Class and Gender in the Feminist Movement

Public opinion polls indicate that by the late 1970S—a decade in which resurgent feminism captured national attention—the gender-based discourse legitimated by affirmative action had become widely diffused. Both a high identification with "women" as a category and a widespread perception of the illegitimacy of sex discrimination had developed among women of all classes and races (Ferree and Hess 1985; Katzenstein 1987). Because of this raised consciousness, many social movement scholars judge the American

women's movement a success (Fulenwider 1980; Gelb 1987; Klein 1987; Mueller 1987). However, the contemporary feminist movement faces a paradox: one the one hand, widespread adherence to its basic tenets, and on the other, relative political weakness and a narrowly based core constituency (Bellin 1989; Dionne 1989). Black women and working-class women, whose agreement with feminist tenets has been quite high, have generally not identified as part of the movement (Klein 1987). Moreover, in contrast to less popular European movements, American feminism can boast of few concrete accomplishments for low-income women (Katzenstein 1987; also Dionne 1989).

The emergence of the comparable worth issue must be understood within the context of the class and gender politics that have shaped American feminism. The paradox of widespread ideological adherence but a low sense of membership accounts for much of comparable worth's appeal, both to movement insiders hoping to enlarge the movement and to low-paid women who have felt excluded. Comparable worth oners the hope of healing the historical class antagonism that divided American women's activists for decades. At the same time, however, the political significance of class differences among women persists, and may even have been strengthened by the limited success of affirmative action; these differences may ultimately limit the success of comparable worth as well—a point I return to in Chapters 6 and 7.

Prehistory: Women's Rights Issues Before the 1960s

The history of class antagonism on issues of women's rights dates back at least to the end of the sumage era and the winning of the vote for women. During the "first wave" feminist struggle for the vote, trade union women (against some pressure from male union leadership) worked with elite suffrage groups like the National Woman's Party and played a major role in the campaign to pass the Nineteenth Amendment (Flexner 1975).^[16] After the amendment

[16] Unfortunately, this type of cross-class alliance was less successful across race differences. According to Giddings (1984, chap. 7), although black men and women strongly advocated women's suffrage, many white activists were willing to use racist tactics in the South.

was in place, however, these coalitions broke down as unionists and elite groups—with very different women in mind—developed competing approaches to the cause of women's equality (Foner 1980, 56–60). Winning the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) proclaiming women's absolute equality before the law became the major objective of the National Woman's Party. Most union women, in contrast, strongly opposed the ERA because it would have invalidated special, protective labor laws for women. Both groups were working for women's rights, but conflicting class interests led to a forty-year fight over this issue (Hole and Levine 1971, 52–107).

Sociologists Rupp and Taylor view the pre-1960s campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment as an "elite-sustained stage" of the women's movement, characterized by a small number of professional women who pursued passage "doggedly and single-mindedly" (V. Taylor 1986, 3). The fight for the ERA was seen as a direct continuation of the earlier struggle for the vote. Allied with the National Woman's Party were groups like the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs and the associations of women in law and medicine. These small, elite groups emphasized the formal legal and property rights most relevant for women of their standing—white, middle-to upper-class, highly educated, professional women. This emphasis antagonized both black women and union women, who were more interested in gaining such substantive protections as labor regulations and enforcement of voting rights (Rupp and Taylor 1987, 50–51, 200). Mary Anderson, a leader of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) and first director of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, went so far as to accuse the National Woman's Party of embracing "a kind of hysterical feminism with a slogan for a program" (cited in Hole and Levine 1971, 79). For their part, women in the WTUL and Women's Bureau came to put greater effort into opposing the ERA than into either of their two original goals: organizing women workers and fighting the exclusionary practices of the American Federation of Labor (Foner 1980, 138–139; Rupp and Taylor 1987, 5–6, 144–153).

Trade union women and their allies opposed the ERA because the amendment would have nullified their own lengthy struggles to gain special protections for women workers, such as restrictions on the hours and conditions of women's employment—laws that did

provide at least some actual protection from exploitive, dangerous working conditions.^[17] Unfortunately, protective legislation also justified occupational sex segregation and women's lower pay and restricted labor market opportunities for women by invoking traditional notions of women as mothers and "the weaker sex," who required special government attention. As a consequence, protective legislation was vehemently opposed by the pro-ERA feminists, whose concern was with discrimination against women in elite male fields; thus they defined women's rights strictly in terms of equal treatment.

