by Ruth Rosen
Part Two
REBIRTH OF FEMINISM
Chapter Three
LIMITS OF LIBERALISM
Much to their amusement, men opened the July 1962 issue of Esquire magazine to discover that a middle-aged Caroline Kennedy had won the most recent presidential election. According to the story, crowds of women cheered as the youthful and charismatic politician assumed her fifth term in office. Apparently, when women usurped power in the early years of the twenty-first century, one of their first acts was to abolish the two-term presidency. Then, they rewrote history, substituting Eleanor Roosevelt for FDR. Nationwide, women fitted themselves with surgical skin grafts so that “men were no longer needed.” Now, the article reported, men crept cautiously around “women’s bars” from which they were legally excluded. They dressed decoratively, spoke softly, lest they displease women and incite their wrath and violent retribution.
This absurdist dystopian fantasy, meant to tickle men’s funny bones even as it struck a note of horror, appeared in Esquire’s special issue, “The American Woman.” To the proposition, “Women of America, Now is the time to Arise,” Esquire commissioned a “yes” and “no” response. Robert Arthur, who had written this presumably nightmarish satire, assumed that if women gained power, they would simply turn the tables on men and treat them as second-class citizens. Equality between men and women was, for him, unimaginable. Power existed for only one reason: to dominate others.1
Not all men shared his anxiety about women’s changing lives. Esquire’s “yes” article, written by a self-described “unreconstructed male feminist,” argued that women deserved no less than full participation in American society. In fact, the Esquire issue reflected an existing ambivalence in the country at large. Much of American society still accepted the idea that “separate but equal”—while discredited as policy for the races—suited men’s and women’s separate social roles rather well. You could see it played out in the daily newspaper. In addition to sex-segregated “help wanted” classified ads, most papers buried any news about women, however political or scientific, in a special “women’s section.”
It surprised no one, then, when on December 15, 1961, the Washington Post tucked the historic news “JFK Seeks Equal Job Status for Women” between two other memorable events of the day: “First Lady Prefers Pastels” and “Skiers to Dance at Ball Tonight,” all of which appeared in its “For and About Women” section. The New York Times squeezed the same story between book reviews and its “Contract Bridge” column. What these stories reported was John F. Kennedy’s decision to create a Presidential Commission on the Status of Women.2
When Kennedy won the presidential election of 1960, the very last thing on his mind was to serve as a midwife for the modern women’s movement. But decades before the phrase “gender gap” entered political discourse, the idea of a “women’s bloc” already worried politicians. Less than two months before the election, the Saturday Evening Post had interviewed women leaders in both parties and floated the unsettling idea that women might swing the election. Pleased to be recognized, women in both parties argued that “there is no doubt that if women did vote as a solid bloc, they could swing the election. It is a matter of simple arithmetic: There are 3,500,000 more women than men of voting age—although all of them do not vote. . . . If sex appeal, or appeal to housewifely prejudice or issues that would sway career women or college girls or club ladies were the determining factor, then women could carry any contest.” In the weeks before the election, women in the Democratic Party redoubled their efforts to reach female voters through breakfasts and “kaffe klatches.”3
Kennedy, who only beat Richard Nixon by the slimmest of margins, knew how much women had helped him. Turning his eyes toward the future, he couldn’t ignore their growing disgruntlement. One indefatigable female party activist complained that women formed the “hard core” of political organizations but received little recognition for their efforts: “They work at the neighborhood level as block captains, poll watchers, checkers, election-day baby sitters and chauffeurs. They staff party and campaign headquarters. They get out the vote and raise funds. . . . In short, woman power has the same untapped creative potential as atomic energy!”4
Democratic women also complained about the “antediluvian male politicians” who “talk down” to the “dear little women” and “try to flatter their looks, rather than their aspirations.” “I get awfully tired,” explained a former leader of women in the Democratic party,
of being treated as if I were the English-speaking delegate from another planet. . . . There are too many popular cliches about women. Why must we be typed as fluttery females or bespectacled battleaxes? The public image of women has reached an all-time low—not in fact, but in print. More of us are working, more of us hold better and more responsible positions than ever before—but you’d never know it if you had to depend for information on what you read about women. We are constantly pictured as a limp, indecisive lump, quivering with uncontrolled emotions. . . . Let’s insist on speaking and acting as individuals who have a rightful place on the human planet.5
