by Gail Collins
PART II
WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED
4. The Ice Cracks
“THE MEAL BEGINS WITH ‘SWAN CANTERBURY.’ ”
On Election Day in 1960, women around the country celebrated the fortieth anniversary of their constitutional right to vote, and newspapers noted that for the first time in the nation’s history, there were likely to be more women than men casting their ballots for president. “Women now hold the balance of power,” said the assistant chair of the Republican Party, Clare B. Williams Shank. It was hard to say exactly what that meant in practical terms. The suffragists of the early twentieth century had presumed that when women got the vote, they would press for a specific pro-family agenda—things like better care for infants and pregnant women, and better schools. But it turned out that women voters made their choices much like their husbands and fathers and brothers did—on the basis of class, ethnicity, or regional loyalties. In the first national election after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, women helped choose the utterly inept Warren Harding, who would distinguish himself for his perennial appearance on the ten-worst-presidents-of-all-time lists.
The women who were cutting the anniversary cake might also have contemplated the fact that the highest-ranking female judge in the nation served on the Customs Court and that in forty years, only two women had ever been appointed to cabinet-level posts in the federal government: Frances Perkins, during the Roosevelt administration, and Oveta Culp Hobby, who was the first secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Dwight Eisenhower. The record was not going to be improved under the about-to-be-elected President John Kennedy or by his immediate successors. At the end of the decade, when Richard Nixon brought the White House back under Republican control, some of his women supporters expressed hope he might follow Eisenhower’s example and appoint the first female cabinet member since the 1950s. Unenthusiastically, a spokesperson pointed out that “the departments had grown” since then.
Women took part in the presidential-nominating conventions that summer, but newspaper accounts of their gatherings did not suggest deal-making in smoke-filled rooms. “The meal begins with ‘Swan Canterbury,’ which consists of fresh pineapple on a bed of laurel leaves surrounded by swans’ heads in meringue,” the New York Times reported in a story headlined “GOP Women Facing a Calorie-Packed Week.” Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of women ages 18 to 60 who were surveyed by George Gallup said that they didn’t approve of the idea of a female president.
The Eighty-seventh Congress that was elected in 1960 included two women in the Senate and seventeen in the 435-member House, and that would turn out to be the high-water mark for the next decade. Both of the female senators and half the women in the House had gotten to their exalted positions through the same time-honored career path: marry a congressman, and succeed him when he passes away. Edna Simpson of Illinois, the ultimate congressional widow, was just finishing her first and last term in office. Simpson’s congressman-husband had died just nine days before the election of 1958, and she bowed to pleas from Republican leaders and let her name go on the ballot in his place. She did not campaign, and after she was elected she never spoke on the floor of the House or—it seemed—to any of her fellow members. Her only legislative initiative was to protest when her name appeared in the Congressional Biographical Directory as Edna Oakes Simpson rather than as her preference: Edna (Mrs. Sid) Simpson.
Even the congresswomen who didn’t succeed their husbands tended to be widows—voters were wary of female candidates with family obligations. The disasters that could befall them were vividly displayed in the case of Coya Knutson, who had managed to topple an incumbent House member in Minnesota in 1954 and win a seat in her own right. Her alcoholic husband, Andy, who was left behind to run the family hotel, torpedoed her career in 1958 by issuing a “Coya, Come Home” letter claiming his marriage was being destroyed by her political success. She became the only Democratic incumbent to lose the 1958 election. Her marriage did not last much longer than her congressional career.
“TELL HER YOU’VE JUST STARTED RUNNING.”
Throughout American history, the best way to get to the top in politics was to begin by practicing law. In 1960 the only woman in the House with a law degree was Martha Griffiths. A Democrat from Michigan, she had a family tree that included Daniel Boone and the first woman lawyer in the state of Missouri. She and her husband, Hicks, were a political couple—something the United States had seen a lot of since Abigail Adams spent the Revolution writing letters to John, urging him to keep up the fight and to remember that the ladies had rights, too. But the Griffithses were different from their predecessors in that their joint efforts were directed at her political career. In her unpublished autobiography, Martha said that when Hicks was accepted at Harvard Law, which did not take female students, he told her, “We will find another law school. You are going, also.” They graduated together from the University of Michigan, then started a law practice in Detroit, where Hicks became active in Democratic politics. But in 1946 it was Martha who got a phone call urging her to run for the state legislature—from a longtime local women’s-rights advocate with the memorable name of Phoebe Moneybean. Martha demurred, but when her husband heard about the conversation, he told his wife, “Call her back right now and tell her you’ve just started running.”
