1
CONSOLIDATION AND STALEMATE, 1945–1960

1
The Equal Rights Amendment and the Ambivalent Legacy of World War II

World War II put women into work they had never done before. Highly skilled and highly paid, women workers producing war materiel demonstrated that they could do virtually any job. The information proved unsettling. American tradition dictated that women, especially married women, keep house and raise children, not put rivets into airplane fuselages. The nation was at once grateful to its women for their help and unnerved at how well they performed.^[1] Women activists with political agendas of long standing sought to capitalize on the feelings of gratitude, proposing federal measures to protect women from discrimination. But they faced a resistance strengthened by the anxieties of wartime dislocation.

Postwar Backlash

The federal government had enticed women into the labor force for war work. Federal funds helped communities take care of the children, and the National War Labor Board promised equal pay with men, declaring wage differentials based on sex impermissible (partly to lure women to work and partly to keep wage rates up in preparation for the GIs' return).^[2] A massive public relations campaign sang the praises of "Rosie the Riveter." Magazine story writers began to portray married women workers favorably, able to handle their jobs competently while meeting their family responsibilities. Work and love went together—but only for the duration. Advertisers who included working moms in their ads made it clear that Mom was

serving because it was her duty but that she would be home again full-time as soon as she could. Now, she had to take care of her kids not directly but by doing war work. As Maureen Honey describes it, "The role allocated to women in wartime propaganda, then, was a complicated mixture of strength and dependence, competence and vulnerability, egalitarianism and conservatism."^[3]

In response to patriotism and new opportunities, the female labor force swelled from thirteen million in 1940 to nineteen million and more in 1944. By March of that year, almost one-third of all women over the age of fourteen were in the labor force, and the numbers of women in industry had increased almost 500 percent, to one woman worker in three. The opportunities created by the war allowed women to leave domestic service jobs: between 1940 and 1944 the percentage of working women who held domestic jobs dropped from 17.7 to only 9.5. Still, more than half of women who worked during the war held clerical, sales, service, or domestic jobs. These women did their duty, but they faced many burdens. The number of childcare facilities never approached the need, areas with military personnel lacked adequate schools, housing was scarce near military installations and defense plants, and few businesses adjusted hours to accommodate women workers.^[4]

Even with all these difficulties, however, policy makers were concerned that women in nontraditional jobs would not willingly relinquish them at the end of the war. As a result, government propaganda, midwar, did an about-face. Because the original exhortations to women to do war work had never challenged the core of ideas about femininity, because no one had suggested that work was more than a sacrifice women had willingly made for the most motherly of reasons, the shift was an easy one. The message was clear: although women could do anything, authentic women would choose to be home with their families. Women's magazines fell in line with the government's efforts and spotlighted articles on the importance of mothers caring for their children.^[5]

Public opinion polls, however, revealed that between 60 and 85 percent of women engaged in war work did not want to leave their nontraditional jobs at the end of the conflict.^[6] Out of

anxiety that women workers might tenaciously hang on to their jobs, the federal government terminated daycare funding and gave veterans the right to displace wartime workers. The contraction of war materiel manufacturing alone displaced workers, male and female, without further ado. Within one month of V-J day, the government canceled $35 billion worth of defense contracts. Employers also began now to revise their judgment of their women workers: in the postwar version of the tale, they had not been very good after all, prone to high absenteeism and "bad attitudes." Women's organizations of all stripes worked against the notion that employers should force women out of jobs, but to little avail.^[7]

Those women who had them lost their high-paying, high-skilled jobs, but the attempt to get women out of the workforce entirely did not succeed. The dismantling of war industries merely consigned these women once again to traditionally female occupations. Companies laid women off at a rate 75 percent greater than that for men, and the returning veterans reassumed the traditionally male jobs. The director of the Women's Bureau, Frieda Miller, suggested that women who had been laid off from the munitions industry look to the (lower-paying) service sector for employment^[8] —which, given no other options, they did. Thus, although 3.25 million women either quit or were fired during the period from September 1945 to November 1946, nearly 2.75 million women assumed jobs, making the net decline only 600,000 women. But Rosie the Riveter had become a file clerk.^[9]

Practical considerations had dictated the ejection of women from wartime employment: returning soldiers needed jobs. Americans worried about the return of the biting depression that had preceded the war. Then, jobs for "heads of households" had taken priority. Intense opposition to married women workers had resulted even in occasional legal bans against hiring them, and in some families in which the wife had been the sole wage earner husbands had suffered acute emotional distress.^[10] No one wished to contemplate the recurrence of such a phenomenon. In the twelve months following June 1945, nine million military personnel were discharged, and policy makers now sought to ensure that the former GIs would not be displaced by

women from jobs they had a right to as "breadwinners." With the contraction of defense manufacturing, the economic dislocation of the postwar period added to the pervasive strain that had attended the war years.^[11]

But a still more insidious backlash emerged following the war, separate from the economic considerations resolved in part by women's relinquishing their jobs. As the psychiatrist Edwin Krause and the novelist Pearl Buck had both warned, by making them the beneficiaries of the heroic male warriors, the war caused a major setback for women. Popular literature counseled women to forget their own needs in order to make their beaux more comfortable, and articles advised them to cultivate feminine characteristics, eschewing the independence, assertiveness, and competency they had acquired from their experiences on the home front.^[12] Government planners had defined the major postwar domestic problem as the readjustment of sixteen million veterans, and they believed that readjustment would come sooner if the vets found their girls as they had left them, not as independent working women.

The anxiety of readjustment translated into a desire for the reinstitution of traditional family life supported by traditional sex roles. Everyone wanted to forget the trauma of the war, including the evidence that women could perform the work of men. A survey of women's roles as portrayed in magazine fiction in 1945 showed careers for women depicted more unsympathetically than since the turn of the century. Women themselves sought the peace and pleasures of marriage and motherhood. The marriage rate, which had averaged 121 per thousand during the war, peaked at 148 per thousand in 1946, and the median marriage age for women fell more than a year, from 21.5 to 20.3. More than ever before, women were trying for both work and love. Pushed out of high-paying "men's jobs," they acquiesced to doing women's work at home and in the office.^[13]

Women Leaders and Women's Issues

One group of women—the small and elite cadre that composed the leadership of national women's organizations—recognized both the vulnerability that women workers labored under and

the possibility of doing something to ameliorate it. If World War II created a backlash that coerced women out of war jobs and into white-collar work, it also generated a feeling of gratitude toward these women for the contribution they had made to the war effort, one no less essential than the military commitment. In October 1945, President Harry Truman offered them some recognition:

Since the earliest days of settlement and the beginnings of this great Republic of ours, American women have built for themselves a proud record of achievement, of unselfish devotion to the public welfare, of courageous industry in advancing every good cause. And never have they done a more magnificent job than during the crisis of recent years, both as private citizens and responsible public officials. To the women of America, I say—your untiring efforts to speed the winning of the war, your tender care and skilled nursing of those struck down on the battlefield, your passionate belief in the possibility of a just and lasting peace, and your effective work in advancing that great cause, need no tribute from me to make them shine as one of the glorious pages in our history.^[14]

Women leaders hoped to capitalize on such gratitude to win at least some protection for the worker once heralded as "the woman behind the man behind the gun."

But these activists disagreed about the best goal to pursue, a controversy already more than two decades old. The break among women's groups had taken place shortly after women, in 1920, won the right to vote. By 1945 the old suffrage coalition had split into three separate, though overlapping, interest groups, each with a different (but not necessarily incompatible) agenda determined by ideology and class identification: one group pursued legislation for working women, one sought an equal rights amendment to the Constitution and the third aimed at securing a more prominent place for women in political parties.

The first group had roots going back to the settlement movement of the 1890s and the Progressive-era push for protective labor legislation for women. Middle-class women concerned about the welfare of their underclass sisters working in factories had formed organizations to improve conditions for industrial

laborers, in some cases joining forces with the women they hoped to help. These organizations—especially the National Women's Trade Union League and the National Consumers League—persuaded the federal government to undertake a massive study of working conditions of women and children, which was published in 1910. They used the data collected to promote state laws applying to women establishing minimum wages, maximum hours, weight restrictions on lifting, and prohibitions against night work. This effort to prevent employers from mercilessly exploiting women workers succeeded to some degree in nearly every state. Sustained by a liberal ideology of participation in government, active public intervention to assist those in need, and a firm belief in the American institutions of enlightened and regulated free enterprise, these reformers fought for suffrage as a means by which women could protect themselves and their families. This same group also persuaded federal administrators to establish a "Women in Industry Service" during World War I to protect women who entered defense work, and in 1920 Congress responded to pressure to make the new agency permanent: it became the Women's Bureau, located within the Department of Labor. With all players believing that both government and private industry would respond to demonstrated needs of workers, the bureau's function was restricted to the collection of information about women workers.^[15]

Yet the organizations that had been instrumental in creating the Women's Bureau looked to it to provide not only information but also leadership. In 1945 the "Women's Bureau coalition" (as it will be called in the following pages) included the following associations: the National Women's Trade Union League (which would disband in 1950), the National Consumers League, the Young Women's Christian Association, the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Council of Catholic Women, the National Council of Negro Women, the League of Women Voters (although the league became less interested in women's issues as the decade progressed), the American Association of University Women, and various women's affiliates of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Not every organization was involved in every issue, and other groups occasionally participated on specific mat-

ters, but in general it was these associations that the bureau staff most often consulted and that usually rallied to the Women's Bureau positions. The coalition lacked key groups, however, especially major labor organizations and political clubs. Isolated from power centers both inside the government and outside and handicapped by a politically maladroit director, Mary Anderson (who headed the bureau for almost twenty-five years), the bureau had difficulty swaying policy makers.^[16]

During World War II, the Women's Bureau coalition had sought essentially to make sure that employers did not use the war emergency as a way of vitiating standards for women workers. At the end of the war, although they looked with some distress on the wholesale dispatch of the female labor force, these organizations agreed with the general goal that married women should be supported by their husbands, who would be earning decent salaries doing men's work. For the women who had to stay in the labor force, the coalition sought to maintain or expand laws regarding work hours and minimum wage protections.

The second group of women activists, smaller and more elite, grew out of the last stages of the suffrage fight in the 1910s, when it splintered from the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the group leading the battle for the vote in the mainstream liberal political tradition. Headed by Alice Paul, a charismatic militant suffragist, the National Woman's party (NWP) used highly visible and inflammatory demonstrations to get suffrage on the front pages of the nation's newspapers. The more traditional-minded leadership of the NAWSA feared that such actions would hurt the cause by creating a backlash, but sheer rivalry also played a role in the antagonism between the two groups.

Friction appeared again early in the 1920s over Paul's decision to introduce an amendment to the Constitution to guarantee women complete legal equality with men. The Women's Bureau coalition objected that the amendment would decimate the protective labor laws they had worked so hard to obtain, thus leaving working women defenseless. The NWP was not unsympathetic; composed largely of women of wealth and unusual educational attainment and concerned chiefly about the right of women to work as professionals, it initially sought a compromise that would

have excluded labor laws from the purview of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) it proposed. But these attempts proved futile, and the NWP ultimately took the position that laws only for women did more harm than good. The party argued variously that all labor laws should apply to both sexes or that labor laws were flat-out undesirable, the latter view reflecting the conservative political philosophy of many NWP members who opposed government interference in private enterprise. In 1928 the party endorsed the Republican Hoover-Curtis presidential ticket, primarily because Charles Curtis had been a sponsor of the ERA but also because many NWP officers were Republicans. (Neither presidential candidate had announced in favor of the ERA, although the Democratic candidate, Al Smith, was certainly against it, being an ardent enthusiast of protective labor laws.)^[17]

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the NWP persuaded several women's organizations to support the ERA and to separate themselves from the advocates of protective legislation. By the 1940s, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs (BPW), the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the National Association of Women Lawyers, the National Education Association, and various other smaller professional women's organizations had endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment and agreed to work with the NWP in pursuit of that goal.

But the NWP insisted on retaining leadership in the battle. Paul was not interested in a mass-based group; rather, she sought to create a Washington-based "elite vanguard," single-mindedly devoted to the pursuit of the ERA and willing to follow her directions. The membership of the NWP endorsed her design. Almost all had participated in the suffrage battle, and the group made little attempt to recruit new members. By 1945 party membership—which, it claimed, had numbered ten thousand in the 1920s—had fallen to four thousand, even by its own highly inflated figures; only some six hundred paid annual dues. The party's intense devotion to its single cause did indeed make it influential out of proportion to its numbers.^[18]

Meanwhile, the NWP and the Women's Bureau coalition had become archenemies. The Women's Bureau coalition continued to cooperate, if uneasily, with other pro-ERA organiza-

tions, like the BPW and the General Federation of Women's Clubs, on specific projects such as equal pay legislation; but after World War II the fight for the ERA constituted almost the entire program of the National Woman's party, and its defeat the major consolidated effort of the Women's Bureau coalition.

