by Cynthia Harrison
In 1920, when the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution finally guaranteed American women the right to vote, it marked the culmination of a movement begun more than seventy years earlier. Many had argued that women voters would generate a sea change in politics. Carrie Chapman Catt, who led the final fight, declared: "In the adjustment of the new order of things we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less." The prospect made many a politician nervous, particularly after the establishment in 1920 of the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, a coalition of women's organizations representing ten million members. Early in the decade, Congress made sure that new legislation addressed the issues important to this new constituency, including a law that eliminated pay discrimination between men and women in the federal civil service. Presidents Wilson and Harding named women to a variety of appointive positions in the courts and on federal commissions.
But by the end of the first decade after suffrage, the anticipated "women's vote" had not appeared nor had a transformation in women's political roles emerged. By 1930, only 13 women had gained seats in Congress, seven of them filling mid-term vacancies. In the state legislatures, the showing was little better: In 1925, women won almost 150 seats out of approximately 7500. Democratic national committeewoman Emily Newell Blair observed, "I know of no politician who is afraid of the woman vote on any question under the sun."
The women's reform community in the 1920s had not united around a common agenda after suffrage. Post-war conservatism and a split over the question of whether women most needed legal equality or legal protection thwarted unified action. During the 1930s, the economic emergency worked against a renewed interest in women's rights -- unemployment and poverty took precedence over any other problem. But both the 1920s and the 1930s still witnessed important changes in women's roles, driven not by politics but by economics.
No change had a greater impact on women's roles than the transition from primarily an agricultural economy to a corporate, commercial, industrial one, a change that took place slowly over decades. Through the 1920s, 25 percent of Americans still lived on farms. Women in farm families worked ceaselessly as partners in the family business, combining economically essential work with child rearing and homemaking. In urban families, however, the middle-class ideal relied on a single wage earner -- the husband and father of the family -- working outside the home. Urban working-class mothers, especially African-Americans, themselves engaged in industrial production or domestic work for pay; by 1920, about 9 percent of married women worked outside the home for wages. But though many women worked while single, once they married, if it was economically feasible they stayed at home.
The Great Depression, with unemployment rates rising to 25 percent, created competing pressures. On the one hand, there was widespread demand that working wives step aside so that men could have their jobs; on the other, with husbands and fathers out of work, wives and mothers needed their own paychecks more than ever. But in fact most women worked only at jobs that men did not do and so, by the start of World War II, almost 15 percent of wives were working, up from 12 percent at the beginning of the 1930s.
After the privations of the Depression, women eagerly responded to wartime expansion. Jobs once reserved for male workers opened to women as the men went into the military. "Rosie the Riveter" became the symbol for patriotic American women, and millions of women gained access to government and non-military factory jobs. The percentage of women in the workforce went from a pre-war figure of 25 percent to a wartime peak of 38 percent. But, as with the Depression, World War II had a mixed impact on women's lives. Higher-paying positions proved temporary, as returning soldiers replaced women workers. After the war, employment and educational benefits for veterans widened the gap between men and women in these areas.
Women left the labor force and many turned their full attention to raising families, but not all and not for long. Both the business and public sectors quickly began to expand in just those areas that traditionally offered employment to women: office work, teaching, and nursing. With so many jobs available, employers gave up their preference for single women and hired married women and mothers. By 1960, almost a third of American wives worked for wages at least part time, twice the proportion in 1940, and the number grew higher every year. The money they earned paid for houses, cars, and college educations for their children.
Despite the fact that women workers contributed about a quarter of the family's income, they routinely met with discrimination on the job. Employers advertised in newspaper columns headed "Help Wanted -- Male," and "Help Wanted --Female," medical and law schools established quotas for women students, even the federal government permitted its executives to request applicants from the civil service register by sex. Employers justified their practices by pointing to women's family responsibilities, which they said took too much time away from work. With one-third of the labor force female and the United States engaged in a global contest with the Soviet Union requiring the most effective use of all its resources, it had become clear to policy-makers that the nation had to address the tension between women's roles as mothers and as workers.