The issue of protective legislation is much debated by feminist and labor historians. Some argue that the National Woman's Party, in promoting strict legal equality, represented the only group with "a truly feminist standpoint" (Lehrer 1987, 239; also Hole and Levine 1971). Others argue, in contrast, that the WTUL members should be considered "industrial feminists," who pursued special legislation because, given the constraints faced, it was the most effective strategy available to better conditions for working-class women (Kirkby 1987; also Feldberg 1980).^[18]

Freeman (1987) points out that the class divisions represented in the ERA issue also involved political parties and business interests.

[17] Support for protective legislation was not the only basis for the antagonism between union and pro-ERA women, however. Union women in the Women's Bureau and WTUL, as well as black women of the National Association of Colored Women, were also antagonized by the single-minded tactics of the pro-ERA National Woman's Party, which included tokenism, the financing of front groups, red baiting, and a cavalier attitude toward coalition building. Rupp and Taylor (1987, 135–165) conclude that the Woman's Party tried to create an impression of black and labor support for the amendment, yet never made sincere efforts to address these groups.

[18] Admittedly, as Lehrer (1987) argues, the class and gender lines were not as simple as my brief discussion might suggest. Some groups of women workers opposed protective laws, particularly women displaced as a result of night-work restrictions. Also, some WTUL members and officials of the Women's Bureau were middle-class reformers who identified as allies of labor. Nonetheless, the largest groups opposed to the legislation were employers and elite women using laissezfaire, antilabor arguments. And the largest groups working for the protections were the trade unions led by the WTUL and the Women's Bureau, who maintained that the number of women displaced was very small compared to the many thousands in the "women-employing" industries to be protected (Foner 1980, 148–150; Kirkby 1987). Both Rupp and Taylor (1987) and Harrison (1988), focusing on the post-World War II period, agree that the conflict over the ERA was primarily one of class.

Although the issue was not high on the agenda of either party, in this period Republicans, conservatives, and major business interests tended to favor the ERA, which was seen as compatible with a laissez-faire, antiregulation stance. In fact, many Woman's Party members shared a conservative view of the labor market, in which legal intervention for women workers was undesirable, serving only to handicap them and make them less competitive. Those opposed to the amendment, in contrast, tended to be Democrats, but they were scarcely a majority of their party (Freeman 1987, 217). For many years, then, the efforts of the two small groups of women's rights advocates mainly canceled each other out. It was not until 1970, within the context of "second wave" feminism and a new generation of activists, that a broader feminist consensus in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment was reached.

Class divisions among women's rights advocates also colored efforts for the Equal Pay Act. First introduced in Congress in 1945, the act failed to gain passage, as it did in every subsequent session until 1963. Unlike the ERA, "equal pay for equal work" had long been a labor movement issue, promoted both by women's advocates and by union men concerned that men's wage levels not be undercut (Steinberg-Ratner 1980, 29–30, 46). During World War II, for example, the War Labor Board required that women receive equal pay when taking over men's jobs for the duration. This policy had been extended to include a comparable worth standard of "equal pay for jobs of equivalent value" by the wars end, but this extension was never enforced (Milkman 1987a). After the war, union women in the Women's Bureau made a federal equal pay law, initially intended to include a comparable worth standard, their primary goal. This equal pay measure was seen as anti-ERA. For one thing, it took attention from the amendment as the women's rights issue; moreover, it left protective legislation intact, and it was to have been enforced by the Women's Bureau, the long-standing antagonist of the pro-ERA feminists (Freeman 1987, 219; Mansbridge 1986, 9–10; Rupp and Taylor 1987, 175).

For its part, the pro-ERA National Woman's Party remained publicly neutral regarding equal pay measures, unwilling to give the impression of being against working women. However, the elite group worked against the Equal Pay Act behind the scenes,

arguing, as they had against protective labor legislation, that interventions only hurt women's ability to compete in the labor market. More specifically, they said that pushing up women's wages would only restrict job opportunities by lowering employers' incentives to utilize female labor (Freeman 1987, 219). Sadly, unionists in the Women's Bureau later claimed that they continued to fight the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1960s primarily because the Woman's Party had fought them on the Equal Pay Act (Rupp and Taylor 1987, 176).^[19]