A third group of political women held itself somewhat aloof from this battle, pursuing a different goal. This contingent had appeared after the achievement of suffrage in 1920—in fact, in response to it. These women had become active in the national political parties' governing bodies, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Republican National Committee (RNC), and they were committed to seeing that women quickly attained their share of power within these political structures. Moreover, they wanted women appointed to government positions because they believed both that women appointees would improve government and that appointments of women would potentially benefit all women. They were supported by women in state party organizations and by female journalists, who viewed the number of women political appointees as an index of an administration's interest in women's advancement. In the 1930s the political party women were indistinguishable from the Women's Bureau coalition, and both they and the ERA proponents opposed the discriminatory features of the National Recovery Administration codes and discrimination against women workers during the Great Depression.^[19] By the 1940s, however, political party women had gone one of two routes: either they openly espoused the Equal Rights Amendment, reflecting their own constituency of middle-class professional women, or else they simply tried to minimize potential fallout from the conflict by giving their party enough female appointments to counteract accusations of indifference to women's issues.

If class made a difference in support for the ERA, race apparently did not. Black women's organizations split over the amendment along the same lines white women's associations did. The National Association of Colored Women, under the influence of Mary Church Terrell, a wealthy militant suffragist, endorsed the ERA, but the National Council of Negro Women, founded by Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935, voiced concern for protective labor legislation and in 1944 went on record opposing the

amendment. One member warned against the council's being led astray by the promise of equal rights: "We are being rocked to sleep by a trick phrase—one dear to us as to other underprivileged groups, and therefore calculated to dull our ability for discriminating between what is good and what appears to be good."^[20]

Representatives from black women's organizations often took part in meetings arranged by the Women's Bureau coalition and were more visible fighting the amendment than favoring it. Many factors were at work here. The Women's Bureau coalition was more hospitable to black women than was the National Woman's party, which purposively narrowed its membership and its goals. The Women's Bureau coalition identified black women, as it did working women, as a special group requiring its assistance in the fight for economic opportunities. On some occasions, the white, middle-class women's organizations making up the Women's Bureau coalition even undertook to combat racism as a separate endeavor. Thus, black women felt more empathy from these white women. The NWP, in contrast, had no interest in civil rights for blacks, except when it could insist that women be included, for the sake of equity, in governmental measures aimed at racial discrimination. Further, the NWP, which accepted ERA proponents of all persuasions, had a wide tolerance for racists, and Paul herself frequently expressed racist sentiments. When convenient, the NWP used racist arguments to persuade Southerners to favor the ERA—that white women should not be denied rights accorded to black men. Such a ploy would hardly make the organization appealing to black women.^[21]

But these considerations had a secondary role in determining black women's response to this struggle. Their position was clear: equal rights for women was a secondary issue; every black women's group considered the fight against racism its primary battle, more so since World War II, which had offered unprecedented opportunities for black women and men, as for white women. Black women were able to give up domestic jobs for higher-paying factory positions, and the number of black workers in government service more than tripled. War jobs encouraged blacks to move from rural areas in the South to Northern cities, and although the new mix of population often elicited

antagonism, the economic benefits were significant. The clashes brought the endemic problem of racism once again to the foreground, however, as did the treatment of black men in the armed services. Blacks disproportionately joined the military, and discrimination there seemed scorchingly hypocritical in view of the fact that American troops were fighting German racial supremacists. In 1942, James Farmer founded the Congress for Racial Equality; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People increased its membership nine-fold during the war.^[22]

The fight for civil rights for blacks and the struggle on behalf of women remained separate, however. Little overlap existed in the personnel engaged in these efforts, although both drew on the same liberal ideology. ERA supporters saw opportunities whenever the government appeared to move toward helping blacks, and both the Women's Bureau coalition and the National Woman's party found useful models for federal action in black activist strategies. But virtually everyone engaged in these efforts in the postwar period saw crucial distinctions between discrimination based on sex and that based on race.

All women activists shared the view that discrimination against women based on crude ideas of masculine superiority had to be eliminated, but the split between the ERA advocates and the Women's Bureau coalition itself reflected the general ambivalence toward women's roles. Both groups were trapped by the apparent verity that only women could care adequately for children. The Women's Bureau coalition tried to resolve the conflict between independence for women and motherhood; the NWP did not address it. The intensity of the disagreement between them came less from practical considerations than from the difference in the way each group handled this issue.

Although both sought to improve the way that women were treated in the public arena, the people associated with the Women's Bureau argued that women's special function in the world—to nurture families and society—ultimately took precedence over the need for individual opportunity. In their view, the American legal tradition rightly acknowledged the unique role of women by differentiation in the law. Ideally, this group believed, no married woman with small children would work.

Rose Schneiderman of the National Women's Trade Union League had remarked in 1908 that women who wanted to work under the same conditions as men "might be putting their own brothers or sweethearts, or husbands out of a job."^[23] In establishing the Women's Bureau in 1920, Secretary of Labor William Wilson stated: "All will agree that women in industry would not exist in an ideal scheme."^[24] Although necessity sometimes forced women into industrial occupations, the Women's Bureau coalition judged such work to be inappropriate for women, and the state within its rights to limit female activity in this kind of employment.

Inside these boundaries, however, the Women's Bureau coalition sought to expand opportunities for women and to eradicate many forms of outright economic and legal discrimination. They advocated entrance into the professions on an equal basis with men and asserted that the state had an obligation to guarantee the right of women to be rewarded according to their merits. (They did not, however, concern themselves with the problems of women professionals, whom they believed could fend for themselves.)

The National Woman's party, conversely, believed that every public activity befitting men was acceptable for women and that, indeed, it was desirable for all women to have careers. The party did not view woman as frail, in need of special protection, and largely passed over the fact the most women worked in low-paying jobs and had neither the resources nor the education to become professionals. Since many in the NWP's leadership were conservatives who opposed statutory interference in private enterprise, they further contended that the ERA rendered any additional legislation for women unnecessary. Like the Women's Bureau coalition, the NWP considered childrearing a woman's task, but it did not address the problem of how a woman could reconcile motherhood and professional responsibilities. Many party members had simply chosen not to marry; others ran households with the assistance of paid help.^[25]

The internal contradictions within each group's philosophy, created by the intractable problem of childcare responsibility, undermined the possibility that either could succeed in gaining its objectives, even if the social setting were receptive,

which it was not. The Women's Bureau coalition sought equal wages for women workers and access to higher-paying jobs, but at the same time it claimed a need for special protection for those workers. Employers quickly agreed that women workers needed special consideration, but they used that rationale to discriminate against them in wages and responsibility. For its part, the NWP asserted without convincing evidence that the ERA would eliminate the need for further legislation to give women equality of pay and job opportunity. The NWP took no account of extralegal causes of discrimination. So long as social norms decreed that women held the chief responsibility for childrearing and homemaking—a point the NWP did not contest—employers could justify differential treatment on the basis that a woman's commitment to work was limited as a man's was not. Thus, each plan of action addressed only a portion rather than the whole of the complex problem of women's status.^[26]

In the postwar period the argument over women's roles played itself out in Congress as well. The National Woman's party, advocating the Equal Rights Amendment, took the offensive, while the Women's Bureau coalition played defense.

The Equal Rights Amendment Ascendant, 1946

The battle over the Equal Rights Amendment dominated the politics of women's rights and opportunities in postwar Washington. Interested players either took sides in favor or against or else they ducked by supporting ostensibly neutral alternative measures that were in fact thinly disguised attempts to scuttle the amendment. But one way or the other, the ERA held center stage. For both adherents and opponents, a bold question awaited decision, especially in the aftermath of women's wartime contribution: were women now to be viewed as autonomous individuals, or did they remain tied in a special way to the family, essentially dependent on the protection of both husband and state?

Shortly before the war, the ERA had made some significant progress. In July 1937, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, a prestigious organization of politi-

cally active women numbering sixty-five thousand, established the ERA as a legislative priority. The following year, the Senate Judiciary Committee reported it, although without recommendation, to the floor of the Senate, the first time the amendment had reached the floor of either house since its introduction in 1923. It was quickly recommitted.^[27]

In May 1942 the Senate Judiciary Committee, under the leadership of chairman James Hughes (D-Del.), voted nine to three to report the amendment favorably, and in 1943 the ERA was the first resolution introduced in the House, cosponsored by forty-two members. The Senate Judiciary Committee again approved it, twelve to four, in May 1943, with a request for early and favorable action. The original amendment considered in 1923 had read: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and in every place subject to its jurisdiction"; in order to bring the language in line with the Nineteenth Amendment (granting women the right to suffrage), the Judiciary Committee adopted alternative wording provided by Alice Paul. The new proposed amendment ran: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of sex." The House Judiciary Committee, after heavy lobbying by Catholic organizations committed to women's traditional roles, voted fifteen to eleven against reporting the ERA to the House, but proponents of the measure were increasingly hopeful that it would carry on a wave of wartime enthusiasm.^[28]

The amendment's advocates exploited the wartime esteem for the competent woman and stepped up their lobbying efforts. Alice Paul revamped the organization of the National Woman's party and enlisted such luminaries as Mary Woolley, former president of Mount Holyoke College, the artist Georgia O'Keeffe, and the birth control reformer Margaret Sanger to stand up for the ERA. Other notable women also responded to Paul's entreaties: Pearl Buck, Helen Hayes, Katharine Hepburn, Judge Sarah Hughes, Margaret Mead, and Congress-women Margaret Chase Smith and Clare Boothe Luce.^[29]

The NWP kept itself a small, elite vanguard, but to benefit from the power of numbers it created an umbrella organization, the Women's Joint Legislative Committee (WJLC). A coalition of

all the organizations that endorsed the ERA, the combined membership of the WJLC totaled between five and six million members, a formidable constituency. The NWP orchestrated an intense lobbying campaign in Congress and within the political parties, dominating the movement for the ERA—sometimes to the annoyance of the other organizations involved. But if the NWP insisted on the authority, it also shouldered most of the administrative and financial burden.

The Women's Bureau led the counterattack. The ERA angered bureau director Mary Anderson, who had headed the bureau since its founding. Anderson had begun her working life in 1889, at age sixteen, as a stitcher in a shoe factory. By 1900 she had been elected president of her local, and in 1911 she gave up her factory job to become a full-time organizer.^[30] Devoted to laws protecting women workers, she viewed the ERA as an absurd theoretical pronouncement, unrelated to the realities of women's lives and natures. The bureau had been created to help women function as wives and mothers even if their economic circumstances drove them into the workforce; Anderson saw the defeat of the ERA as her first responsibility.

A legal treatise drawn up at her request by the solicitor of the Department of Labor, Douglas B. Maggs, became the department's fundamental position paper on the subject. It warned of injury to women as wives and mothers should the ERA be added to the Constitution. Ratification of the ERA, Maggs admonished, would unsettle the law for years. The extensive litigation would result, he was sure, in "highly undesirable" changes in the Social Security system; equal induction into the armed services; changes in workmen's compensation laws; upheaval in laws requiring husbands to support their families; and repeal of "reasonable protective legislation" with "consequent social loss." Moreover, Maggs argued, the attempt to extend such laws to men would render the statutes subject to constitutional attack. He concluded his paper by asserting that a constitutional amendment that would nullify statutory differences "having a reasonable and rational factual basis" would lead to "social and legal consequences which even the proponents of the proposal would deplore if they had the candor to recognize them." Maggs added in a footnote: "Fanatical adherence to a doctrinaire principle or

dogma such as the theoretical equality of rights of men and women is foreign to the spirit of Anglo-American legislation and jurisprudence. If the proposal is ratified it should be regarded as an unwholesome original development in the law."^[31] His characterization of the amendment's advocates as "fanatical" indicated accurately that the bureau did not foresee the possibility of compromise. Indeed, the two visions were irreconcilable.

