The Citizens' Advisory Council and the Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women

President Johnson was eager to capitalize on the good will engendered by the commission. As vice-president, Johnson had made known his strong support of the commission's objectives and had often attended commission functions; following the group's first meeting it was Mrs. Johnson, not Jacqueline Kennedy, who hosted the reception for the assembled representatives. Shortly after Johnson took over, Elizabeth Carpenter, Mrs. Johnson's press secretary, called Esther Peterson to ask her advice on how to win for the new president the support of the women's organizations that had so enthusiastically backed the president's commission. Peterson replied that Johnson should appoint commission member Margaret Hickey to chair the Citizens' Advisory Council on the Status of Women (CACSW)—a decision John Kennedy already made but not implemented—and that this appointment would signal his intention to stand behind the commission's work. Johnson dutifully followed the advice, and both he and Mrs. Johnson attended the council's first meeting. In Women's Bureau releases, Esther Peterson moved quickly to identify Johnson with the Kennedy policy initiatives on women.^[9]

The Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women

(ICSW) and the CACSW were continuations of the president's commission not only in spirit but also in personnel. The executive order establishing the ICSW and the CACSW placed in the former group all the cabinet members who had been on the president's commission, plus the secretaries of state and defense. John Kennedy named to the CACSW all the nongovernment members of the presidential commission, adding Eleanor Roosevelt's daughter, Anna Halsted, and the president of the Trenton Trust Company, Mary Roebling. The support of the two continuing groups, with membership almost identical to that of the president's commission, signified that there would be no sharp departure in the Johnson administration from the agenda described in the commission report.^[10]

The new president chose, however, to highlight one particular recommendation in order to differentiate himself from his predecessor and to win some new and exciting publicity before the 1964 election. His decision provided a momentary return to the modus operandi of Kennedy's predecessors. In January 1964, Lyndon Johnson declared to a Washington Post reporter that he intended to appoint fifty women to significant policy-making positions within thirty days; the story appeared on the front page. Johnson, a longtime party man, endorsed the notion that the appointments were good politics, and he responded to the suggestions of party women with whom he had long been associated—and whose counsel, to their delight and relief, was once again welcome in the White House. The president's closest female adviser, Elizabeth Carpenter, originally a journalist, saw good public relations in the campaign to appoint women and encouraged the president to do so.^[11]

Indeed, Johnson's actions led to a sharp increase in the number of women serving in Senate-confirmed positions, with ten such appointments in his first thirteen months in office—excluding local customs office jobs, the same number as Kennedy had named during his whole three years. Of these ten, six represented "firsts" for women, compared to four for Kennedy. During the balance of his term, Johnson appointed another seventeen women. Of the twenty-seven total appointments, sixteen were firsts, and the number of women serving in the administration rose from thirty in 1963 to fifty-two in 1968.

Although Johnson did not name a woman to his cabinet, he was not criticized for this omission—an indication that his overall record, with due attention given to breaking new ground, contented Democratic women. Moreover, thanks to Liz Carpenter, Johnson accompanied his appointments with the fanfare political women thought appropriate. Yet unlike Truman and Eisenhower, Johnson also took an interest in the civil service efforts the presidential commission had instigated. Rapid gains in high-level jobs for women took place at the beginning of 1964.^[12] Party women were very pleased, and the journalist Isabelle Shelton recalled more than a decade later: "There's never been anything like it—before or since."^[13]

But Johnson's burst of interest in appointments created some unforeseen consequences that affected the status of women more significantly than the mere numbers of nominees. By pledging a larger role for women in his administration, Johnson raised expectations that he then failed to fulfill. The appointments campaign ended with the 1964 presidential election, and by March 1965 Margaret Price complained once again that women were dissatisfied with the number of staff appointments. This time the displeasure spread through the state commissions, gaining attention from many more women—women organized and focused on the status of women—than ever before.

A second outcome of Johnson's appointments concerned the Women's Bureau. The president designated Esther Peterson to be his special assistant on consumer affairs, the single highest post to which he named a woman. (India Edwards and Liz Carpenter both observed the irony in giving this post to Peterson, who already was the ranking female member of the administration as assistant secretary of labor, a job she retained. Both women pointed out that Johnson would be able to name more women to important jobs if Peterson did not get them all. In fact, Peterson became one of the few Kennedy appointees Johnson continued to trust.) With the new appointment, Peterson decided to relinquish the directorship of the Women's Bureau, the least prestigious of the three jobs she held, and Johnson replaced her with Mary Dublin Keyserling, an economist active in Democratic politics.

Keyserling was not pleased by the new position of concilia-

tion the president's commission had crafted.^[14] A longtime worker with the National Consumers League, Keyserling maintained a firm commitment to its philosophy that working women required protection, a point of view she had expressed emphatically while serving on the Committee on Protective Labor Legislation of the commission. Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz shared Keyserling's view, as expressed in the president's commission report, that hours laws for women should be expanded until they could be replaced by laws requiring premium pay for overtime. As Peterson and Catherine East, formerly the technical secretary of the Committee on Federal Employment and now the executive secretary of the Citizens' Advisory Council on the Status of Women, moved away from the idea of maintaining laws that protected women and not men, they came into increasing conflict with Keyserling and Wirtz.^[15]