After a stint in the state legislature, Martha set her sights on Congress. Hicks managed the campaign while she drove around the district in a house trailer—a rarity at the time—and lured curious voters in to examine the interior and meet the candidate. Griffiths estimated that she talked to 40,000 prospective voters in her first unsuccessful race in 1952. It paid off two years later when she won. She went on to become the leading advocate of women’s rights in the House of Representatives during the critical years of the 1960s. “She was wonderful. She was gutsy—very outspoken and friendly,” said Muriel Fox, the public-relations executive who became one of the founders of the National Organization for Women. Griffiths and her husband, who did not have children, were “totally dedicated to each other,” a friend said, and her political success was the crowning achievement of both of their lives. Nevertheless, she felt obliged to assure an interviewer that “if there was any question that my career was interfering with my husband’s happiness, and I had to make a choice, I would definitely give up my career.”
“I’M NOT SURE I CAN GO TO THOSE LENGTHS.”
The greatest irony of the celebration of forty years of suffrage was that it seemed that once women had gotten the right to vote, they never got anything else. There was an endless list of ways they were discriminated against or treated unfairly, from lower salaries to inferior facilities for girls’ sports in public schools to the different—and less generous—way that Social Security benefits were computed on women’s wages. Few people seemed to think all this posed much of a problem. Many of the women who had experienced the most discrimination took it for granted; those who didn’t saw little possibility for major change.
The new president, John Kennedy, had called on the nation to throw off the restraints of decades of depression and war, and move forward into the exciting and challenging future he called the New Frontier. He didn’t necessarily envision a major role for women in it. In her memoirs, the publisher Katharine Graham recounted how the president had once demanded to know why Adlai Stevenson, the balding, chubby United Nations ambassador, was regarded as so attractive by his many female friends. Told that it was because Stevenson actually listened with interest to what women had to say, the president responded, according to Graham, “Well, I don’t say you’re wrong, but I’m not sure I can go to those lengths.”
During his run for the White House, Kennedy had kept the female volunteers at arm’s length when it came to decision-making. Margaret Price, an official on the Democratic National Committee with the inevitable title of vice chair for women’s activities, called the campaign staff an “all-male cast.” After the election, 2.4 percent of t
he executive positions in the forward-looking New Frontier went to women—exactly the same as under the placid administration of Dwight Eisenhower. Yet the ice was starting to crack, and things began to move.
“ESTHER, THE LADIES ARE HERE.”
Early in 1960, just as in every other year when Congress went into session, a group of mostly elderly women emerged from a brick house on Constitution Avenue and walked up Capitol Hill to request the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). They were members of the National Woman’s Party, led by the redoubtable Alice Paul, the heroine of the battle for suffrage who had stoically endured hunger strikes and prison terms to win the right to vote. She was consumed by the fight for women’s rights. “There is no Alice Paul. There is suffrage,” wrote a magazine writer who had tried, and failed, to find the person behind the cause. Paul seemed to have no private life and to be indifferent to anything that did not relate directly to her obsession. Since 1920 she and her followers had devoted all their attention to getting a constitutional amendment barring discrimination on the basis of sex.
“Esther, the ladies are here,” the president pro tem of the Senate told Esther Peterson, the head of the Department of Labor—Women’s Bureau and the highest-ranking woman in the Kennedy administration. As always, the bill would be introduced. Then, as always, a poison pill would be added, declaring that the amendment would not apply to any laws aimed at protecting women—such as common state regulations limiting the number of hours they could work. The Woman’s Party members would then declare that the amendment was unacceptable, ask that the ERA be withdrawn, and trot sadly back down the hill to their headquarters.
Most people in the Kennedy administration regarded the Woman’s Party as an anachronism at best—the original “little old ladies in tennis shoes”—and at worst a bunch of wealthy conservatives who cared only about other well-to-do white women like themselves. (Esther Peterson called them the “Old Frontier.”) But complaints had already been raised about the way Kennedy and his aides were ignoring women’s issues, and Peterson had worked out a plan for both avoiding the ERA and mollifying the critics. Like Peterson herself, it was practical and aimed at incremental change. It would turn out to be the catalyst for much more.
“GOD SAW HIM AS A BIGGER COG THAN ME.”
As a good Mormon girl growing up in Utah, Esther Eggertsen was troubled by religious doubts, which she confided to her boyfriend. Religion, he told her, was much like a pocket watch: “God is the mainspring, and we are the cogs turning round him. Each of us has an ability to lead or follow, each doing our part.” Esther listened intently. “From his description,” she recalled years later, “I got the clear idea that God saw him as a bigger cog than me.” Much to her mother’s distress, she broke off the relationship and went east to study at Columbia University. Realizing her family’s worst fears, she was attracted to a doctoral student, Oliver Peterson, who “was a socialist who drank coffee and smoked a pipe.” When the two of them wound up getting kicked out of a park “because we argued about the business practices of Henry Ford into the early-morning hours,” she knew it was love.
After their marriage, the Petersons moved to Boston, where Esther taught gym at an upscale school by day and volunteered to teach a night course at the YWCA for young factory workers. When a favorite student failed to show up one night, she sought the girl out at her family’s slum tenement and entered a room where a mother and five children sat around a table under a bare lightbulb, doing take-home work for which they were paid by the piece: “Even the youngest child, no more than three years old, worked. He sat in a high chair, counting out bobby pins into piles of ten.” The student had skipped school to take part in a strike against a factory that had reduced the payment for piecework, putting the already-impoverished workers in danger of starvation. The next morning, Peterson was out on the picket line with her. It was the beginning of a forty-year career in the labor movement.