The repeated failure of the Equal Pay Act was indicative of the lack of any coherent or organized working-class women's constituency behind the Women's Bureau's efforts (Johansen 1984, 31–33). But despite this weakness, the Women's Bureau gained greater access to the federal government during the Kennedy administration,^[20] becoming institutionally expanded through the establishment of national and state branches of the President's Commission on the Status of Women (which functioned as research and advisory bodies). With the decision to drop the comparable worth standard in favor of the narrow equal work criterion, the Equal Pay Act was finally passed in 1963 (Johansen 1984, 33). Its passage is considered part of the prehistory of the contemporary women's movement, though it was in fact a major victory for women. But the context of class divisiveness from which the Equal Pay Act emerged left a legacy that proved difficult for the new generation of women activists to escape (Rupp and Taylor 1987, 192).

[19] The duration of this conflict indicates the extent to which the class-based antagonism between these two groups took on a life of its own, transcending any specific policy questions. Rupp and Taylor (1987, 559–564) also comment, in a similar vein, that the antagonism between elite and union women persisted long after the original legal basis to the ERA-protective legislation conflict had eroded. In the earlier part of the century, most labor legislation affording protections to all workers was rejected by the courts (as "unreasonably" restricting the "free" labor contract), and only by arguing on the basis of women's special needs was it possible to have legislation upheld. Seen in this light, the ERA posed a significant legal threat. After the New Deal, however, labor regulations applying to both men and women were deemed valid and "reasonable." Yet the antagonism between elite feminists and union women remained well entrenched for another thirty years (also see Lehrer 1987).

[20] Steinberg (1984b, 9) attributes this improved access to the critical electoral support of the labor and civil rights movements in the Democratic victory of 1960, as well as to the first stirrings of resurgent feminism.

The "Second Wave": Gender and Class in Contemporary Feminism

The "second wave" resurgence of feminism during the 1960s is typically seen as arising from a convergence of forces, including relative increases in the educational levels and labor force participation rates of women, as well as civil rights and New Left politics (Garden 1974, 1978; Evans 1979; Ferree and Hess 1985; Freeman 1975; Fulenwider 1980). The new generation of women created a new organizational context for feminism, which drew on the legacy of both the elite Woman's Party and the unionist Women's Bureau. At least through the first decade, however, resurgent feminism, with its emphasis on the ERA and equal treatment strategies, tended to replicate the earlier class bias of the "elite-sustained" stage. Only with the failure of the ERA and the rise of the antifeminist backlash has contemporary feminism attempted to become a more inclusive movement, embracing strategies like comparable worth that are directed at working-class women.

As is obvious from the previous discussion of affirmative action, the feminist movement owes a substantial debt to black activists. It has built on many of the organizational, ideological, and legal contributions of civil rights struggles, and the analogy constructed between sex and race underlies many of the gains made by women (Ferree 1987, 176–177). In fact, the race analogy directly provoked the foundation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966, considered the birth of the "second wave." As we have seen, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was finally passed with the added prohibition of sex discrimination, enforcement of which the majority of EEOC commissioners and staff opposed. They considered the provision to have been adopted without serious intent, to discredit the principle of equal opportunity rather than promote sex equality.^[21] Two "pro-woman" commissioners suggested pri-

[21] This peculiar incident also occurred because of the alliance between proERA elite women and conservatives. Because Woman's Party members saw Title VII as a possible "foot in the door" for the ERA, they played a key role in getting sex added. The conservatives who voted for the addition of sex very likely wanted to discredit the entire act, but they also may have reasoned that if such discrediting failed, at least white women should get the same legal benefit as black women. Therefore, as Rupp and Taylor (1987, 176–178) points out, Title VII was not anunexpected gift to the women's movement; the Woman's Party had been trying to ride the coattails of the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s, if in an opportunistic fashion.

vately that to have sex discrimination treated seriously external pressure groups like the civil rights organizations were needed (Freeman 1975, 54; Rupp and Taylor 1987, 178–180).^[22] Then at the third national convention of the Commissions on the Status of Women, a resolution urging the EEOC to treat sex-based cases as seriously as those that were race-based was vetoed even before it reached the floor. A small group of angry delegates immediately concluded that the "pro-woman" EEOC members were right: an independent, nonpartisan organization was needed, to function like an NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) for women (Ferree 1987, 176; Freeman 1975, 54–55; Fulenwider 1980, 11–12). NOW became that organization.