Thus, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy took the advice of an assistant secretary of labor, Esther Peterson, and established a commission on the status of women to create a plan to help women fill their dual public and private roles. The President's Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, made proposals for a wide variety of measures, both governmental and private, to assist women. Virtually every one of the 50 states established similar bodies to deal with discrimination on the local level. In 1963, Congress enacted legislation prohibiting differentials by sex in wage rates in private industry, the first such employment discrimination law. The publication earlier that year of The Feminine Mystique, by a writer named Betty Friedan, brought to public attention the ways in which women's capacities had been disparaged, and it fueled support for new initiatives to end unfair treatment of women. A provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited sex discrimination in employment, and to enforce it, a national network of activists, prepared by their work on state and federal commissions, soon realized they needed an independent feminist organization. In 1966, they created the National Organization for Women [NOW].
NOW adopted the unfinished agendas of the government groups and quickly forged a new set of goals aiming at complete equality for men and women in American society. A more radical women's movement almost immediately sprang up alongside, born of the struggle of women within the civil rights movement in the South, the anti-war movement on college campuses and the movement for social justice in American cities. The combination of perspectives challenged every standard idea about the relationship of men and women to each other, to children, and to the state. The infusion of feminist energy soon made women the epicenter of a social reformation.
Political power for women ranked high on the list of feminist objectives and starting in 1972, women began to run for office in record numbers. Results have been uneven. The proportion of women in state legislatures went from 4.5 percent in 1971 to 21 percent in 1993, but then stalled. In 1961, a record twenty women sat in both houses of Congress, a record that held for another twenty years. In the 1980s, the roster of women started slowly to increase but by 1997, the number of women members had risen only to 60, still less than 12 percent of the total.
Nevertheless, as a result of the new women's movement and its own new members, Congress has produced many pieces of legislation to accompany the earlier bans against sex discrimination in employment, including laws that prohibited unequal treatment in credit and in educational programs. A 1974 law gave domestic workers minimum wage protection; a law passed in 1978 barred discrimination in employment against pregnant women; in 1984, Congress strengthened child support laws and pension rights of widows and divorced women. In 1990, Congress passed a law to provide federal funds for child care, the first such law since World War II, and in 1993, newly-elected President Bill Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, for the first time requiring employers to offer some accommodation to workers' need to meet family responsibilities as well as those of the workplace.
The Supreme Court, the interpreter of the Constitution, also reconsidered its view of women under the law in the wake of new understandings about women's roles. Until 1971, the Court had accepted as constitutional most laws that differentiated between men and women. In 1971, in a case called Reed v. Reed, for the first time the Supreme Court struck down a state law that favored men, deeming the classification by sex to be "arbitrary." Afterwards, the Court expanded its interpretation to cover most areas of legal jurisdiction (although it continued to permit differential treatment in the military).
The Court's new stance took on greater significance in 1982 when the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution failed to be ratified. In addition, the Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade, a 1973 case, that state laws which prevented women from terminating an early pregnancy violated their right to privacy. The ruling gave women substantial control over their reproductive lives but it also incited a powerful opposing movement in support of traditional values.
In 1997, the persistence of sex roles at home means that most women who work full time for wages also shoulder the major part of home and family care responsibilities. At the same time, barriers remain in the work place, especially for women of color and gay women. The many single mothers working at low wage jobs have difficulty providing adequate child care or medical treatment for their children and the repeal of New Deal legislation providing aid to poor families may contribute to their difficulties.
Nevertheless, the change in women's status in the decades since World War II has been dramatic. The right of a married woman to work outside the home is no longer in question, especially because most families with two parents depend on a second income. Some 60 percent of wives now work for wages. With her own income, the American woman today is in the position to exercise more authority within her home or to end an unhappy marriage. Although the movement into formal political office has been gradual since women won the vote in 1920, women have become visible and central political actors. Women's issues-- sex discrimination, reproductive rights, care of children, economic equity across sex and racial lines -- get full attention from policy-makers. Federal law has established a woman's right to equal treatment in schools and in the workplace and women have taken advantage of these opportunities. In 1991, women received 54 percent of bachelor's and master's degrees and 38 percent of doctorates. In the workplace, women are about one-fifth of lawyers (up from 3.5 percent in 1950), more than 40 percent of college teachers (up from 23 percent in 1950), and about 20 percent of physicians (up from 6 percent in 1950). However, 70 percent of working women still earn their living as clerical, service, or sales workers.
If the transformation to a society of complete equality is not yet fully realized, we should not be surprised. The change in the relationship between men and women is one of the most profound a society can undergo; every nation on the globe continues to negotiate this evolution.
----------
Cynthia Harrison is an Associate Professor of History and of Women's Studies at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
(The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.)
U.S. Society and Values
USIA Electronic Journal , Vol. 2, No. 2, June
1997