When Frieda Miller assumed leadership of the Women's Bureau after Anderson's retirement in 1944, she pledged to continue the fight "with all the resources" at her command.^[32] Miller had begun her career in public service in 1929 under Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, as head of New York State's Women in Industry Service. Before joining the government, Miller had worked in organizations concerned with the protection of working women, particularly the Women's Trade Union League. Her antipathy to the Equal Rights Amendment was therefore of long standing. Out in front on the issue, she called the amendment "radical, dangerous and irresponsible," its potential effects "calamitous."^[33]

Both she and other ERA opponents recognized, however, that they stood on vulnerable ground with only a negative campaign. Acknowledging that some laws did discriminate against women and that some labor statutes had outlived their utility, the bureau began to examine state codes. Its mission was to find laws that needed to be eliminated and to identify those that continued to protect women but that would be at risk under the ERA. The bureau uncovered several categories of laws it defined as harmful to women; many limited the right of married women to own and convey property, to make contracts, to establish domicile, to control bequests, and to exercise parental authority. The bureau recommended that state legislatures repeal these statutes.^[34]

The National Women's party contended that elimination of laws one by one would take too long. It also attacked as a limitation on women's freedom such regulations as laws restricting work hours for women. Good labor laws should be extended to both sexes, the NWP insisted, bad ones simply expunged. In response to the bureau assertion that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited "unreasonable" laws, the NWP pointed out cor-

rectly that the Supreme Court had never interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit discrimination against women.^[35]

The momentum seemed to be with the National Woman's party and its wealthy, influential, single-minded members. In 1944 the Republican National Convention included a plank supporting the ERA, as it had in 1940. Indeed, from its inception enthusiasm for the amendment had been stronger among Republicans, and the argument that protective labor legislation would be affected won less sympathy from probusiness Republicans than from liberal Democrats. In 1940 representatives of the League of Women Voters, who had lobbied against the proposal in the platform committee, had dubbed its inclusion "the shock of the century," and a reporter for the New York Times had called the argument "the most extensive and portentous feminine controversy in the history of the country."^[36] Now in 1944, however, the fight over the Democratic platform resulted in victory for ERA advocates as well. The Democrats, too, saw women earning a place for themselves as independent individuals and needed to encourage that position—at least for the duration of the war. Eleanor Roosevelt failed to speak against the amendment as she had in 1940, citing the confusion of the war and the uncertainties of the peace. It was difficult to argue in favor of labor legislation to limit women's hours when men were dying on foreign battlefields. The Democrats also felt the pressure of the Republican pronouncement. Were Democrats less committed to equality for women? The general disorganization of the opposition allowed ERA supporters, among them Perle Mesta and Emma Guffey Miller, a Democratic committeewoman from Pennsylvania and the sister of Senator Joseph Guffey, successfully to capitalize on women's war efforts. The Democratic plank finally read: "We recommend to the Congress the submission of a constitutional amendment on equal rights for women."^[37]

The National Committee to Defeat the Unequal Rights Amendment

Alarmed by the successes of ERA advocates, especially the platform victories, and fearing a Senate vote, the Women's Bureau

coalition called a meeting in September 1944 "to organize a National Directing Committee to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment." Twenty-seven groups decided to coalesce under the rubric of the "National Committee to Defeat the UnEqual Rights Amendment" (NCDURA). The membership consisted principally of labor organizations and the national women's organizations making up the Women's Bureau coalition. NCDURA decided that in addition to lobbying against the ERA, it would set up local branches in each state to combat the ERA directly and to undermine its support by eliminating discriminatory state laws. Because even members of this committee could not agree on which laws genuinely discriminated against women, that determination was left up to the state organizations.^[38] By June 1945 fifteen state committees had been formed, and the group, which had initially planned to operate for only six months, decided to continue functioning "until the end of the emergency." NCDURA's roster was a veritable roll call of liberal organizations, now comprising forty-three national organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union.^[39]

Although advocacy of individual rights had become identified, since the New Deal, with the liberal wing of the Democratic party, support for the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress came mostly from Republicans and conservative Democrats from the South and the Southwest. On its face, the ERA was appealing—after all, it mandated equal treatment under law for half the population. Opposition to it, rather than support of it, required explanation, especially now that both parties had endorsed it. In their own defense, opponents cited the threat to protective labor laws; but those legislators who were indifferent to the labor law question had little reason to contest their party's official position. So probusiness Republicans and antilabor Southern Democrats found themselves on the same side of the issue. Advocacy of the Equal Rights Amendment served, too, as a defense against the accusation that the South opposed civil rights: some Southern legislators held that equality for white women ought to come before, or at the very least with, equality for black men and women.^[40] Some liberals accepted the argument that women deserved constitutional equality and that government regulation of the workplace could extend to both men

and women workers. The array of arguments concerning the ERA resulted in peculiar alliances on the issue: both the vigorously liberal Claude Pepper, a Democratic senator from Florida, and the ultraconservative Howard W. Smith, a Democratic representative from Virginia, favored the amendment. But in general, conservatives, finding the arguments in favor of free enterprise and individual opportunity especially appealing, tended to favor the amendment, whereas liberals, who espoused the idea that government had a positive responsibility to protect women and the family through regulation, were more likely to oppose the ERA.

For the moment, ERA advocates continued to carry the day. Citing the party platform pledges, the House Judiciary Committee in July 1945 reported the amendment favorably (by a vote of fifteen to seven) for the first time since its introduction twenty-one years before.^[41] The NWP's revelation of support from Cardinal Dennis Dougherty "caused a minor sensation" in the Senate subcommittee hearing, and, primed by vigilant lobbying on the part of NWP workers, it voted in favor of the ERA four to one.^[42]

In an effort to quell the tide of support, Frances Perkins urged President Truman to meet with the opponents of the ERA; he agreed to see them in September. In 1944 then Senator Truman had written to Emma Guffey Miller: "I am in sympathy with [the] fight for the Equal Rights Amendment because I think it will improve the standard of living." Despite Miller's entreaties, however, Truman had not reiterated his favorable statement.^[43] Now confronted with a contingent of well-known liberal women, Truman was hardly willing to disavow his support for protective labor legislation. Administration aides trying to craft a position for the president felt besieged. "This is a tough baby," presidential aide William Hassett observed to David Niles, an administrative assistant. Niles concurred: "This Equal Rights thing is dynamite which ever way you place it." Matthew Connelly, the president's secretary, finally signed the letter to NCDURA chair Dorothy McAllister. The president, he wrote, "plans to give some thought to the Equal Rights Amendment in the near future and is grateful for the careful analysis you have made of this problem." Aware that the issue was both

complex and charged, President Truman issued no further public statements for or against the Equal Rights Amendment.^[44]

The Senate Judiciary Committee, voting eleven to four, reported the ERA favorably on January 21, 1946. The measure now stood ready for a vote in both houses of Congress. Supporters and opponents lobbied vigorously. Under the letterhead of the Industrial League for Equality (an NWP creation designed to suggest labor support for the amendment), Congress members received a copy of a 1913 editorial by American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers asserting that the "industrial problems of women are not isolated, but inextricably associated with those of men." An excerpt from the Supreme Court's 1941 decision upholding the Fair Labor Standards Act noted that hours and wage laws could now safely be applied to both men and women.^[45] The other side sent a letter opposing the amendment, signed by Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, Carrie Chapman Catt (the leader of the National American Women Suffrage Association when the suffrage amendment was ratified), and several other notable American women.^[46]

When the roll was called in the Senate on July 19, 1946, the amendment won a majority—thirty-eight to thirty-five—but not the two-thirds majority needed for victory. With twenty-three of the favorable votes Republican, plus two absentee Republicans recorded in favor, the total was one shy of two-thirds of the thirty-nine Republican senators. Democrats made up fifteen of the pro votes, with two absent Democrats indicating their approval as well, accounting for less than a third of the fifty-six Senate Democrats. Only four of the assenting Democrats were from states outside the South or Southwest.^[47]

Crushed by the loss, the NWP complained that the vote had come without advance notice, when several pro-ERA senators were away from Washington. But opponent Senator Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.) insisted that many ERA supporters had voted in favor only because they knew the measure would fail.^[48] The conflict had taken a toll, as later events showed: it was long before support gained such strength again. Several senators had promised that they would not vote in favor of the amendment in the future, NCDURA informed its membership, now that they knew more about its implications.^[49] The New York

Times expressed its pleasure in an editorial: "Motherhood cannot be amended, and we are glad the Senate didn't try."^[50] The measure never came to a vote in the House.

The Times rightly marked motherhood as the central issue. The failure of the ERA hinged not on the chance absence of its supporters but on the unwillingness of the nation as a whole to affirm the independent equality of women at a moment when the restoration of "normal" family life constituted a preeminent objective. Still reeling from wartime and conversion upheaval, with industry unsettled by strikes and families fighting inflation, equal treatment for women in the public sphere seemed beside the point. Women were needed at home.

But the impulse that had led to the ERA vote could not be entirely submerged. Both equity and the place women had gained in the workforce supported the call for some response from the federal government. The battle over the ERA went on through the next decade, a metaphor for the largely unacknowledged struggle being waged as women attempted to reconcile their home and public lives. For activist women in Washington, the amendment continued to dominate the political scene, generating alternative legislative proposals, all of which suffered from the difficulty of coming to terms with the changing role of women.

2
"Reasonable Distinctions": An Alternative to the ERA

In 1945 and 1946, the respect engendered by women's performance during World War II had lent unprecedented energy to the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. Even after Congress decided not "to amend motherhood," the New York Herald Tribune , calling the amendment "a measure of simple justice that is not to be denied,"^[1] predicted rightly that the ERA would reappear on the legislative docket. Without missing a beat, the National Woman's party had begun to collect new statements of support from political figures, and in January 1947 John Robsion (R-Ky.) introduced the measure in the House, declaring its passage by Congress to be "at hand."^[2] But the political climate had already begun to change in the mere year and a half since the war's end. The impulse toward women's equality, which had never really held the field, continued to dissipate, and the backlash, with its insistent message that women stay home, took stronger hold. If the ERA was out of step with that prescription, alternative proposals appeared no more effective at resolving the tension between women's two roles.

As part of the conservative reaction, women's magazines launched an attack on feminist ideas, following the lead of a 1947 book, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex . Its authors, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, described feminism as a "deep illness," characterized by a hatred of men and a taste for lechery. Women's quest for education, employment, and political power represented, they asserted, an attempt at symbolic castration. Rather than pursue such misbegotten goals, the healthy woman would choose to create a rewarding life for herself based on mothering and dependency, in tune with her biological and psy-

chological destiny. Although sociologists offered thoughtful counterarguments, these usually appeared in inaccessible scholarly journals. In any case, Lundberg and Farnham had struck the note of the times: women belonged at home.^[3]

After fifteen years of depression and war, American women and men sought a haven in the home—stability, security, and the warmth of family in the place of uncertainty, fear, and loneliness. No one had to force women into marriage and motherhood.^[4] The marriage rate, 84.5 per thousand women in 1945, shot up to 120.7 in 1946 and 106.8 in 1947; fluctuating between 78 and 98 per thousand for the next ten years, it fell off again only in 1958.^[5]

Yet with only the briefest dip in the immediate postwar period, the number of women employed continued to rise. Many women did not want to, or could not, leave the labor force to be full-time wives and mothers. They voted with their feet in the postwar period and throughout the 1950s, taking jobs in the face of public disapproval but in the solid company of their peers. Between 1951 and 1963, married women with husbands present and children between the ages of six and seventeen increased their labor force participation rate from 30.3 percent to 41.5 percent. They worked to buy food and pay the rent in the face of a staggering inflation rate, but they also sought an education for their children and a higher standard of living for the entire family.^[6]

Women also went back to school. Although the GI bill offered educational opportunities almost exclusively to men, and so the proportion of women in schools declined compared to men in several years, women made substantial gains. The number of women Ph.D.'s, though small, doubled between 1948 and 1960, and the number of women who held master's degrees (thirteen thousand in 1948) increased by 80 percent in the same period. More than 103,000 women earned bachelor's degrees in 1950; by 1959 the number had risen to over 127,000.^[7]

Under penalty of being labeled neurotic (à la Lundberg and Farnham), women workers declined to offer a feminist defense of their right to work. Their families, they insisted, needed the money they earned. They did not challenge male prerogatives in the prestigious professions, nor did they overtly demand a

redefinition of sex roles within the home. Although many states gave husbands control of the earnings women brought home and some barred women from certain occupations, working women in general took little notice of legislation concerning their right to jobs, to equal pay with men, or to constitutional protection against discrimination.^[8] Women leaders were therefore hard pressed to argue that such legislation demanded immediate attention.

Advocates of civil rights for black Americans had no such problem. Faced with public demonstrations, retaliatory violence, and pressure from notable Americans, President Truman had taken a number of steps to improve the lot of black Americans. In December 1946 he had created a presidential committee on civil rights, which issued a report the following year; in 1948 he banned discrimination based on race in federal employment, and barred segregation in the armed services. In December 1951 the newly formed Committee on Government Contract Compliance began to monitor federal contractors for discrimination. The National Woman's party demanded that women be included in Truman's executive orders, but the request was ignored. None of the largely white women's organizations interested in the Equal Rights Amendment or other measures had tried to forge an alliance with civil rights groups; the NWP did not usually even support measures seeking to eliminate racial discrimination. Worse, it responded in anger to the notion that blacks would have rights denied to women. Still, the federal measures undertaken on behalf of blacks served as models in the fight to eradicate similar problems for women. Only months after Truman named his presidential committee on civil rights some women leaders made much the same proposal for women, as a way to meet the threat of the ERA.

