When Everything Changed (11 page)

The proposal that women should have equal opportunity to be considered for any job was an idea that struck a great many otherwise open-minded people as absolutely ridiculous. The debate over Smith’s amendment reflected that.
Emanuel Celler of New York
, who was managing the Civil Rights Act and attempting to deflect any amendment that might endanger it, stood up. “I can say as a result of forty-nine years of experience—and I celebrate my fiftieth wedding anniversary next year—that women, indeed, are not the minority in my house… ,” he said. “I usually have the last two words and those words are ‘yes, dear.’ ”

Amid the hoots
from the other male legislators, Representative Leonor Sullivan of Missouri turned to Martha Griffiths. “If you can’t stop that laughter, you’re lost,” she said.

Griffiths, unlike much of the House, was dead serious about adding women to Title VII, but she knew that between the lawmakers who flat-out opposed the idea and the ones who simply feared doing anything to endanger the Civil Rights Act, there would not be enough votes to support her if she offered such an amendment. When she heard Smith’s comments on
Meet the Press,
she saw a new opening. Smith had the consistent support of dozens of Southern conservatives in the House. Add those to the numbers she could round up on her own power, and there might be a majority. Griffiths had some chips in the favor bank herself. (She was the first woman to serve on the Ways and Means Committee, which approved all those obscure little tax exemptions so dear to the hearts of campaign contributors.) She had been working to collect votes, and she had thought carefully about what she would say when she rose to her feet. “
I presume that if there had been
any necessity to point out that women were a second-class sex, the laughter would have proved it,” she said.

That got their attention.

“
In my judgment
, the men who had written the Equal Employment Opportunity Act had never even thought about women,” Griffiths said later. She was convinced the authors wanted to “give black men some rights, and that black women would be treated about like white women.” But whatever their motives, Griffiths said, “I made up my mind that if such a bill were going to pass, it was going to carry a prohibition against discrimination on the basis of sex, and that both black and white women were going to take a modest step forward together.”

Eleven of the twelve women serving in the 435-member House rose to support the act. The holdout was Edith Green of Oregon. A member of the Commission on the Status of Women, Green had just finished a long and depressing struggle to pass a bill prohibiting employers from paying men and women different wages for the same job. Her Equal Pay Act had been amended until it was riddled with holes, including an exemption for professional, executive, and administrative positions. (
Green remembered a male
colleague asking her incredulously if she would actually “pay a woman administrative assistant in your office as much as you would pay a male administrative assistant.”) For the minimal reform that was left, Green had still had to fight every step of the way.
At one point, when she went
looking to make sure the bill hadn’t disappeared in committee, she found that a male colleague had filed it under “B”—for “broads.” It was no wonder, really, that Green had a reputation for crankiness.

Green herself had thought of proposing an amendment to add women to the Civil Rights Act. But the Johnson White House had convinced her that it could endanger the legislation’s chance of passage. In this matter, she decided, black Americans had to come first. “
For every discrimination
that has been made against a woman in this country, there has been ten times as much discrimination against the Negro,” she said.

It was a very old and very painful debate. The fight for women’s rights and the struggle for racial justice had almost always been linked in America. Abolition of slavery had been the first political issue that brought large numbers of women into the public world, and many of them pointed out the similarities they saw in the treatment of women and African-Americans. Black leaders were grateful for the support but tended to feel that however bad and repressive Victorian marriages were, they were not quite as grim as slavery and lynching. From the beginning, each cause was keenly aware that when they presented a joint front, critical support tended to dwindle away. Many male politicians who supported abolition felt very strongly that a woman’s place was in the home, and many Southern politicians who were willing to consider legislation of benefit to women drew back fast when civil rights were added to the equation. During the Civil War, abolition leaders felt that it would be much harder to amend the Constitution to give African-Americans the full rights of citizenship if women had to get the vote as well, and they decided that the black cause was by far more urgent. Women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were furious, and Stanton shocked her old friend and ally Frederick Douglass by denouncing the idea of immigrants and freed slaves—“Patrick and Sambo and Yung Tung”—making laws for the disenfranchised “daughters of Adams and Jefferson… women of wealth and education.”