Impatiently, these party activists waited for their political payback. But Kennedy disappointed them, offering very few women high-level positions. Margaret Price of Michigan, one of the few Democratic women who had any influence with Kennedy, flooded him with women’s résumés, but with little result. When Kennedy appointed no woman to his cabinet, the well-known journalist Doris Fleeson wrote in her New York Post column: “At this stage, it appears that for women, the New Frontiers are the old frontiers.”6 Veteran Democratic activist Emma Guffey Miller informed Kennedy that “It is a grievous disappointment to the women leaders and ardent workers that so few women have been named to worthwhile positions. . . . As a woman of long political experience, I feel the situation has become serious and I hope whoever is responsible for it may be made to realize that the result may well be disastrous.”7 Depressed and disillusioned, another party activist predicted that fifty years would pass before the country elected a woman president. Yet another activist grimly joked—as it turned out, accurately—“Man will walk on the moon before there is a woman chief executive.”8
A PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION
Esther Peterson, Kennedy’s newly appointed head of the Women’s Bureau, a division of the U.S. Labor Bureau, quickly mobilized a coalition of women in liberal and labor organizations to pressure Kennedy to create a special commission to explore women’s status in the United States. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a towering presence, visited the president “to express her concern over the failure of the New Frontier administration to recognize and utilize fully the talents of women.” In the view of black activist and lawyer Pauli Murray, that conversation “was the catalytic event which signaled the rebirth of feminism in the U.S.”9
To Kennedy, a commission seemed a cheap political payoff, a way to reassure the American people that all was well, that women required no drastic or dramatic changes. By creating a commission, he also avoided the far more contentious alternative, that of supporting the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). After the suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, Alice Paul, the leader of the National Woman’s Party (NWP), submitted the ERA to Congress in 1923, and every year afterward. The members of the NWP, a conservative and relatively well-to-do group of women of means and professional women, sought formal equality with men and argued that a constitutional amendment was necessary to guarantee women’s equality with men. With one fell swoop, they argued, the ERA could wipe out all state laws that discriminated against women.
But the amendment, which simply stated, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” stayed on the back burner, resisted by labor unions, who were afraid of losing protective legislation for working women. Ever since 1923, women activists remained deeply divided over the ERA, and not until 1970 did female labor and leftist activists give up their strong opposition to th
e ERA. In their view, protective legislation, which regulated the hours and conditions of women’s work, had protected female laborers from extreme exploitation. If the ERA were passed, protective legislation would be eliminated and employers would be free to exploit women. Now Esther Peterson and other women in the Democratic Party, whose roots were in labor, pressed for a commission, rather than the president’s support of the ERA. For Kennedy, it was a blessing; labor constituted an important part of his political base.
To justify a commission concerned with women’s needs, Kennedy cast it as part of the post-Sputnik Cold War effort to free women’s talents for public service. He appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as its chair and charged the commission to “make studies of all barriers to the full participation of women in our democracy.”
In 1963, the President’s Commission on the Status of Women issued The Presidential Report on American Women. Not surprisingly, it mirrored the culture’s ambivalence about women’s proper place in society. The report reaffirmed their roles as wives, housekeepers, and rearers of children, while documenting the inequalities they faced as workers. Most of the tepid recommendations, as Betty Friedan later noted, were “duly buried in bureaucratic file drawers.” The report, a thoroughly political and diluted document, avoided offending any group’s sensibilities.10
But the commission’s report did reveal a great deal about women’s place in the American imagination. Amplifying the concern of many social and cultural critics of the day, the report repeatedly decried “the erosion of American family life” and praised those wives and mothers who were holding together the nation’s transient families and communities. The report also sounded the alarm that working women would only contribute to the atomization of American social life. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead even worried that the report had not sufficiently praised full-time mothers and wives and asked, “Who will be there to bandage the child’s knee and listen to the husband’s troubles and give the human element in the world?”