The "Status Bill"

Aware of the activity of the National Woman's party and anxious about the continuing strength of the constitutional amendment, ERA opponents in 1947 decided to follow Eleanor Roosevelt's advice to construct a positive alternative piece of legislation, one that would eliminate "unfair" discrimination in the law without

the supposedly deleterious effects of the ERA. The proposed joint resolution became known as the "Status Bill" or the Taft-Wadsworth bill (after its sponsors Senator Robert A. Taft [R-Ohio] and Representative James W. Wadsworth [R-N.Y.]).^[9] Seeking a less negative image, the National Committee to Defeat the UnEqual Rights Amendment, which had drafted the bill, changed its name to the National Committee on the Status of Women (NCSW).^[10]

The members of the NCSW chose to offer an alternative "joint resolution" rather than a constitutional amendment for several strategic reasons. First, they believed that because a resolution required only a simple majority in each house of Congress, it would be easier to obtain than a constitutional amendment, which required a two-thirds majority in Congress and then approval by three-quarters of the state legislatures. Second, they feared that any amendment they offered might itself be amended to resemble the ERA more closely than they would wish. Finally, they felt that any constitutional amendment concerning women would invite litigation, and the outcome of a court fight could jeopardize the legislation they wished to safeguard.^[11]

The Status Bill had two main components. The first was an unusual statement of "policy" for the United States, one that sought to acknowledge the desire both to enhance women's autonomy and to reaffirm their connection to the family. Apparently presuming that the two aims were reconcilable, the Status Bill declared that "in law and its administration no distinctions on the basis of sex shall be made except such as are reasonably justified by differences in physical structure, biological, or social function." The proponents of this bill noted approvingly that, although such a section "prohibited" sex discrimination, it permitted differentiation on "reasonable" grounds, such as those underlying protective labor legislation only for women and military service only for men, "based on rational and commonly accepted assumptions and beliefs."^[12]

The other key section seemed more unambiguously aimed at change. It created a Commission on the Legal Status of Women, composed of seven members appointed by the president, to "make a full and complete study . . . of the economic, civil, social and political status of women, and the nature and extent of dis-

criminations based on sex throughout the United States, its Territories, and Possessions." The bill also required federal agencies to comply with the policy statement and urged that states take similar actions.^[13]

According to its drafters, the bill constituted a compromise with the ERA. They knew that the National Woman's party would not accept it: "Frankly [the bill] is not framed to win the support of individuals who would seem to be satisfied with nothing less than a declaration, in fundamental law, that women, however different from men in their physical structure, biological or social function, must be accorded, by governments, identical treatment with men." But they argued that "all who earnestly desire to remove outmoded sex discriminations in law can at long last unite" behind their "practicable working program," whether or not they supported the ERA.^[14]

With its policy statement, however, the bill could not serve as a compromise. If the law could take note of social function as well as physical structure and biological characteristics, virtually any discrimination could be justified. Even committed members of the Women's Bureau coalition took exception. The executive secretary of the New York Women's Trade Union League wrote to its national office, which supported the bill: "Please tell me, what is a social function of women as distinguished from a social function of men? If you are implying that it is the social function of women to rear the children . . . , keep the home fires burning and to be supported by their husbands, then I say to you that you have opened wide and fastened back with iron bars the door to eliminating by law all married women from employment. . . . A continuation of this reasoning takes us into the question of equal pay."^[15] Several members of the Labor Advisory Council of the Women's Bureau also felt uneasy about the phrasing. Esther Peterson of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and Katherine Ellickson of the research department of the Congress of Industrial Organizations requested that a preliminary definition of "reasonable distinctions" be made to guide the presidential commission the bill proposed to establish.^[16]

ERA proponents expressed markedly less enthusiasm. The General Federation of Women's Clubs asserted that enough data on women existed to make the commission superfluous,

and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs characterized the Status Bill as "sniping at the Equal Rights Amendment." The NWP issued a statement labeling the bill "unnecessary and unjustified," opening the "floodgates" to discrimination against women through the policy statement.^[17]

Nevertheless, proponents of the Status Bill regarded it as a method "to break the deadlock over the so-called Equal Rights Amendment." Eager for some movement, Eleanor Roosevelt, all seven women members of Congress, the League of Women Voters, and former directors of the women's divisions of both party national committees endorsed it. So did some ERA supporters, such as the New York Herald Tribune, which argued that the commission would "inevitably" reach the conclusion that protective labor laws should be extended to men. The Women's Bureau lobbied actively for the bill, although the White House remained silent.^[18]

The Status Bill failed as an effort of conciliation. Solidly identified with anti-ERA forces, the paradoxical policy statement engendered enough controversy that Congress could hardly enact it in the interest of accommodation. The ERA had been in both platforms, and both House and Senate judiciary committees were on record in favor of it. Thus, in the spring of 1948, both committees once again reported the amendment favorably and postponed consideration of the Taft-Wadsworth measure. Action to remove the ERA from the parties' platforms also proved unavailing, thanks to the efforts of prominent party women in support of the measure.^[19]

The ERA was not an issue during the 1948 campaign. Beset within his party by objections to his civil rights measures and assaulted by Henry Wallace's new Progressive Party for his belligerent stance toward the Soviets, Harry Truman's defeat seemed assured. But much to everyone's surprise, Truman pulled the election out of the grasp of Republican Thomas E. Dewey, and the Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress (although by only twelve votes in the Senate). India Edwards, who, as head of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, had planned the program to get out the women's vote, emphasized inflation, not women's rights. Relatively few women held or ran for public office. In

1949, fewer than 3 percent of the nation's state legislators were women: only one woman sat in the Senate, and eight in the House of Representatives.^[20]

The new count revealed, however, that the ERA stood a reasonably good chance of passage in the Senate. In view of the lack of enthusiasm for the Status Bill, ERA opponents looked around for another measure that would provide either a positive alternative, or at least a way to maintain the status quo with respect to protective labor laws. They devised such a safety catch in the Hayden amendment.^[21]

The Hayden Amendment

In 1921, when the National Woman's party first proposed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women, it had considered a proviso to exempt laws that applied to conditions of women's work, hoping to win support from the women's groups who advocated those laws. It was a compromise unacceptable to both sides. The members of the Women's Bureau coalition found it insufficient protection, and the NWP, irritated by the coalition's response, declared that special laws for women ought to be eliminated because they restricted women's right to employment on their own terms. A Wisconsin decision concerning an "equal rights" law passed in that state substantiated this view. That law had included a clause exempting "special protections and privileges" for women, and in 1923 the state attorney general had ruled that the state could continue to forbid women to work as employees of the Wisconsin legislature because that job required "unseasonable" hours of work.^[22]

Nevertheless, adversaries of the ERA held to their view that the addition of a section to the ERA expressly exempting protective labor legislation would not prove adequate. In 1944 the solicitor of the Department of Labor had warned that too many kinds of protective laws existed—an amendment could not exempt them all: no matter how carefully such a provision were drafted, some desirable laws might yet be vulnerable to elimination through the ERA. Moreover, the possibility existed that such an amendent to the ERA could be adopted by one house of Congress and then eliminated by the other. Still, in the face

of the apparent popularity of the ERA, the National Committee on the Status of Women had decided that it had no choice but to support a safeguarding clause.^[23]

The Senate debate on the ERA in the Eighty-first Congress began on January 23, 1950, and continued for three days. Proponents cited platform pledges, favorable committee reports, the support of well-known women's organizations, and the unfairness of discrimination based on sex. Opponents defended protective laws for women, cited labor opposition, and expressed fear of unknown consequences. Senator Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.), an ERA opponent and introducer of the Status Bill, claimed that the ERA could "eliminate rape as a crime" and lead to joint bathroom facilities. Senator Andrew Schoeppel (R-Kans.) argued on the other side that giving women constitutional equality would help counter Communist propaganda (a salient issue with the intensification of fighting in Korea).^[24]

On January 25, near the close of the debate, Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.) offered his amendment. Following instructions from the Women's Bureau, Hayden proposed that a new section be added to the ERA: "The provisions of this article shall not be construed to impair any rights, benefits, or exemptions conferred by law upon persons of the female sex." Hayden offered the following explanation: "In the beginning, God made them different when male and female created He them." He went on in a personal vein, noting that his mother had borne and breast-fed him, that his father had built them a home and provided food and clothing on the "wild Apache-infested frontier," and that neither could have played the other's role. In the few minutes remaining for debate, Claude Pepper (D-Fla.) protested that Hayden was "emasculating" the ERA. The senators, however, eagerly took advantage of the opportunity to go on record in favor of both equal rights and special laws for women. They voted for the Hayden rider fifty-one to thirty-one and the ERA sixty-three to nineteen, well over the two-thirds vote required for a constitutional amendment.^[25]

The Hayden amendment caught ERA adherents by surprise. Because of the short time between Hayden's motion and the vote, ERA backers Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Me.) and Rep. Katharine St. George (R-N.Y.) had no opportunity to

approach their colleagues and explain that they wanted the rider defeated. Thus the ERA went to the House with the Hayden rider attached.^[26]

ERA adversaries considered the amendment with the Hayden rider only slightly less objectionable than the unaltered version, but ERA proponents repudiated it completely: in their view, the rider effectively negated the body of the amendment. NWP leader Alice Paul stated flatly, "It is impossible to imagine the Constitution containing two such paragraphs."^[27] If given no other choice, they preferred the bill dead.

In the House, the ERA faced not only the threat of the Hayden rider but also the unshakable antipathy of House Judiciary Chairman Emanuel Celler. The liberal New Yorker had become committee chair in 1949, and he had no intention of allowing the ERA to reach the House floor even in its amended form. Katharine St. George had collected enough signatures of representatives to discharge Celler's committee, but fear of the Hayden amendment led her to withdraw her petition.^[28]

ERA opponents had succeeded in finding a technique to undercut the ideal of complete legal equality for women. The Hayden amendment proved unbeatable, so long as no outside social or political impetus pressured Congress to choose unequivocally between equal treatment for women or a legally defined special family responsibility. If forced to vote on the measure, members of Congress could now have it both ways: equality and special privileges for women. Moreover, with the Hayden rider, the ERA proved unacceptable to its initial backers, making it unlikely to pass—the outcome the anti-ERA forces desired most. If it were to pass, the rider offered a safeguard for the legislation they deemed essential to the welfare of women workers.

ERA advocates were stymied. Eleanor Roosevelt, now at the United Nations and sensitive to the international implications of constitutional equality for women, backpedaled on her long-standing objection to the amendment, but it made no difference. President Truman stayed out of the crossfire. With no genuine support for an amended ERA, and with no grassroots enthusiasm for a radical change in women's legal status, stalemate was a foregone conclusion. The NWP therefore looked to

the 1952 election, hoping for a Republican presidential victory to move the amendment forward.^[29]

Eisenhower: For . . . But Not Quite

The NWP and other ERA supporters were optimistic after the 1952 Republican victory because they believed that Republicans would be less sensitive to pressure from women labor activists. Indeed, retention of the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act had been a campaign issue, with the Republicans coming out in favor of keeping it. In addition, Republicans had a longer history of support for the ERA, as the first party to introduce it in Congress in 1923 and the first, in 1940, to include support for the amendment in its platform.

But President Eisenhower held very conservative social views, and the Eisenhower period was profoundly one of social consolidation. Eisenhower eschewed a deliberately conceived and openly executed program aimed at social reform. In 1954 the Supreme Court decreed, in Brown v. Board of Education, that states could no longer segregate children by race in the public schools. Rather than welcoming this overdue gesture in support of racial equality, Eisenhower was angered by the decision and its intentional initiation of such broad social change by federal action. Confronted with overt resistance to the federal system on the part of some Southern states, Eisenhower took action against the segregationists only when national integrity appeared genuinely threatened.^[30]

Eisenhower disliked overt social manipulation by the federal government, but measures passed by Congress—as federal aid for education and home and highway construction—wrought extraordinary alterations in the country's landscape and demographics. Government support of industry included a massive influx of federal dollars, all in the name of defense, into the chemical, aerospace, electronics, and computer industries, creating thousands more white-collar jobs for women to fill. The money built the economy. Between 1945 and 1960 the GNP increased more than twofold, and per capita income rose 35 percent. By 1960 nine million families had become new home-

owners. More than ever before, Americans were suburban white-collar workers, well educated and well off.^[31]

Although Eisenhower insisted that government should be restrained, he did give small signs of promise to ERA supporters. For one, he replaced the Democratic Women's Bureau director, Frieda Miller, with a Republican state official, Alice Leopold. Miller had been only the second director in the bureau's thirty-year history, and by tradition bureau directors did not change with a change in administration. Mary Anderson, appointed by the Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, had stayed through three Republican administrations. The Women's Bureau had long been the exclusive terrain of the liberal reformers and labor women who had lobbied for its creation, and Miller and her colleagues were not only hurt when she was replaced but also alarmed. Eisenhower's action suggested that the bureau would become less closely tied to its constituents and, therefore, presumably less a champion of women's welfare and more a tool of the administration.