When women once again rose up and demanded the right to vote during World War I, Alice Paul and her lieutenants had no intention of alienating Southern supporters with a show of sympathy for African-Americans. When Paul staged the famous women’s rights parade of 1913 in Washington, she ordered black suffragists to march at the back of the line in order to spare the feelings of Southern sympathizers. (
Ida Wells-Barnett, who had
been leading a group of black women from Chicago, vanished into the crowd along the sidewalk, then stepped back into the street as the Illinois delegation marched by, joining her white friends and integrating the demonstration.)
A half century later
, Paul ignored pleas that she decline to accept support for the ERA from the segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace.

In 1964 black Americans were still in a far more perilous position than white women. But women, especially poor and working-class women, desperately needed better protection. And there was no reason that a fabulously prosperous nation founded on equal rights for all shouldn’t be able to attack both injustices at the same time.
While all the black
legislators were worried about the amendment’s effect on the Civil Rights Act, they were not unanimously convinced that Griffiths was wrong. Griffiths recalled that, several days after the vote, as she was walking into the House, William Dawson, a black representative from Chicago, came up and shook her hand. “Mrs. Griffiths, during the weekend I thought about that speech you made on behalf of women and I would like to tell you that if all of your training and all of your experience had been for that one moment, it has all been worthwhile,” he said.

The amendment passed the House, as Griffiths had calculated. (“
We made it!
We’re human!” cried a woman from the gallery.) The Civil Rights Act then moved through the Senate, where Everett Dirksen, the powerful minority leader from Illinois, wanted to remove it. While Marguerite Rawalt organized one of her letter-writing campaigns, Senator Margaret Chase Smith picked up the fight on the Senate floor.

“T
HIS LITTLE LADY HAS SIMPLY STEPPED OUT OF HER CLASS
.”

Smith was another widow
—at 33, after years as a single working woman, she married Clyde Smith, a 54-year-old soon-to-be congressman from Maine. She stepped into his seat when he died, and then, after four terms in the House, she shocked everyone by running for the Senate in 1948. “This little lady has simply stepped out of her class,” said a state politician. Smith campaigned for the seat during the congressional session, returning home on weekends in an era when flying—especially flying to Maine—was an airborne version of taking a wagon train west. Smith headed for Portland, which required one or two changes of planes along the way. When she arrived, there was another hundred-mile trip to her home, where she picked up her car and started driving. As she traveled from stop to stop, she sometimes wound up having to ask for shelter for the night in a local farmhouse. When she slipped on the ice and broke her arm, it simply made her two hours late for her next speaking engagement. She had no paid staff, no campaign manager. And in the end she got more votes than all three of her opponents.

In 1950, when Washington was quivering under Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crazed anti-Communist campaign, Smith took to the floor and became the first lawmaker to dare to stand up to McCarthyism. “I don’t like the way the Senate has been made a rendezvous for vilification…. I am not proud of the way we smear outsiders from the floor of the Senate and hide behind the cloak of congressional immunity…. As an American I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves,” she said. Bernard Baruch, one of the most influential political advisers of the era, said that if the speech had been made by a man, that man would have been the next president. In retaliation, McCarthy had her tossed off the Permanent Investigating Committee and tried to run a candidate against her in Maine in 1954. She simply ignored the challenger. “My record is so outstanding and so effective that there isn’t any use running around the state defending it,” she said. And she was right.