Once formed, NOW expanded quickly, becoming the largest and most broad-based feminist organization. Yet even though it incorporates both union and professional women, echoes of previous class antagonisms remain. Core membership, for example, has consisted largely of well-educated white women, as in the earlier "elite-sustained" stage (Carden 1978; Eisenstein 1981; Freeman 1975; Fulenwider 1980; Klein 1987). Although such issues as reproductive rights have been important, the organization's central aim, particularly in the first decade, reflected the integrationist goals of the civil rights movement: "to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society" (statement of the original charter, cited in Carden 1974, 104). Winning passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, symbol of this equal citizenship, therefore became NOW's top priority, much as it had been for the National Woman's Party.

Although NOW and other second-wave organizations were never as elitist as the Woman's Party, the stress on equal treatment un-

[22] In addition, the EEOC was reluctant to enforce the sex discrimination provision because it wanted to avoid the controversy over protective legislation, that is, whether Title VII would invalidate special protections by requiring equal treatment in all employment practices. Although the National Woman's Party hoped this would be the case, paving the way for passage of the ERA, the EEOC left the issue for the courts to resolve and did not issue guidelines until 1969 (Steinberg-Ratner 1980, 50n 32; Hole and Levine 1971, 34–35; Rupp and Taylor 1987, 178).

intentionally extended the earlier class bias. Equal treatment policies, as Wilson (1978) has pointed out, tend to benefit those who already have greater resources. Much as occurred in the black community, those women with more education and greater family resources were best situated to take advantage of the newly opened opportunities (particularly as the opportunities tended to be concentrated in high-visibility, professional areas). In both cases—civil rights and feminism—largely middle-class movements followed strategies that unwittingly best reflected their own narrow interests. Women of color objected to NOW's single-issue focus on the ERA because of this narrow class-biased agenda (Giddings 1984, 340–348). In general, as Ferree (1987) points out, American feminisms reliance on the race-sex analogy and policies requiring equal treatment has had a two-sided result: American working women face far fewer overt barriers than European women but, at the same time, receive far fewer substantive benefits. Obviously, it is those with fewer resources who dearly need such substantive benefits.

Nevertheless, and again like the civil rights movement in the black community, contemporary feminism in the United States has been concerned with representing women of all classes, and may be moving in a more class-inclusive direction. The contemporary campaign for the ERA, in contrast to the earlier "elite-sustained" effort, was marked by a high level of consensus among women's right activists. There were several reasons for this, which I briefly digress to explain.

As late as 1967, most unions still supported retaining protective legislation and therefore opposed the ERA (Johansen 1984, 40). But just as with the Equal Pay Act, measures "protecting" women were favored primarily because they reinforced sex segregation and protected men from job competition with women. In the 1960s, changes in the occupational structure and an increase in women's labor force participation made such discriminatory effects more apparent (Hole and Levine 1971, 30–39). At the same time, a small but active number of union women, frustrated by their lack of influence within organized labor, began to view their interests differently. Working against protective measures, they began to construct ties to the feminist movement and to organize for more of a voice within the labor movement (Johansen 1984, 40). This effort

culminated in the 1970 endorsement by the Women's Bureau of the Equal Rights Amendment (Rupp and Taylor 1987, 183).^[23]

Independent of this shift, by the late 1960s Title VII cases were coming before the courts and protective legislation began to be struck down. The requirement of equal treatment in employment practices was invalidating protective laws on a case-by-case basis, despite the fact that the ERA had not passed (and the EEOC had failed to issue guidelines on sex discrimination). The original legal need for the special treatment argument had long since eroded; labor regulations protecting all workers had been accepted by the courts since the New Deal (see note 19). Thus, the traditional basis of labor's opposition was finally neutralized.

By the early 1970s, with the changed legal context and the changed stance of women unionists, a nonpartisan consensus developed in favor of the amendment (Freeman 1987, 220–221). There was little opposition, in fact, when it passed the Congress in 1972. However, while the ERA had been seen as an antilabor, "free market" issue easily supported by conservatives, with the new labor-feminist alliance it became part of a liberal, interventionist agenda. The traditional class and gender positions became very nearly reversed as internal changes in the Republican party also edged out moderate women and brought the New Right antifeminists to power. Opposition hardened, ratification by the states stalled, and ultimately the campaign for the ERA failed (Mansbridge 1986).