Mary Anderson had been a trade unionist; Miller had worked with the National Consumers League before accepting an appointment as Industrial Commissioner in the New York State government (a post Frances Perkins had filled before her). Each represented a wing of the Women's Bureau coalition, devoted to the welfare of working-class women.

Leopold's career differed sharply. A businesswoman, she had started out as personnel director for a department store and then had owned a children's toy company. Active in Republican politics, she had won a seat in the Connecticut state legislature and gone on to become Connecticut's secretary of state in 1950. She was not unsympathetic to women's labor issues and had in fact authored Connecticut's equal pay law; she had also championed protective labor legislation. But she shifted the perspective of the Women's Bureau. For the first time, the bureau devoted part of its resources to the examination of issues concerning professional women. And as the Women's Bureau coalition feared, Leopold took the bureau out of the ERA fight.^[32]

Alice Paul thought that Leopold herself supported the amendment but that she could not make an unambiguous state-

ment in favor of the ERA because of opposition from the Women's Bureau staff. Leopold never did champion the measure, but she did consistently refuse to take any action to oppose the bill, and by stating on several occasions to ERA opponents and supporters, as well as to members of Congress, that the bureau no longer took a position against the ERA, she left a gaping hole in the leadership against the measure.^[33]

To the disappointment of ERA sponsors, however, her position made little difference with respect to the fate of the measure. The Hayden amendment had become an effective weapon in the anti-ERA arsenal, and with little pressure on Congress outside of the small group of Washington lobbyists the ERA had no real chance. The National Committee on the Status of Women, whose agenda had narrowed to the Status Bill, disbanded when the Hayden rider proved more successful in scuttling the ERA.

ERA adversaries easily maintained the upper hand, even after the Republicans had gained control of both houses of Congress in 1953. In May the Senate Judiciary Committee reported the bill favorably, and by July 64 senators had pledged to vote for the amendment on the floor, as had 255 members of the House. But Carl Hayden offered his proviso on the Senate floor when the measure came up in mid-July, and once again the Senate approved both Hayden's clause (by a vote of 58 to 25) and the ERA (73 to 11).^[34]

As before, the amended ERA created not a measure tolerable to both sides of the women's political community but one acceptable to neither. When NWP sleuths determined that the House would endorse the Senate "compromise," they directed their supporters to kill the hybrid creation. Janus-faced, the ERA with the Hayden amendment incorporated two contradictory views of women—equal but not equal. So long as the nation remained divided, the Congress would not choose.

Likewise, administration signals on this issue remained ambiguous throughout the decade. The Department of Labor, under the direction of James P. Mitchell, had held steady in its opposition to the ERA, but the White House had begun to give other indications. In a 1954 meeting with Katharine St. George Eisenhower had, according to her report, offered his private

support. (The fall elections, however, put the Democrats back in control in both houses, vitiating Eisenhower's backing, even such as it was.) National Woman's party members began to receive invitations to Women's Bureau meetings, and in December 1955 Gerald D. Morgan, special counsel to the president, had written to Nina Price of the NWP that, because it had been included in the party platform, the ERA would continue to be part of the Republican program and that Eisenhower was "encouraged by the number of sponsors of the amendment in the House and Senate."^[35] (Secretary Mitchell countered, when he received a copy of Morgan's letter, that the platform did not commit the administration to a particular bill.) Notes of a prepress conference White House briefing in April 1956 suggest that the White House staff did not itself truly understand the basis for the dispute. A memorandum remarked: "Equal Rights for women came up, but nobody seemed to know exactly what was meant."^[36]

In 1956 the ERA stayed in both party platforms, and a high-placed Eisenhower campaign official succeeded in arranging what all regarded as a coup for ERA supporters. Dorothy Houghton, cochairman of the Citizens for Eisenhower campaign, pledged that she would try to get the president to make a statement of support for the amendment. To the satisfaction of ERA enthusiasts, in an address given to a packed house at Madison Square Garden in New York City on October 25, a mere twelve days before the election, Eisenhower uttered these words: "And we shall—with intelligence and sympathetic understanding—do all in our power to make more secure, for all citizens, their civil rights. And, as a special item of this matter, we shall seek, as we promised in our Platform, to assure women everywhere in our land equality of rights."^[37] Although the candidate had not in fact promised with this pledge support for any specific measure, it gained him much affection from Republican women. Eisenhower won a personal landslide (which probably did not owe much to this particular statement), but the Democrats retained their control of both houses of Congress.

Neither his campaign promise nor his 1957 budget message, which also referred to equal rights for women, made a differ-

ence in the amendment's fate—nor could it have. Moreover, Eisenhower's sincerity in championing the women's cause, even if in fact he favored the ERA, seemed questionable in light of his other behavior. The minutes of a February 1957 meeting of the secretary of labor's policy committee noted that the secretary inferred a lack of whole-hearted commitment to the ERA on the president's part: "Pres. for—but not quite." In view of his own reservations and the president's recent messages, his own posture, he decided, would be cautious: "Secretary will fudge."^[38] The White House indeed responded to letters assuring the inquirers of the president's continuing interest in the subject of equal rights for women, but without specifically mentioning the Equal Rights Amendment.^[39] Eisenhower further unsettled ERA advocates by his response to reporter May Craig at an August press conference. When the well-known correspondent for the Portland, Maine, Press-Herald asked the president why he had not worked harder for the ERA, Eisenhower replied, laughing: "Well, it's hard for a mere man to believe that woman doesn't have equal rights. But, actually, this is the first time that this has come to my specific attention now since, oh, I think a year or so. . . . I just probably haven't been active enough in doing something about it."^[40] ERA supporters were shocked at both the president's response and his laughter; they had been under the impression that he had received and read their letters. Administration support was tepid, the Hayden amendment seemed unbeatable. The unadorned Equal Rights Amendment did not express the national sentiment, and it remained an unachieved objective.

The AFL-CIO Department of Legislation, headed by labor lobbyist Andrew Biemiller, maintained a cursory anti-ERA lobbying effort in the absence of effort from the Women's Bureau and other groups. The labor federation recognized that many legislators were sympathetic.^[41] As lobbyist Hyman Bookbinder put it, being for the ERA "is like being against sin, I suppose";^[42] AFL-CIO officials even admitted that "many of our own people . . . are surprized [sic ] to find labor opposed to it."^[43] But the labor organization had no internal qualms about its position or its support for protective labor laws. In fact, a half-hearted attempt by the American Civil Liberties Union to craft yet an-

other compromise on the ERA elicited derision. One labor official responded: "If the ladies who are now worrying about this did not have this to worry about they would find something else. Vive le (sex) difference!"^[44] Biemiller made it clear to Senator Hayden that the organization was depending on him to continue to introduce his proviso. The Industrial Union Department urged affiliate unions to "keep up a constant barrage of communications to members of Congress," a campaign coordinated by legislative representative Esther Peterson.^[45] Although the Senate Judiciary Committee reported the amendment favorably in May 1959, by a vote of nine to three, the Senate in July 1960 voted both to adopt the Hayden rider and to recommit the bill to committee.

The course of the amendment's fortunes suggested that defeat of the measure throughout the decade rested on a national unwillingness to restructure sex roles, an unwillingness revealed in the success of the Hayden rider to the otherwise ideologically appealing amendment. The ERA stood little chance of passage because it represented an affirmation of absolute equality for women at a moment when heightened recognition of sex roles served a number of national functions, most important of which was the re-creation of a stable and familiar society in the wake of the social chaos of wartime. Engaged in the contest, some ERA opponents argued that only a more sharply focused piece of legislation would avoid the conflict that the ERA engendered. They proposed an equal-pay law.

3
"Specific Bills for Specific Ills": Equal Pay Legislation

The cardinal premise of the Women's Bureau coalition held that the Equal Rights Amendment would do little to help women; discrimination could be eliminated only by the prudent enactment of "specific bills for specific ills." The "specific bill" offered by ERA opponents in 1945 sought to protect equal pay for equal work for women in private employment. Such a strategy possessed several advantages: it gave opponents of the ERA a positive goal rather than a negative one; it took advantage of the wartime impulse to recognize the contribution of women in jobs traditionally done by men; it allowed a focus on unfair practices that genuinely harmed women and their families, sidelining discussion about whether "theoretical" statements of equality were of value; it proposed a change in the law that was less unsettling than the ERA because it was so much narrower; and it placed ERA adversaries squarely in favor of eliminating discrimination.

But this bill faced a major problem in the postwar world. Higher wage rates would draw more women into the workforce, not encourage them to stay home. Thus the impulse to reward women for their wartime efforts ran counter to another current: the fear that returning soldiers would face job shortages. Making it more lucrative for women to stay in the workforce would hinder men's efforts to find jobs. Moreover, federal support, in the form of legislation guaranteeing equal opportunity in the workplace, would appear to confirm the social shifts the war had produced. The war had made working women visible—and that visibility made people nervous. The fight for equal pay once again played out the tension between institutionalizing the war-

time gains of women in the public arena and reinstalling them as keepers of the hearth.

In addition, the quest for equal pay legislation was hampered by the ERA struggle. Because it had been proposed by ERA opponents, some advocates of the amendment viewed the legislation with suspicion. The ERA continued to be the chief legislative goal of the groups that favored it, and the primary supporters of equal pay never devoted equivalent resources to getting their bill through. The split between the pro- and anti-ERA forces made it more difficult for women to overcome both the "back to the home" sentiment and the conservative animus against business regulation in general.

By the end of the following decade, however, both the economic and the social context had changed. Women had clearly become a permanent part of the labor force—bound securely to women's jobs. The expanding peacetime economy, in fact, had created more service and clerical jobs than ever before, so employers welcomed—indeed, sought—women workers. In assuming these jobs, women continued to bear the major responsibility for their families' welfare, so the burden on husbands of working wives was small. With the newly generated need for women workers, the sentiment in favor of equal pay legislation began to grow, and it soon stood a real chance of passage. But social and economic supports were necessary, not sufficient, conditions. Real success required a more favorable political situation.

In the postwar period, President Truman gave the reformers seeking an equal pay law reason to believe he would support such an effort. After assuming office on Franklin Roosevelt's death, he made clear gestures to identify himself with his predecessor's liberal program, designed to encourage growth and progress in the postwar period. He promoted national health insurance and aid to education and, in particular, took a stand against discrimination by issuing executive orders banning prejudicial actions against black Americans in the civil service and in the military. Such efforts made it plain that discrimination against any group in the United States—even women—could be combatted through federal measures.^[1]

At the same time, though, the government had focused its sights on trying to cap the skyrocketing inflation rate and maxi-

mizing the employment of former GIs. Yet President Truman seemed unable to craft an effective program to meet these needs, or to deal with labor unrest that led to strikes in the steel, automobile, electric, coal, maritime, and railroad industries.^[2] In the 1946 elections Republicans took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in fourteen years. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed over the president's veto in June 1947, circumscribed the right of unions to control hiring. Policy goals sought to keep wage rates down and the employment of males up. Nevertheless, women activists in Washington, interested in advancing women's status even while maintaining "reasonable distinctions" between the sexes, worked to raise women's wages and assert their right to jobs.

The quest began in February 1945 when the National Committee to Defeat the UnEqual Rights Amendment drafted a bill to be introduced by Senators Wayne Morse (R-Oreg.) and Claude Pepper (D-Fla.). NCDURA's desire to eliminate a prevalent and serious problem for women workers was geniune, and it solicited the backing of all women's organizations, both favorable to and hostile toward the ERA. In order to separate equal pay from its opposition to the ERA, NCDURA established an independent national equal pay committee, which the pro-ERA BPW quickly agreed to join.^[3]

But however sincere the motives of supporters of equal pay, the impetus for the measure was the desire to divert attention from the ERA. NCDURA counseled its members to urge legislators to vote both in favor of the equal pay bill and against the ERA, and Mary Anderson, the ERA's archfoe (who had resigned the year before, at age seventy-two, as director of the Women's Bureau), herself chaired the new equal pay committee and drew up the bill. The bill thus got hit from two sides—by those who favored the ERA and did not want what they saw as a more important effort vitiated by a narrower one, and by those who opposed any interference in the workplace and wanted no law at all.