Here was a serious conundrum. If the nation’s female talent were not deployed in universities and laboratories, the Cold War might be lost to a Communist empire that had no scruples about turning its women into workers and scientists, and sending its children to day care centers, as part of its plan to conquer the world. Yet, if American women did work outside the home, who would care for the children, the families, and the communities? This was a dilemma that would haunt the women’s movement for decades.11
Disappointing as the report may have been, the commission was still an historic convocation. As the first official body to study women’s status, the commission collected immense amounts of data, most of which supported the complaints and problems reported by housewives and workers. Press coverage of the commission broke out of the ghetto of the women’s section and made the front page of the New York Times. NBC’s Today show broadcast a lively interview with Esther Peterson, the Associated Press ran a four-part series on the final report, and, in 1965, a book of its findings appeared. Most important of all, within a year of its publication, the national commission spawned dozens of state commissions (an idea promoted by Esther Peterson), and the government distributed eighty-three thousand copies of the commission’s report, with its invaluable data on women’s lives, which was quickly translated into Japanese, Swedish, and Italian. By 1967, all fifty states boasted such commissions.12
Charged with collecting local data about women, the state commissions held an annual national conference at which they compared their information and discussed their recommendations for improving women’s lives. By 1963, the lives of the women they studied had already changed greatly. Better contraception, more educational and economic opportunity, and the liberalization of attitudes toward divorce were altering a social landscape that had seemed engraved in cement. Later marriages, fewer children, rising divorce rates, and longer life spans meant that more women could expect to spend some part of their lives supporting their families or themselves. Trying to study modern women’s status was like aiming at a moving target.13
At about the time that the commission started its work, Congress began considering 432 pieces of legislation on women’s rights that it would debate between 1960 and 1966—none of which would have appeared on the political agenda without the behind-the-scenes work of hundreds of political women. Activists pushed the Kennedy administration to respond to all kinds of grievances. In 1962, the president revised, by executive order, an 1870 law used to bar women from holding high-level federal positions. The Supreme Court also ruled that states could no longer ban the sale of contraception or exclude women from juries. Shepherded by the Women’s Bureau and strongly supported by the United Auto Workers and other labor organizations, the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. The original intent—and wording of the bill—proposed equal pay for comparable work; the final act required only equal pay for equal [or the same] work. In the midst of jubilant celebration, some women activists knew that the law would have little impact on the vast majority of female workers. Few of them did “men’s work”; they were part of a sex-segregated labor force that paid them “women’s wages” for “women’s work.” Nevertheless, an important principle had passed into law, and over the next decade, 171,000 employees would be awarded $84 million for equal work done but not rewarded.14
Who were these women who linked the suffrage generation to the generation of feminists emerging in the late 1960s? What kind of leadership and experience did they bring to this job? Who lobbied for the Equal Pay Act? And who used the President’s Commission as a way to launch a new women’s movement? Veterans in the Left, trade unions, the civil rights movement, and mainstream women’s organizations, which demonstrated extraordinary persistence and unfailing commitment, but have remained hidden in history. Most Americans, if they thought about them at all, probably imagined them to be white middle-class professional women. In fact, feminism was resurrected by women whose ideas had developed in a deeply radical milieu.15
President Kennedy certainly never intended his presidential commission to turn into what Pauli Murray dubbed “the first high-level consciousness group.” But this is what happened. Among its members were leaders from Churchwomen United, the National Association of Catholic Women, the National Association of Jewish Women, the B’nai B’rith, the League of Women Voters, the American Association of University Women, the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Teamsters, and the United Packinghouse Workers. There were also representatives of women in religious orders, professors in universities, schoolteachers, and those who had worked for child welfare, peace, and educational reform.16
These leaders brought an incredible range of interests, experiences, and perspectives to the commission. Dorothy Haener, a tireless organizer of women in the United Auto Workers, argued ceaselessly for a higher minimum wage. (Haener later chaired NOW’s Task Force on Poverty, a fact that never received as much attention as NOW’s efforts to break the “glass ceiling” for professional women.) Addie Wyatt, an African-American leader of the United Packinghouse Workers of America and the NAACP, viewed the commission as a chance for working women to “raise our voice” on a national level and to gain a “sharper focus on women’s concerns.” She was also the first person to insist that women needed their own civil rights organization, modeled on the NAACP. Kay Clarenbach, chair of the Wisconsin State Commission, first president of the Association of State Commissions, and author of the first handbook for the state commissions, had been a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin. Later, Clarenbach said that her experience on the commission “not only changed my life, it subsequently became my life!” Clarenbach eventually came to see her work in global terms. “Feminism,” she said, “is a vision of a different kind of society.”17
A disproportionate number of these women came from the Midwest, rather than from either coast or Washington, D.C. The heartland, with its progressive political traditions a
nd strong unions, had apparently provided women with greater opportunities to become effective organizers. Dubbed by some politicians the “Wisconsin Mafia,” these seasoned veterans transformed the role of the state commissions. Although they were only supposed to collect data and report on it, they quickly turned data into ammunition that could be used for lobbying legislatures. They wrote publications, researched the law, held conferences, and gave endless speeches. In a typical year, the indefatigable Kay Clarenbach gave forty speeches. In her view, they “laid the groundwork that was absolutely necessary” for changing women’s lives.18
Everything is data, but data is not everything, as sociologist Pauline Bart has warned. To really learn about women’s lives, these women would have to learn from one another. And so they did. What Kennedy could not have known was that when brought together, women tell each other stories about their lives. As these commission members began to share grievances and secrets, they began to discover exactly how ubiquitous was sex discrimination.