Calm and steady—she relieved anxiety with bouts of manic bread-making—Peterson wore her hair in an old-fashioned braid around her head. (Later, when she became Lyndon Johnson’s assistant for consumer affairs, the outraged advertising industry would refer to her as “the woman with the tight hairdo.”) After her family moved to Washington, she became the only woman lobbyist for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. The union leadership, wary of giving her any serious responsibility, assigned Peterson to follow the most insignificant freshman representative on the Labor Committee. “Give her to Kennedy—he won’t amount to much,” someone said. The two bonded, and when John Kennedy ran for president, she became one of the first labor-union officials to support him.
“What do you want?” Kennedy asked when he won the election.
“The Women’s Bureau,” she replied. It was an uninspired choice, but Peterson’s husband was ill with cancer and she wanted a job in which she knew she would feel comfortable. The Department of Labor—Women’s Bureau was the traditional spot where presidents stashed a female appointee deserving of a policy-making position. It was supposed to fight for better working conditions for women, but it also frequently and defensively acknowledged that no job should take second place to domestic duties. (“It is not the policy of the Women’s Bureau to encourage married women and mothers of young children to seek employment outside the home,” said a 1964 publication.) The highest salary anyone in the bureau could be paid was $2,000 a year, since Congress had decided that, in the words of one lawmaker, “no woman on earth is worth more than that.”
But Peterson had made her choice, and she was reminded quickly of where it left her in the political hierarchy. When the incoming Kennedy administration organized a lunch for all its new labor officials and the Eisenhower appointees they were to replace, the secretary of labor, Arthur Goldberg, asked Peterson to take the outgoing Women’s Bureau head to lunch so the men could get together on their own. “Like a fool, I did it,” she said.
“MEN HAVE TO BE REMINDED THAT WOMEN EXIST.”
Republican women tended to favor the Equal Rights Amendment, but it raised hackles among many Democrats because it would eliminate the protective laws they had struggled to pass during the last generation. Esther Peterson had spent much of her life working with desperate women who were crippled by the physical demands of their jobs, sexually harassed by their supervisors, and deprived of enough time to be proper mothers to their undernourished children. She resented the “elite, privileged old ladies” who cared about only their own emancipation. “Are women better off being singled out for protection, or are they better served by erasing all legal distinctions between women and men? As the lettuce pickers and cafeteria workers know, it depends on your status,” she said.
But even some Democrats felt the protective laws did more harm than good, giving employers an excuse to discriminate against women and deprive them of the chance for promotion and overtime. During the 1960 presidential campaign, a prominent Democratic clubwoman wrote to Kennedy, asking him to support the ERA. Kennedy had replied carefully and vaguely—in a note that was probably written by Peterson. The disappointed petitioner then took the extraordinary step of having a friend on the campaign committee type a different letter on Kennedy’s stationery, announcing his support for the amendment and signing it with the automatic pen that the campaign used to duplicate the candidate’s signature. Rather than raise a controversy, Kennedy tried to ignore it, but the letter got some attention.
While the ERA was hardly a major problem hanging over the new administration, it worried Peterson. She decided to bury the issue by proposing a special Presidential Commission on the Status of Women that could be stacked with ERA opponents and then eventually issue a report on how to improve the lives of American women without the help of a constitutional amendment. Every politician seeking to avoid a sticky issue loves a study, and for the president, the commission was a win-win that got even better when Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to serve as the symbolic head.
Roosevelt had always been a one-person network fo
r smart, talented women who had been cut out of all the male power circles in the New Deal and beyond. She had introduced them to one another, put in calls when they needed political pull, and lobbied for them when they were seeking jobs and promotions. (“When I wanted help on some definite point, Mrs. Roosevelt gave me the opportunity to sit by the president at dinner and the matter was settled before we finished our soup,” said one of her protégés.) Kennedy’s relationship with the great former first lady had always been chilly, and when the new administration failed to include any high-ranking female appointees, she told reporters, “Men have to be reminded that women exist.”
“SHE WOULD TRAIN THE MEN.”
The Commission on the Status of Women was made up of people you would expect to find on a panel that was meant to be modestly useful but not controversial. The male members were mainly educators and cabinet officials whose interest in the subject was in some cases nonexistent. (Hyman Bookbinder, who served on the commission as the representative of the secretary of commerce, cautioned that the commission “should not pretend that women as a group are equal to men as a group in qualifying for participation in the world of work and public affairs.”) Among the women, Kennedy had included the presidents of the National Council of Negro Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Council of Catholic Women, along with an editor from Ladies’ Home Journal. The commission would eventually issue a very responsible report that would be quickly forgotten in the anguish over the president’s assassination a few days after its release.