Often both these opponents were conservatives, either Republicans or conservative Democrats. Although the liberal-conservative split was muddled in the ERA battle, on the question of equal pay it stood out clearly. Equal pay legislation

came out of the protective labor law tradition, and the original version of the bill protected only women's wage rates. Liberal organizations lined up behind the bill, but conservatives who supported independent free enterprise opposed an equal pay law. Those conservatives who also supported the ERA thus had two "good" reasons to fight equal pay legislation.

In proposing to protect women's wage rates, the liberals were arguing not in favor of new roles for women but for recognizing the reality, however undesirable it might be, of women in the workforce. Working women had taken jobs because they needed the money. Equity and decency demanded that employers pay them a fair wage—that is, the rate a man earned for the same job.

The argument might have carried the day, but in drafting the bill, Anderson, never politically astute, ignored important political considerations and made several inflammatory moves. She modeled the bill after the sweeping coverage of the National Labor Relations Act, which applied to employers engaged in businesses "affecting" commerce, rather than following the narrower coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which applied only to those actually participating in interstate commerce. The bill protected the pay only of women; a man earning less than a woman at a particular job (assuming such a person existed) had no recourse. Although not important from a practical point of view, the exclusion of men from the law's protection gave the bill's opponents a powerful "equal treatment" argument to use against it. The bill also forbade employers to discharge women without cause, a provision intended to help women keep wartime employment (a goal few endorsed in 1945). Anderson went so far as to vest enforcement power in the director of the Women's Bureau. A fact-finding agency, the bureau had never had this kind of enforcement authority and had no machinery to perform it. The provision of the bill that sparked the most opposition provided for an "advisory committee" that would establish wage differentials among different types of work. Opponents could thus contend that the bureau had aims completely apart from the mere protection of women's wage rates. Finally, the bill permitted the blacklisting of employers found guilty of wage discrimination, a red flag to business interests whose cooperation

the bill's supporters needed. Said one partisan, in something of an understatement: "With the enactment of this law, we will be entering [an] . . . unchartered [sic ] field."^[4]

The chances for some kind of equal pay legislation looked promising because of patriotic sentiment in its favor and because studies done during World War II had documented an authentic problem of widespread wage discrimination. "Women in producing the weapons of war have, in many industries and occupations, demonstrated their ability to turn out the same day's work as do men," Senators Pepper and Morse asserted when they introduced Anderson's bill; employers should not treat them like "second class workmen."^[5] The Women's Bureau representatives had indeed discovered a large war plant where women instructors got sixty cents an hour, whereas the men they were teaching received seventy cents. In the small arms and artillery ammunition plants the bureau representatives visited, entering wage rates were found to be at least ten cents an hour higher for men than for women; in gun manufacturing men began at sixteen cents an hour more. The New York Herald Tribune pointed to the war widows, now the sole support of their families, and urged no further delay of "so just a measure" as the equal pay bill.^[6]

Congress responded apathetically. Mary Norton (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Labor Committee, told Women's Bureau director Frieda Miller that no legislation would be enacted without an active campaign revealing "intense interest" on the part of women's organizations, labor unions, and the administration.^[7] In response, Mary Anderson expanded the equal pay committee she had formed, now called the National Committee on Equal Pay. Labor and women's organizations came on board, and the CIO replied: "[We] are anxious to work with you."^[8]

Not surprisingly, the National Woman's party hung back. Its response to a Supreme Court decision in 1936 on a wage and hour case had revealed its antipathy to labor legislation in general; now, although it declined to oppose this bill overtly, its members complained to congressional backers about several of the bill's features. They objected first to a special bill pertaining only to women rather than mandating equal pay for equal work regardless of sex. But even more, they rejected the bureau as

the law's enforcement agent. As the chairman of the National Advisory Council of the NWP, Nora Stanton Barney, wrote to Senator Claude Pepper: "We do not want women to have any more legislation setting them apart from other workers, and sincerely wish the Women's Bureau did not exist. We certainly do not want it given any more power over the lives of women."^[9] The party feared that, at worst, Anderson's plan would work and Congress, instead of enacting the Equal Rights Amendment, would use equal pay legislation to mollify women.

Equal pay advocates took no pains to conceal this possibility; indeed, they regarded it as a selling point. Elizabeth Magee, general secretary of the National Consumers League, issued a press release observing that the equal pay bill "may lead to the shelving of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment," and Dorothy McAllister, the head of NCDURA, told her committee members that passage of the equal pay bill "would greatly weaken the interest some Senators have in the [Equal Rights] Amendment."^[10]

At the end of October 1945, the Senate Education and Labor Committee held hearings on the bill. Labor unions, including the AFL, offered support, as did the administration in the person of the secretary of labor. (The president said he endorsed the "principle" but no particular bill.)^[11] Speakers emphasized equity, the protection of wage rates for male workers, the needs of widows, and postwar purchasing power to sustain the economy. The BPW and the General Federation of Women's Clubs spoke in favor, also emphasizing their support of the ERA, and the NWP kept mum. No one testified against the bill.^[12]

The committee took seven months to report the bill. It had eliminated the provision against firing women (even Frieda Miller had testified against this provision) and vested enforcement in the secretary of labor. Even so, labor subcommittee chairman James Tunnell (D-Del.) seemed only mildly interested in the bill, and committee members Robert Taft (R-Ohio) and Joseph Ball (R-Mich.), who had strong business constituents and conservative economic principles, opposed it. The measure did have a good friend on the House side however. Mary Norton saw to it that in July the House Labor Committee, which

she chaired, reported a similar bill, without hearings to create delay.^[13]

The bill went no further. Because the Senate committee had taken so long, the bill reached the Senate floor near the close of the session. Robert Taft took to the floor against hasty consideration: "The bill involves a major interference with the freedom of American industry. Certainly it ought not to come up during the last days of the session."^[14] With the assistance of Joe Ball, who leapt to his defense against charges of indifference to women's rights, they scuttled the measure for 1946.

This first defeat undid the bill. The ERA had gone down the previous July, so the chief impetus for the coalition backing equal pay legislation had withered. The wartime contributions of women were beginning to fade from memory, as was the desire to reward those efforts. Sympathetic Congress members continued to introduce the bill, but without an outside lobbying effort the cause was futile.^[15] In subsequent hearings industry lobbyists, emboldened no doubt by the earlier failure, argued that federal legislation was unnecessary and intrusive—a position supported, to the dismay of equal pay advocates, by the AFL. The labor federation had reversed its position in 1947, arguing that collective bargaining was a more effective tool for securing pay equity for women, a position it took despite the fact that many labor unions continued to include dual pay scales in their contracts.^[16]

With the Korean conflict some supporters became hopeful that Congress would use equal pay to encourage women to do war work. Mary Norton, now in the Department of Labor, asked Representative John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to introduce an equal pay bill to support defense production. Kennedy acquiesced, as did a number of other House members, but the war did not replicate either the massive production effort of World War II or the labor shortage of that era, and the bill got nowhere. Wayne Morse complained in August 1951 that the "reactionary coalition," supported by the AFL, put the kibosh on the bill.^[17]

Indeed, the AFL now vehemently objected to the possibility that, through the equal pay law, the government might play a

role in job evaluation or setting wage rates. Said one member of its legislative committee:

Private property is the foundation of economic freedom. . . . It has been found desirable to keep decisions on economic matters in the hands of economic organizations, limiting the political to the formulation of objectives and basic principles. Administrative regulation of the economic order limits economic freedom and with increasing scope and degree may destroy it. . . . To attack the problem as an issue of social justice to be cured by legislation is to perpetuate a principle based upon the assumption that women are wards of the state.^[18]

This argument seemed a bit disingenuous in view of the AFL's opposition to the ERA based on the amendment's threat to protective labor laws for women. Laws limiting women's hours of employment or barring women from certain jobs entirely certainly seemed to imply that women were wards of the state. To object to laws protecting women's rates of pay, but not those limiting their hours, lent credence to the NWP's claim that male unionists opposed the ERA for self-interested reasons rather than for the sake of women.

The NWP, itself uninterested in governmental intrusion into business matters, also continued to fight the bill's backers. The animosity between ERA supporters and equal pay advocates broke into the open again in March 1952, at a Women's Bureau conference designed to generate enthusiasm for the measure. Mildred Palmer of the National Woman's party crashed the conference and, during the question period, asked Frieda Miller why the bureau did not support the Equal Rights Amendment if it wished to expedite the matter of equal pay. With "unrestrained hatred," according to Palmer's account, Miller told her she was out of order.^[19]

Effective coalition now seemed less rather than more likely, and the situation deteriorated further when Graham Barden, the new head of the House Education and Labor Committee, made it clear he had no use for the equal pay bill. The next year, 1953, AFL president George Meany affirmed that organization's position: "We feel that in a free competitive economy, the task of establishing and safeguarding the principle as well

as the practice of equal pay to women workers is properly within the province of collective bargaining and not of police action by the government."^[20] The National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce agreed that government interference was unwarranted,^[21] and Alice Paul, the founder of the National Woman's party and the nation's chief exponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, joined them: "The building up of a new, far reaching system of inspection on the question of equal pay, with power to investigate every business in the United States, administered by a colossal new government agency with vast enforcement powers, would not be helpful to women, as far as I can see."^[22]

The National Committee on Equal Pay (NCEP), which the Women's Bureau tried to resurrect after several years of inactivity, served as a clearinghouse of information. It had no power over its member organizations, many of which differed over the best strategy to pursue. Some members were frankly opposed to legislation and belonged to the group only to monitor its activities. The member organizations that were in accord with the objective of legislation all had many other time-consuming items on their agenda—including opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, a big drain on energy and resources. Thus, the NCEP could hardly overcome the obstacles against the bill: an array of powerful organizations opposed to it, and a leadership vacuum and political inactivity on the part of the working women who presumably favored it.

The Republicans, elected in 1952, introduced yet another wrinkle. All the proposed bills had followed Anderson's model and covered employers "affecting commerce." Republican representative Frances P. Bolton from Ohio introduced equal pay legislation in January 1954 that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to narrow coverage considerably from the other bills and give enforcement to the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, which had power only to mediate disputes, not to issue "cease and desist" orders. By way of compromise, Bolton later submitted a different bill, which, although still modeled on the FLSA, broadened coverage a bit. To enforce the law, the secretary of labor would have to file suit.^[23]

Advocates of the original bill refused to consider Bolton's ap-

proach, unwilling to foresake coverage for any group of women workers. Bolton retreated and introduced a bill proposing "study" of the problem, while Edith Green (D-Oreg.) went to bat for the original bill. Green reintroduced the blacklist provision for guilty employers but permitted enforcement through the courts.^[24] The Department of Labor, representing the administration, insisted on the Bolton bill, and the NCEP maintained its support for the Green bill. The Women's Bureau, estranged from its traditional consistency by Leopold's appointment, also had little clout within the administration; it could influence neither side.

Meanwhile, support outside Congress was mounting. Equal pay had gone down in 1945, at a time when almost everyone agreed that women should leave the labor force. By the end of the 1950s, however, public policy had taken a new tack: concern now focused on the appropriate use of womanpower, both to fill the needs of businesses seeking white-collar workers and to meet the international challenge posed by the ostensible threat from Moscow—a challenge that highlighted the need to devote more human resources to science. In 1957 the National Manpower Council (NMC), a Columbia University panel funded by the Ford Foundation, published a landmark study entitled Womanpower . A comprehensive look at the experience of women in the labor force, current employment needs, and the implications of both for education, training, and public policy, the NMC analysis called women "essential" and "distinctive" workers.^[25] Attracting women to work had become a matter of national interest.

Moreover, women themselves had indicated that they intended to be a permanent part of the labor force regardless of policy incentives to stay home; now no one could accuse the government of wrecking homes by improving conditions of women's work. The sex segregation of the labor force safeguarded jobs for men, so the government could not be charged with threatening the "breadwinners," and business prosperity indicated that the nation no longer needed to fear the return of the prewar depression and job scarcity. Public opinion polls consistently supported equal pay for equal work for women.^[26]

President Eisenhower was the most prominent new proponent of the equal pay bill. The administration had consistently

favored an equal pay law, and in 1956 Leopold persuaded Eisenhower, via the secretary of labor, to mention it in the State of the Union message. On January 5, 1956, Eisenhower told Congress: "Legislation to apply the principle of equal pay for equal work without discrimination because of sex is a matter of simple justice. I earnestly urge the Congress to move swiftly to implement these needed labor measures."^[27] Women's organizations were encouraged, and the president subsequently included equal pay recommendations in all his budget messages and four of his economic reports to Congress during the rest of his term. But the Women's Bureau did nothing else with these statements.

