A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (25 page)

Clearly a new movement to expand women’s rights was already on the horizon by 1963. In addition to the core group of feminists who had long been working behind the scenes, economic and political trends had gradually been undermining some of the opposition to incorporating women more fully into America’s economic and political life. Indeed, Robert Jackson has argued that women were by this time, as his book title claims,
Destined for Equality
.

As the booming postwar economy created a growing demand for new workers, especially in the expanding service and retail sectors, industry increasingly put out the welcome mat for women, despite objections from some male workers and pundits who decried the “feminization” of the workplace. The Cold War and the Korean War also raised fears that the United States might lose out to the Soviet Union unless it trained women in needed defense fields such as engineering. By the beginning of the 1960s, politicians and employers agreed that both the economy and the political system needed more “woman power.”

Most of the opinion-makers who supported expanding women’s participation in the economy expected that men would continue to organize and direct that woman power. Few envisioned an equal partnership at work or in government, much less at home. But the trend toward assigning status based on individual merit and educational achievement was eroding the assumption that one group, be it whites or men, was automatically entitled to monopolize positions of power and prestige. And these economic and social changes were encouraging many young women, even without reading Friedan, to direct more attention to getting an education or preparing themselves for a career.

 

IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE 1960s, HOWEVER, MOST MASS ORGANIZATION and public debate continued to focus on the civil rights movement. There
were no actions by women comparable to the sit-ins in the South or the picket lines in the North, much less anything on the scale of the 1963 March on Washington. In fact, the wedge that feminists would later use to organize their own movement was an almost accidental by-product of struggles between southern segregationists and civil rights leaders.

Federal officials had initially been reluctant to enforce integration. But the pressure of almost ten years of demonstrations for equal rights, combined with dramatic television coverage of white southerners’ violent resistance, created a powerful sentiment for justice in the United States and put America under intense pressure abroad. Finally, in 1963, President Kennedy introduced the Civil Rights Bill. After Kennedy’s assassination later that year, the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson, urged Congress to enact a more comprehensive law to protect blacks’ voting rights; ban racial discrimination in jobs, housing, and schools; and put the Justice Department on the side of plaintiffs who argued that their rights were being violated. Title VII of the bill outlawed discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin.

The bill faced strong resistance, especially from southern members of Congress. Adding sex to the list of categories of prohibited discrimination was part of the convoluted maneuvering that surrounded this battle, which produced what historian Ruth Rosen calls “a bizarre coalition” of southern congressmen and supporters of women’s rights.

It began when a few members of the National Woman’s Party approached Congressman Howard Smith, the southern chairman of the House Rules Committee, and pointed out that if the bill passed in its present form, black men would have protections that were denied to white women. They urged him to present an amendment adding “sex” to the bill. Smith agreed, although he later admitted that his main motive had been to stir up trouble in the bill’s supporters, many of whom opposed women’s rights and might therefore join the southerners in voting against the bill.

The amendment delighted most of the female members of the House of Representatives but worried many supporters of civil rights. Esther
Peterson of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women declared that she “was not willing to risk advancing the rights of all women at the expense of the redress due black men and women.” Representative Edith Green decided to vote against the amendment, which she supported in principle, because she feared that linking the two issues would jeopardize the chance of winning this important piece of legislation for racial equality. Some male politicians voted
for
the sex amendment for the same reason, hoping its inclusion would kill the entire bill.

The amendment to add the category of sex to Title VII passed the House by a vote of 168-133. Two days later, the entire bill passed the House by a vote of 290-130.

Next the bill went to the Senate, where southern senators immediately began a filibuster that brought everything else to a halt for fifty-four days. Behind the scenes, several senators talked about amending Title VII to strike the word “sex.” At this point feminist legislators such as Representative Martha Griffiths and Senator Margaret Chase Smith, both supporters of the entire bill, mobilized their networks to oppose dropping the sex discrimination clause. Ultimately the White House, fearing the loss of even one sincere women’s rights supporter in the Senate in what might be a very close vote, threw its support behind the bill as it had passed the House, and the Senate finally voted 73-27 in its favor.

The inclusion of a woman’s plank in such a sweeping piece of democratic legislation in the absence of an organized women’s movement, points out historian Cynthia Harrison, was an anomaly. It resulted more from the tremendous sense of urgency produced by the civil rights struggle than from any grassroots pressure that women’s rights advocates were able to mobilize. But getting the ban on sex discrimination enforced in the absence of a mass movement was another matter.

Almost immediately, working women began to deluge the commission with complaints of discrimination, but the agency set up to enforce the new law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), refused to outlaw sex segregation in employment ads. After all, said the director of the EEOC dismissively, the sex clause in Title VII was “a fluke . . . conceived out of wedlock.”

Many in the media agreed that the clause should not be taken seriously. “Why,” demanded a writer in the
New Republic
, “should the mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives” be treated seriously by responsible administrators?

If businesses could no longer designate some jobs by sex, pundits asked, would Playboy Clubs, for example, be forced to employ male bunnies to serve drinks and show off their bodies? The
Wall Street Journal
enjoined its readers to picture “a shapeless, knobby-kneed male ‘bunny’ serving drinks to a group of stunned businessmen in a Playboy Club” and raised the hilarious prospect of “a matronly vice-president” chasing a male secretary around her desk. The manager of an electronics company that employed only women told a journalist that if opponents of sex segregation got their way, “we’ll have to advertise for people with small, nimble fingers and hire the first male midget with unusual dexterity [who] shows up.”