The only woman in the Senate for most of her career, Smith had to stand in line at the public bathroom because she was barred from the senators’ lounge. When she served on the Naval Affairs Committee, one of the staff members took her for a walk during long sessions so the men would have a break from the burden of a female presence. Once, on a flight home from Europe with other lawmakers, the plane developed trouble serious enough that everyone was given a life jacket and told to prepare for a possible crash. In response, Smith pulled out some harmonicas she had purchased as presents for her nieces and nephews and persuaded everyone to start singing. Later, she told reporters she was as terrified as everyone else, “only as a woman I couldn’t have the luxury of showing my fear.”

On the issue of women’s rights, Minority Leader Dirksen was no match for the senator from Maine. The Civil Rights Act passed with the amendment intact and was signed into law. Years later, the very elderly Howard Smith—retired and no longer the terror of liberal legislation in the House of Representatives—visited the Capitol and ran into Martha Griffiths. “
You know, our amendment
is doing more than all the rest of the Civil Rights Act,” she told him. Smith, Griffiths said, responded, “Martha, I’ll tell you the truth. I offered it as a joke.”

“A
N AIRLINE OR A WHOREHOUSE
?”

Howard Smith was not the only person who thought the idea of giving women workers equal protection under the law was hilarious. Once the Civil Rights Act was on the books, it looked as if the section protecting women from job discrimination was going to do nothing but spawn endless jokes about the “bunny law” that, wags predicted, would require the Playboy Club to give men equal opportunity to don puff tails and silk ears, and work as one of its scantily clad waitresses.
The
Wall Street Journal
invited
its readers to imagine “a shapeless, knobby-kneed male ‘bunny’ serving drinks to a group of stunned businessmen” while on the other side of town “a matronly vice president” was chasing her male secretary.
“Bunny problems indeed!”
giggled a
New York Times
editorial, which also raised the specter of male chorus-line dancers.
The New Republic,
a bastion
of liberal commentary, said the sex provision should simply be ignored. “Why should a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives be treated by a responsible administrative body with this kind of seriousness?” the magazine asked.

Very few people involved with enforcing the act seemed to believe women should be a serious concern. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was set up to arbitrate complaints under the new law, and
Aileen Hernández, the only woman
among the five commissioners, said other members responded to sex-discrimination complaints with “boredom” or “virulent hostility.” The EEOC ruled that help-wanted ads could not mention a preferred race for applicants, but it did nothing to stop the newspapers’ practice of dividing the ads into
HELP WANTED
—
MALE
and
HELP WANTED
—
FEMALE
.

Yet when the EEOC opened for business, its first complainants were neither oppressed black workers nor men hoping to break into the ranks of the Playboy Bunnies. They were stewardesses. The commission’s clerical staff, which had been told that their job was to help fight racial discrimination, was still unpacking when Barbara Roads, a union leader for the flight attendants, and another stewardess arrived. “
We walked in
and looked around at a sea of black faces. Their typewriters were still in boxes. This woman came up to us, two blondes in stewardess uniforms, and she said, ‘What are you doing here?’ ” Roads recalled. The two women helped the brand-new workers set up their typewriters and told them about the airline ban on marriage, the age discrimination, and the endless measurements to check for weight gain. “They couldn’t believe it,” she said.

The black women behind the typewriters may have been sympathetic, but the flight attendants’ complaints brought out the same somber deliberation on the part of male officials that the Playboy Bunny theories did. When a House labor subcommittee held a hearing on the issue,
Representative James Scheuer of New York
jovially asked the flight attendants to “stand up, so we can see the dimensions of the problem.” The airline industry continued to argue with a straight face that businessmen would be discouraged from flying if the women handing them their coffee and checking their seat belts were not young and attractive. “
What are you running
, an airline or a whorehouse?” Martha Griffiths demanded. The remark got into public circulation just as Griffiths was concluding a reelection campaign, and even her ever-supportive husband, Hicks, worried she had made a potentially fatal error. But the next morning he called from Michigan to report, “I am wrong. Everybody I have seen in Detroit is in hysterics. They are shouting at me from across the street, saying, ‘Tell Martha it was the greatest question ever asked.’ ”