Important backing came from another source in 1956. Since 1947, the American Federation of Labor had opposed the equal pay bill, insisting that union membership and collective bargaining constituted a preferable route—even though in a number of unionized plants sex-segregated pay scales granted skilled women workers no higher wages than male common laborers. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, however, had steadily endorsed equal pay legislation, and when the two federations merged in 1956 the AFL-CIO adopted the CIO position, swayed by the measure's popularity: both parties had endorsed it, as had the president, and women's organizations were virtually unanimous. The AFL-CIO endorsed the Green bill, not the Bolton, and insisted on an amendment to provide for administrative enforcement by the secretary of labor. Although publicly the organization expressed its concern that employees should not be forced to undergo the expense of legal action, the choice of administrative, rather than judicial, enforcement reflected the fear that unions would also be the target of equal pay suits. Where dual pay scales existed, some women had already sued unions, charging discrimination under collective bargaining agreements and asserting that the unions were not representing them fairly in the bargaining unit, as the law required. The labor federation assumed that the secretary of labor would give unions a more sympathetic hearing than a judge. Its anxiety over this provision meant that the group would not readily compromise on it.^[28]

The AFL-CIO position was typical of the bill's supporters: backing hinged on special considerations. There was contention

even within the administration, with the Commerce Department objecting to coverage broader than the FLSA and the whole notion of a separate bill.^[29] With a Republican administration in power, labor was distrustful of any suggestion of compromise, and the Republicans' business constituents, for their part, did not look kindly at the "harassment" promised by the Green bill.

Powerful enemies on the Hill, especially Graham Barden (D-N.C.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, made the problems in some ways moot. Barden told Green point-blank that he considered the bill "ridiculous" and that he would never pay a woman as much as he paid his male legislative assistant. Others involved in the struggle suggested that the problem with the bill lay in the lack of hard statistical data, but that gap provided only a convenient excuse.^[30] For the last three years of the Eisenhower administration, the only significant action on equal pay legislation was the president's repeated counsel to Congress to enact it.

By the second half of the 1950s, the lack of a committed, sophisticated leadership that could gather convincing data, lobby effectively, and forge a compromise among the disparate elements backing the bill spelled defeat. The National Committee on Equal Pay served merely as an informational conduit; the administration stuck to its guns, as did the major labor organizations; and the Women's Bureau, with ties now principally to professional women rather than to its traditional constituency of labor union women and advocates for women in industry, and unwilling to alienate the Republicans' business constituency, gathered little data on the prevalence of unequal pay scales.

Like the Equal Rights Amendment, in the postwar period equal pay legislation had suffered from the national ambivalence toward women's roles. Introduced in 1945, the legislation was overtly a tribute to women war workers, but concern for reestablishing security in the workplace for returning veterans overwhelmed the desire to achieve either that tribute or real equity for women. Throughout the fifties, as the nation restored its emotional and economic foundations within a conservative social framework, women quietly left the home during the day for the workplace, becoming an indispensable and

unique part of the labor force, no longer in competition with men for jobs but filling an almost completely separated category of white-collar and service work. By the end of the decade, anxiety over working women had subsided, but equal pay proponents, fragmented by diverse goals and political beliefs and lacking effective and appropriate leadership, could not overcome the business opposition united against the bill, now its only serious obstacle. From 1945 to 1960, therefore, women received from Congress virtually no recognition of their contribution to the war effort, their new place in the American economy, or their importance within the electorate. It remained for the White House to cover this political flank and do something for the women.

4
Tokens of Presidential Esteem: Women Appointees

The defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the failure of equal pay legislation created problems for both Republicans and Democrats in the postwar period, leaving them open to the charge that male politicians didn't care about women voters and didn't appreciate the contribution women had made toward winning the war. Women within the major parties threatened that without some recognition, faithful female party workers would simply desert their posts.

Ever since suffrage had been won in 1920, both the Republican and the Democratic parties had religiously offered something to women. After World War I, the Democrats had created the Women's Bureau, and in 1921 Congress passed legislation setting up maternal and infant health programs. In 1922 a Republican president signed the Cable Act, which permitted American women married to foreign nationals to retain their citizenship as men did, and in 1923 Congress forbade differential pay by sex in the civil service. Both parties had created special women's divisions, and in the 1920 campaign both had adopted platform planks suggested by the newly formed League of Women Voters. As the first decade after women's suffrage wore on however, it became clear that women, riven as they were by class interests and philosophical outlooks, were not going to form a consolidated bloc of voters, and male politicians relaxed. After that, few legislative initiatives spoke directly to women's needs, but in order not to alienate the women who were concerned about women's advancement, presidential administrations assiduously publicized the names and positions of women appointed to federal posts. Franklin Roosevelt, under the guidance

of Democratic politician Molly Dewson, surpassed his predecessors by far: whereas Hoover had appointed three women to significant Senate-confirmed posts in eight years, in twelve years Roosevelt named seventeen.^[1]

In the postwar period women's organizations were divided over the Equal Rights Amendment, a reflection of the nation's general ambivalence toward equality for women. The equal pay bill was stalemated, caught in the backwash of both the ERA battle and the divisions between Republicans and Democrats, business and labor forces. Women's organizations with divergent political objectives remained united on only one point: the need to have women in policy-making positions. Appointments offered an easy way out of the policy dilemma—and the first two postwar presidents eagerly took that route.

The strategy had many advantages. "Policy-making" appointments for women evinced concern for women as voters without the ugly prospect of waging a campaign for controversial legislation or choosing sides among women's organizations. Moreover, because each president could usually work his will on the subject of appointments, it was possible to obtain this objective expeditiously. Finally, appointments represented the premier item on the agenda of the women to whom the two presidents were closest: the heads of the women's divisions of the major parties. Truman and Eisenhower each had close ties to his party's national committee, and party women considered high-level positions for deserving qualified female candidates essential. By proxy, these appointments served as encouragement and reward for the campaign work of thousands of loyal women in local precincts whose efforts were becoming more important with each election.

Women's organizations, despite their disputes over other matters, agreed unanimously on the desirability of increasing the number of women in higher government positions. Women in public office, women leaders argued, would represent women's interests, show that deserving women could attain opportunities commensurate with their abilities, offer examples to other employers that women performed admirably in responsible jobs, and make available to the nation the wisdom that educated and talented women possessed.^[2] At a June 1944 conference

called by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and held at the White House, two hundred women leaders had asked specifically that women be appointed as delegates to international conferences and as members of national policy-making bodies. Women's organizations undertook the development of rosters to ensure that "qualified" women would be visible, and Roosevelt herself continued to call attention to this demand, writing to the new president, Harry Truman, and to his associates that women's loyalty to the Democratic party depended on these rewards.^[3]

The chairman of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, Gladys Tillett, also wrote to Truman: "We should like," she reminded him, "to have women serve on all of the Peace Conferences which are to be held." She urged Truman that appointment of women to positions of power in the government would "establish the fact that the president is interested in matters pertaining to women."^[4] Truman did not, however, take much of Tillett's advice. In fact, his appointment record of women in the term he served out as Franklin Roosevelt's successor was undistinguished: from 1945 to 1948 he appointed only three women to important Senate-confirmed posts;^[5] Roosevelt had appointed thirteen women to such posts during his first three years in office.

But once India Edwards assumed Tillett's post in 1948, the number of female appointments jumped. Tillett had lacked effectiveness with Truman for two reasons: Truman saw her as a member of Roosevelt's team, and he felt no particular attachment to her or her proposals; and Tillett's suggestions for appointments were vague—a list of names of women she would ask the president to "consider."

Edwards, in contrast, had been a strong supporter of Truman even when FDR was president. Moreover, Edwards had pursued the course of finding a highly qualified woman for almost every available position and then making a specific pitch to the president on that candidate's behalf. She thus made it easy for Truman to fulfill her requests.^[6]

India Edwards had begun her professional career as a journalist on the editorial staff of the Chicago Tribune, where she worked from 1918 until 1942. But when she left Chicago and moved with her husband to Washington during World War II, she gave up

journalism and began to work as a volunteer at the Women's Division of the DNC. She became the division's executive secretary in 1945 and, in early 1948, its executive director. Edwards's assertive demeanor, coupled with her political know-how, elicited admiration from many of her colleagues, although others, put off by her "unladylike" behavior, called her a "battle-ax." Democratic party women, however, enthusiastically described her as powerful.^[7]

Edwards had been a longtime Truman backer. During the 1944 campaign she was one of the few DNC workers who always included the vice-president's name in speeches and publicity materials. In 1948, then director of the Women's Division, Edwards was one of the few campaign workers who thought Truman would pull off the election. In support she organized campaign schools for women volunteers, "Housewives for Truman" trailers, a series of radio shows, and the distribution of many thousands of guidebooks, fliers, platforms, and voting records. Truman, who inherited an administration devoted to his predecessor, clearly appreciated her loyalty. When William M. Boyle, Jr., who coordinated the Truman Whistle-Stop Train, asked Edwards what she wanted as a reward for her work, she replied: "Nothing for myself but a lot of jobs for a lot of women."^[8] From 1948 to 1952, Truman's appointment record showed a marked improvement. In addition to naming fifteen Senate-confirmed appointees, he placed two hundred more women in government.^[9]

In general, Truman had firm ties to the DNC. Robert Hannegan and J. Howard McGrath, the two committee chairs during his first term, were longtime political associates. But his closest ties were to Edwards, whom he saw more frequently than even McGrath. In 1951 Truman offered the DNC chairmanship to Edwards—a first for a woman in either party—but she declined, believing that the amount of time she would have to spend protecting herself from enemies would hinder her effectiveness.^[10]

As the head of the Women's Division, Edwards devised a procedure for getting women into appointment slots that served as a model for her successors. First she scouted among Democratic women's organizations for names of women able to hold govern-

ment jobs and checked their qualifications; then she found jobs that they could fill. Before going to the president, she got the necessary clearances from party officials, senators from the nominee's state, and executive officers. After Truman made the nomination and the Senate approved it, Edwards fulfilled her share of the bargain by making sure the appointment got plenty of publicity. Women journalists, who always believed that women appointees made good copy, were willing collaborators. With regard to ambassadorships, Edwards primed Truman to appoint a woman even before a vacancy appeared. When the post of ambassador to Denmark opened, she had Eugenie Anderson ready to fill it, a special feat because Anderson was a married woman. When U.S. treasurer William A. Julian died in an accident in 1949, Edwards raced to the White House to see whether Truman would consider a woman for the position, a sinecure. When he said he would, if the woman was "qualified," Edwards came up with Georgia Neese Clark, a woman who was both a member of the DNC and a small-town banker. (Although every treasurer after Clark has been a woman, neither before nor since has the treasurer also been a banker.)^[11]

In urging Truman to accept women appointees, Edwards emphasized the political consequences of ignoring women voters. "I know there will be unfavorable reactions if not one woman is among the twenty-seven new judges," she wrote in 1949. "I hear often the criticism that most of the women's appointments are window-dressing, not on the policy level. . . . I know this is somewhat true."^[12] As a result of this particular campaign, Truman named Burnita Matthews to the district court bench.

Truman had his limits, however. For one, he intended to keep the cabinet a male preserve. He refused to consider Frances Perkins to head the Federal Security Administration because, one of his aides reported, he intended to create a Department of Welfare, and he "did not want any woman in the cabinet."^[13] He also allowed Chief Justice Fred Vinson to veto the selection of the first woman on the Supreme Court. Edwards had recommended Florence Allen, who had received her seat on the court of appeals from Franklin Roosevelt. According to aide Matthew Connelly, Truman explained: "The Justices don't want a

woman. They say they couldn't sit around with their robes off and their feet up and discuss their problems."^[14] Truman also declined to appoint Florence Shientag to a vacant federal judgeship in New York, on the grounds that "her husband is already a Judge in the New York Courts and it seems to me that one Judge in the family is enough."^[15] (Shientag eventually became a judge of the family court in New York City.)