A
New York Times
editorial warned that if employers were not allowed to specify that only men could apply for certain jobs there would be “no more milkman, iceman, serviceman, foreman or pressman. . . . The Rockettes may become bi-sexual, and a pity too.... Bunny problem indeed! This is revolution, chaos. You can’t even safely advertise for a wife any more.” And the personnel officer of a major airline raised the horrifying prospect of what might happen “when a gal walks into our office, demands a job as an airline pilot and has the credentials to qualify.”

The EEOC’s blatant disregard of the new law angered feminists in government service, who had thought until then that their patient work through official channels was paying off. In October 1965, at the usually placid conference of the National Council of Women of the United States, Pauli Murray publicly chastised the EEOC chair, saying that the committee’s policy of permitting sex-segregated ads violated Title VII. “If it becomes necessary to march on Washington to assure equal job opportunities for all,” said Murray, “I hope women will not flinch from the thought.”

After reading newspaper accounts of these comments, Betty Friedan sought out Murray, who had done some typing for her several years earlier, and Murray in turn introduced her to what Friedan later called “the feminist underground” in government circles. Many of these women were
already convinced that women needed an independent national civil rights organization, comparable to the NAACP. In fact, the original idea has been variously credited to Addie Wyatt, Aileen Hernandez, Pauli Murray, Muriel Fox, Dollie Lowther Robinson, Richard Graham, and Friedan herself, which suggests that many individuals were coming to a similar conclusion.

Whoever came up with the idea, the government feminists saw Friedan as someone who could be especially effective in pressing the issue forward, both because of her high profile since the publication of
The Feminine Mystique
and because she was not a government employee who could be fired if she alienated higher-up administrators. They took pains to include Friedan in their discussions, urging her to get involved in political organizing.

They also invited her to attend the third national meeting of state women’s commissions in June 1966, which many hoped would compel the EEOC to start enforcing the law. Shortly before that conference, Representative Martha Griffiths lambasted the EEOC on the floor of Congress for its “arbitrary arrogance, disregard of law, and . . . flat hostility to the human rights of women.” Catherine East of the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor arranged to get copies of Griffiths’s speech to all the conference delegates. A showdown was brewing.

At the conference, Friedan participated in behind-the scenes discussions with fifteen to twenty women who were determined to move beyond the polite lobbying tactics of their superiors. Her room was the site of a late-night meeting where they heatedly debated the next step in pushing forward their grievances.

The following day, when they were told they could not offer resolutions critical of the Johnson administration, the women decided it was time to step outside government channels and start a new women’s association—the National Organization for Women. Friedan came up with the name, writing it on a napkin at the table where the dissidents huddled. The women agreed with Friedan that this should not be an organization “of” women, but one “for” women, welcoming sympathetic men as well.

Friedan played a central role in founding NOW and, with Pauli Murray, helped develop a statement of purpose that addressed a far wider constituency and range of issues than had
The Feminine Mystique
. Of special note, given later claims that NOW dealt only with white middle-class concerns, the statement pointed out that black women were “victims of the double discrimination of race and sex” and pledged “active support to the common cause of equal rights for all those who suffer discrimination and deprivation.”

Under Friedan’s leadership, NOW established task forces on equalizing employment opportunities, education, and political rights; improving the image of women; and fighting female poverty. Friedan quickly became a national leader, working energetically to publicize and expand the movement’s reach.
The Feminine Mystique
continued to sell well, and in combination with Friedan’s activities in NOW, she was in great demand as a speaker and lecturer around the country.

Things did not always run smoothly in the new organization. Initially, Friedan tried to exclude lesbians from public roles and vehemently opposed addressing their concerns. Even after this issue was resolved, her criticisms of other feminist leaders were sometimes divisive. But she continued to win recruits to the cause, and her audacious call for a National Strike for Equality in 1970, when the movement had begun to flag, was a brilliant move that helped unite the more mainstream NOW leaders with younger women who had been independently exploring feminist issues and forming what they called “women’s liberation” groups throughout the country.

Many of these young women came to their views by very different routes than either the traditional feminists or the women influenced by
The Feminine Mystique
. For the younger women who energized the early 1970s women’s movement,
The Feminine Mystique
was less likely to provide a “click” moment than it was for the slightly older group of women who first discovered it. Some read Friedan’s book after they became activists, seeking validation for their views, but others skipped right over Friedan’s book to read the more radical pamphlets and books being published by the early 1970s.

Some young women had already turned against the prevailing gender ideology of the 1950s and early 1960s simply by seeing the damage that ideology had done to their mothers. Noted author and columnist Anna Quindlen comments that for many young women who had observed the lives of their mother’s generation, motherhood appeared to be “a kind of cage.... You stayed home and felt your mind turn to the stuff that you put in little bowls and tried to spoon into little mouths and eventually wound up wiping off of little floors.”

In fact, many mothers had already encouraged their daughters to make different choices than they had made. Studying the archives of the Institute for Human Development from the 1950s, historian Jessica Weiss found women expressing new hopes for their daughters long before
The Feminine Mystique
. “I sure don’t want [them] to turn out to be just a housewife like myself” (a 1957 interview). “I want them to have something, to be more independent than I was” (1958). “I’d like to see them make a living so the house isn’t the end of all things” (1959). So some young activists of the 1960s were not rebelling against their mothers but simply taking their mothers’ advice a little further than their moms had perhaps anticipated.