago. Her father was a tool-and-die maker, her mother a returned-goods clerk at a Walgreen’s warehouse. At eighteen, she married Donald Joyce, a tool-and-die maker’s apprentice at her father’s plant. Fifteen years later, after working knee-deep in PCBs for years, he died suddenly of a rare form of liver cancer.

  After her husband’s death, Joyce taught herself to drive, packed her children in a 1966 Chrysler station wagon and headed west to San Jose, California, where a lone relative lived. Joyce was an experienced bookkeeper and she soon found work as a clerk in the county Office of Education, at $506 a month. A year later, she heard that the county’s transportation department had a senior account clerk job vacant that paid $50 more a month. She applied in March 1972.

  “You know, we wanted a man,” the interviewer told her as soon as she walked through the door. But the account clerk jobs had all taken a pay cut recently, and sixteen women and no men had applied for the job. So he sent her on to the second interview. “This guy was a little politer,” Joyce recalls. “First, he said, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ before he tells me, ‘You know, we wanted a man.’ I wanted to say, ‘Yeah, and where’s my man? I am the man in my house.’ But I’m sitting there with four kids to feed and all I can see is dollar signs, so I kept my mouth shut.”

  She got the job. Three months later, Joyce saw a posting for a “road maintenance man.” An eighth-grade education and one year’s work experience was all that was required, and the pay was $723 a month. Her current job required a high-school education, bookkeeping skills, and four years’ experience—and paid $150 less a month. “I saw that flier and I said, ‘Oh wow, I can do that.’ Everyone in the office laughed. They thought it was a riot. . . . I let it drop.”

  But later that same year, every county worker got a 2 to 5 percent raise except for the 70 female account clerks. “Oh now, what do you girls need a raise for?” the director of personnel told Joyce and some other women who went before the board of supervisors to object. “All you’d do is spend the money on trips to Europe.” Joyce was shocked. “Every account clerk I knew was supporting a family through death or divorce. I’d never seen Mexico, let alone Europe.” Joyce decided to apply for the next better-paying “male” job that opened. In the meantime, she became active in the union; a skillful writer and one of the best-educated representatives there, Joyce wound up composing the safety language in the master contract and negotiating what became the most powerful county agreement protecting seniority rights.

  In 1974, a road dispatcher retired, and both Joyce and a m
an named Paul Johnson, a former oil-fields roustabout, applied for the post. The supervisors told Joyce she needed to work on the road crew first and handed back her application. Johnson didn’t have any road crew experience either, but his application was accepted. In the end, the job went to another man.

  Joyce set out to get road crew experience. As she was filling out her application for the next road crew job that opened, in 1975, her supervisor walked in, asked what she was doing, and turned red. “You’re taking a man’s job away!” he shouted. Joyce sat silently for a minute, thinking. Then she said, “No, I’m not. Because a man can sit right here where I’m sitting.”

  In the evenings, she took courses in road maintenance and truck and light equipment operation. She came in third out of 87 applicants on the job test; there were ten openings on the road crew, and she got one of them.

  For the next four years, Joyce carried tar pots on her shoulder, pulled trash from the median strip, and maneuvered trucks up the mountains to clear mud slides. “Working outdoors was great,” she says. “You know, women pay fifty dollars a month to join a health club, and here I was getting paid to get in shape.”

  The road men didn’t exactly welcome her arrival. When they trained her to drive the bobtail trucks, she says, they kept changing instructions; one gave her driving tips that nearly blew up the engine. Her supervisor wouldn’t issue her a pair of coveralls; she had to file a formal grievance to get them. In the yard, the men kept the ladies’ room locked, and on the road they wouldn’t stop to let her use the bathroom. “You wanted a man’s job, you learn to pee like a man,” her supervisor told her.

  Obscene graffiti about Joyce appeared on the sides of trucks. Men threw darts at union notices she posted on the bulletin board. One day, the stockroom storekeeper, Tony Laramie, who says later he liked to call her “the piglet,” called a general meeting in the depot’s Ready Room. “I hate the day you came here,” Laramie started screaming at Joyce as the other men looked on, many nodding. “We don’t want you here. You don’t belong here. Why don’t you go the hell away?”