Both Edwards and leaders of women's organizations constantly reminded Truman not to forget women in appointments. The Korean War inspired a special plea for women on emergency war committees, and a new showcase body, called the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, counseled the Defense Department on the use of women in the newly integrated military services. DACOWITS, as the group was known, functioned chiefly to reassure parents (in order to support recruitment) that the government had an interest in the welfare of young women enlistees. Although enlistment of women fell far below goals, DACOWITS did accord several dozen women an ongoing role in "policy making."^[16]

The matter of women appointments did not concern the general public, however. Truman's appointments came in response to the requests of Edwards and other women lobbyists. Only a handful of letters arrived at the White House from outside Washington, and public opinion polls showed that the electorate did not want the president to turn over more power to women in government. In December 1945 a Gallup survey showed that only 26 percent of men and 38 percent of women agreed with the statement of "a woman leader" who said that "not enough of the capable women are holding important jobs in the United States Government." Furthermore, only 29 percent of men and 37 percent of women said they would vote for a woman for president even if she were the best-qualified candidate, 52 percent of men and 43 percent of women disapproved of having a "capable woman" in the cabinet, and 46 percent of men and 35 percent of women disapproved of a "capable woman" on the Supreme Court. In 1947, 48 percent polled believed that women should not participate more actively in politics, and only 46 percent said they should. By 1949, 51 percent of women and 45 percent of men would have voted for

a woman for president, and 48 percent of men and 60 percent of women approved President Truman's choice of a woman for minister to Luxembourg. But these data hardly represented a mandate to a president interested in appointing women in order to win votes. In fact, public support for equal pay for women was much stronger: a 1946 poll showed that 71 percent of the men and 81 percent of the women surveyed endorsed equal pay.^[17] If Truman displayed more interest in appointments than in equal pay legislation, his actions reflected the concerns of Democratic party women and the advantages of using appointments to recognize women instead of choosing a more problematic political route.

Between 1945 and 1952 Truman named eighteen women to positions requiring Senate confirmation, an average of 2.25 per year. Of these, nine were jobs women had never held before. Truman's appointments included one woman to a subcabinet position, Anna Rosenberg (assistant secretary of defense), and two ministers, Eugenie Anderson (ambassador to Demark) and Perle Mesta (minister to Luxembourg). (By way of comparison, Roosevelt, in twelve years, had appointed seventeen women, eleven of whom were "firsts.") A total of forty women (including those designated as regional comptrollers of customs and similar local officers) served during Truman's administrations in these Senate-confirmed positions (compared with thirty-seven in the Roosevelt years). In 1951–1952 women made up 2.4 percent of all executive appointments, excluding places on commissions (79 out of 3,273 posts). Edwards, counting members of presidential commissions, claimed that Truman had installed more than 250 women in high-level positions.^[18] Adlai Stevenson, the 1952 Democratic nominee for president, promised to follow in Truman's footsteps in his "growing reliance upon qualified women for high public posts."^[19]

Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee, also understood the utility of emphasizing appointments for women. He wrote to the American Association of University Women: "If it should be my destiny to serve as chief executive, I would utilize the contributions of outstanding women to the greatest extent possible. Indeed, it would be impossible to carry out the responsibilities of the office without their help." He expanded on this

statement in a speech in Portland, Oregon: "I want to speak for just a second about my honest belief, my deep conviction, that we should have more women in public life." Not only, Eisenhower observed, were there two million more women than men, but women more than men worried about "the preservation and strengthening" of American values. Thus Eisenhower urged the election of women to the office of governor, and he counseled Republicans to accept women as "equal partners" in the Republican party. Katherine Howard, the only woman on the Eisenhower Campaign Strategy Committee, pointedly brought these and similar remarks to the attention of the almost nine thousand Republican women leaders with whom she was in contact.^[20]

After Eisenhower's election in November, Republican women, following the Democratic model, moved with dispatch. Jessica Weis, director of women's activities for the Republican National Committee, promptly formulated a plan of appointments for the president's consideration. Her list of possible "top-level" positions included director of the Mint, under and assistant secretaries of the Departments of Labor, Agriculture, and Commerce, and assistant postmaster general. The position of assistant attorney general, Weis said, "has aroused more interest than any other post among women." Weis also recommended the appointment of a White House assistant at some level—"a new job for women and one which should have priority." Furthermore, Weis advised, "the United Nations is a fertile field for women's positions as so many of them are in the area of women's traditional interests," and she urged as "a matter of policy" that women be appointed to all presidential commissions. Weis also suggested that Frieda Miller be replaced as director of the Women's Bureau. Although Mary Anderson, a Democrat, had held the office during the tenure of three Republican presidents, establishing a precedent that the director not be replaced with a change in administration, Weis stated: "An early appointment would be appreciated as Miss Miller is most unpopular with Republican women." In addition to the posts Weis specified, there were, she stressed, many more at lower levels in the departments and in the judiciary. She transmitted a list of eligible women and warned that Truman had created a record Eisenhower needed to match: "We must do better."^[21]

In planning its program for 1953, the Women's Division of the RNC asserted that women in policy-making posts, accompanied by appropriate media attention, would reap rewards for both the administration and the party. Such appointments would not only inspire women campaign workers but also win favor with the leaders of nonpartisan women's groups. Indeed, in 1953 Independent Woman (IW) , the magazine of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, featured women appointees of the Eisenhower administration in both its January and its March issues. Noting that women had been "frequently and emphatically reminded" during the campaign of the importance of their votes, the journal commented that they expected "substantial recognition" in the form of appointments to important posts. "And," IW stated, "the new president did make two selections that acknowledged the debt to hard campaign work on his behalf and his faith in the ability of the women chosen." IW highlighted the appointment of Ivy Baker Priest as treasurer, "a straight political appointment in which the honor somewhat outweighs the work involved," and of Oveta Culp Hobby as the new Federal Security administrator, and soon to be a cabinet member as the first secretary of the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In March, Clare Boothe Luce, the new ambassador to Italy, appeared on IW 's cover, "the first woman to hold the top-ranking diplomatic post in a world power."^[22]

In the appointment of women, the Republican National Committee had a freer hand than had the DNC, because Eisenhower ran the White House differently from the way Truman had. Truman, who had had a long career in politics, and some involvement with political machinery, liked to be personally involved in the selection of political appointees, and he felt comfortable with the idea of patronage. The former general, in contrast, instituted a militarylike hierarchy, making him less accessible than Truman had been to political operatives. Moreover, with no experience in running for office, Eisenhower disdained politics and turned all but the highest-level political matters over to subordinates.^[23] Eisenhower's preference for leaving political decisions to politicians made the RNC the main clearing-house for patronage selections, and Eisenhower's willingness to depend on the committee permitted Republican women to of-

fer suggestions on a regular basis and to have them acted upon. The RNC leadership, which sought such appointments, proved generous in granting these requests. As chairman C. Wesley Roberts explained to White House aide Sherman Adams, "The thought behind this is to try to give better recognition to women during this administration than has been done heretofore, particularly in positions of importance."^[24]

Bertha Adkins, assistant to the chairman and head of the RNC Women's Division, served as the chief conduit to Republican women^[25] and regularly enumerated Eisenhower's appointment record to the press. By July 1953 she had a list of twenty-seven women who were "playing a real role in the daily-mounting achievements of the new Administration"—proper repayment to women campaign workers who had worked "in unprecedented numbers and zeal" for Eisenhower's election.^[26] The record redounded to Adkins's credit, and she quickly became known in political circles as a powerful woman. A United Press poll named her one of the ten most influential women in Washington, because she supposedly had a "good telephone line to the White House."^[27] Adkins's reputation did not, however, reach so far as Edwards's had, and after complaints from Republican women that they were being shut out, the president began to attend publicized "breakfasts" with women party and civic leaders. Newsweek reported that Adkins had "ready access to President Eisenhower, who calls her by her first name and quotes her views to male politicians,"^[28] a clear attempt to evoke Edwards's relationship to Truman. RNC campaign films narrated Eisenhower's achievements in appointing women to important jobs, a theme Adkins sounded repeatedly.^[29]

In April 1957 Eisenhower appointed a woman to the White House staff. In a surprise announcement to the fifteen hundred women attending the fifth annual Republican Women's Conference in Washington, he named Anne Wheaton, who had held the post of director of women's publicity of the RNC for eighteen years, as associate White House press secretary. The appointment was a public relations stroke, and the audience responded with "cheers and applause," according to newspaper accounts.^[30] Adding this one to the other slots arranged by Adkins and the RNC, Adkins claimed by 1958 that Eisenhower

had appointed "more women to key posts in the Federal Government, in International Affairs and on important committees and commissions than any other Chief Executive in the Nation's history."^[31] Shortly thereafter Adkins herself assumed the position of under secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (another "first"), thus becoming the top-ranking woman in the government.

Eisenhower's record of appointments of women did exceed Truman's. In roughly the same amount of time, Eisenhower named twenty-eight women to Senate-confirmed posts, compared to twenty for Truman. Even excluding such positions as collector of customs for localities, Eisenhower still could claim twenty-two such appointments to Truman's eighteen. Eisenhower also edged Truman out slightly in first appointments: ten for the general and nine for Truman. Each president had a woman in the cabinet; Truman, however, had not chosen Frances Perkins, a Roosevelt holdover who stayed only briefly after he took office, but Eisenhower himself selected Oveta Culp Hobby, who served until July 1, 1955. Both presidents had named one woman to the subcabinet (under and assistant secretaries), but whereas Eisenhower designated three women to serve as agency heads, Truman appointed none. Eisenhower also appointed one minister more than Truman (three to Truman's two), although Truman installed one more woman on a federal court than did Eisenhower. The Republican bested Truman's annual average of Senate-confirmed appointments by 0.5 percentage points: 2.75, up from 2.25 (84 out of 3,491 positions). With members of commissions, Eisenhower's distaff contingent numbered over four hundred.^[32] Although the actual number of women named to important positions was in fact small, it satisfied the political women who themselves took pride in their access to the chief executives. Of the three groups competing for federal attention, only the party women could claim success.

But however commendable—or unsatisfactory—the records of Truman and Eisenhower, their appointments of women to government posts stood as a symbolic gesture more than an effective method to improve women's economic or legal posi-

tion. Women's groups sought these appointments on the premise that just having women do their job properly would set an example for other employers, which in turn would expand opportunities for women at all levels. Certainly the women appointees of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, all highly qualified and competent, vindicated those who had advocated their advancement. But these appointees, as one observer noted, "did not herald a new . . . tradition in which increasing numbers of women occupied ever higher governmental positions, nor did they advance the status of women either significantly or lastingly."^[33]

Nor could they have done so. Chosen principally for their sex, not their qualifications, these women were vulnerable. India Edwards later recalled that Truman had paid her "what men have always considered the ultimate compliment to a female: that I operated like a man." In the absence of a movement for women's rights, when "operating like a man" was the standard of excellence, no woman in an important governmental job could become the champion of the women's cause without calling her legitimacy into question—unless that position dealt exclusively with women's issues.

Mary Anderson, director of the Women's Bureau, which was under the aegis of the secretary of labor, encountered this problem with regard to Frances Perkins. Anderson wrote:

When Frances Perkins came in as Secretary of Labor, we were all jubilant, because we thought that at last we would have someone who really understood our problems and what we were up against and who would fight for us. . . . But it did not turn out to be that way. . . . The terrible publicity she was subjected to because she was the first woman cabinet officer was a great handicap. . . . It was especially discouraging to me to find that the Women's Bureau was not of great interest to her though I understood that she was preoccupied with other things and did not want to be thought of as a woman who was too closely identified with women's problems.^[34]

Perkins, herself in part a token, understood the difficulties common to token appointees. Often highly qualified, but selected because of their sex or because they possess a specific

visible racial, ethnic, or physical characteristic essentially irrelevant to the execution of their job—selected, that is, for the specific political purpose of recognizing the group they represent—token appointees are expected to ignore in the fulfillment of their duties the very attribute for which they were chosen. Tokens have the responsibility of proving that the trait that identifies them does not in fact constitute a handicap. They thus labor under the burden that their mistakes impugn not only their own abilities, but those of all members of their group as well. Conversely, of course, the successes of "token" appointees do both confirm their abilities and confer at least a modicum of status on the group they represent.

But the postwar experience of the pursuit of token appointments for women reveals the drawback of this strategy. By diverting attention from policy questions, a roster of token appointments made in response to requests from an interested group allowed the presidents to duck thorny political problems without serious reprisals and to evade the debate over more significant issues. Convinced of the value of female appointments for both women and their parties, and concerned with the publicity deriving from the appointments rather than with policy goals, the party women who nominated the candidates did so in general without regard to the views of the designee on specific matters of interest to women activists. The appointees for the most part had no policy role with respect to women's issues.

Both Truman and Eisenhower met their obligations to their female constituents in a way that was ultimately cosmetic, without addressing more fundamental questions regarding the position of women in America. Because token appointments represented a traditional means of recognizing groups excluded from real power, the political system yielded willingly to the requests of party women. The ease with which the appointments were obtained signaled the limits of appointees' ability to alter the status of the group they personified: if these appointments had been of greater consequence, they would have been harder to come by. Moreover, the benefits of the appointment practice did not filter down to the women who were not direct recipients of presidential largesse.

During World War II, American women had proven themselves heroines on the home front; afterwards, they quietly took up again the responsibility to reestablish secure and stable homes. By 1960, a supposedly grateful nation had left them without any legislative or executive protection from discrimination, as vulnerable to arbitrary treatment in the public and private sectors as ever they had been before.