It is most important here to note that the failure of the ERA led to questioning of the feminist agenda and to an awareness of the political weakness and narrow base of the movement. NOW leaders had originally thought that implementation of the ERA would provoke a broad range of changes, including improved economic status for women through stepped up enforcement of federal policies. When efforts at ratification stalled, the amendment was pro-

[23] This changed stance also led to the formation of the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974. CLUW has always been a small group—it numbered about six thousand in 1979 and was up to eighteen thousand by 1986 (Balser 1987, 199). It has been fairly successful in promoting women "insiders" to leadership positions in the AFL-CIO and serving as a top-down check on national union policies. It has been far less successful in promoting grass-roots organizing, though it has given greater voice to working-class women's concerns within NOW (Balser 1987; Johansen 1984, 41–42; Milkman 1985; Sexton 1978).

moted explicitly on economic grounds, with the slogan "59 cents" widely used. Although the economic consequences of the ERA would likely have been minimal (Mansbridge 1986, 36–44),^[24] the slogan also signaled the changing feminist agenda and a willingness to address economic issues more directly (Johansen 1984, 2, 67).

NOW also made other attempts to address working-class women. At the organizations tenth annual convention in 1976, for example, issues originating from a labor task force were featured, including an endorsement of union organizing (Johansen 1984, 41–42). And in 1978 comparable worth received official support (Johansen 1984, 139). In addition, when feminists gained a foothold in the federal government during the Carter administration, their demands moved beyond an elitist gender politics to the needs of low-income welfare and wage-earning women (Eisenstein 1981, 232, 244–248; Ferree and Hess 1984, 125).

Figures on the size of the movement illustrate its relative political weakness. Generally it is estimated that, in the late 1970s and 1980s, major movement organizations had 200,000 to 300,000 members (Carden 1978; Mueller 1987). The membership of NOW may have peaked at some 220,000 in 1982 with the last-ditch efforts to get the ERA ratified (Ferree 1987, 173); by mid-decade that figure was reportedly about 150,000 (Brozan 1986). Still, the constituency is somewhat larger than paid memberships in movement organizations would suggest. The circulation of Ms . magazine, a good rough indicator, has consistently been around 500,000 (Katzenstein 1987, 4).^[25] Gelb (1987, 283) estimates that in 1981 only 4 percent of all American women gave money to a women's rights organization, and that only one out of three hundred was involved in some feminist activity.

In addition to the failed ERA campaign, awareness of the changing family economy also led to some shift in emphasis by the feminist mainstream. The stagflation economy, the decline in industrial

[24] In strictly legal terms, Title VII already made employment law genderblind, undermining much of the argument for the ERA. However, it is probably true that the ERA would have sent a strong message of public commitment to the courts, encouraging broader interpretations of Title VII. In fact, as Mansbridge (1986, 42–43) notes, this might have led the courts to endorse a comparable worth standard for bringing sex-based wage discrimination suits.

[25] It is also significant that, as Fulenwider (1980, 65) found, approximately 90 percent of Ms . magazine's readers are white and college-educated.

employment, and the sharp rise in female-headed households throughout the 1970s made all types of families more dependent on women's earnings. Currie, Dunn, and Fogarty argue that during the 1970s women's earnings became critical for working-class, married-couple families to protect against an eroding standard of living, as "a kind of social speed-up" required putting more family members to work (1980, 13).^[26] In addition, households with a married couple dropped from 78 percent to 61 percent of the total (Bianchi and Spain 1983, 9); and while the number of female heads-of-household in the labor force doubled (Cain 1984, 142), unless a single mother had a managerial or professional job she was virtually condemned to poverty or near-poverty. In 1977, for example, 42 percent of single mothers had incomes below the poverty line, a rate six and one-half times higher than for married-couple families (Currie, Dunn, and Fogarty 1980, 12). Sociologist Diana Pearce (1978) first described this phenomenon as "the feminization of poverty" (also Pearce and McAdoo 1981). In fact, between 1966 and 1985 the percentage of families in poverty headed by women increased from 30 percent to 48 percent (Chavez 1987). But the term also captured the more general sense that many women, rather than benefiting from increased opportunities, actually faced worsened or more precarious conditions. Ms . magazine highlighted the feminization of poverty in its tenth-anniversary issue, commenting that what had been a "decade of liberation" for some had been grim for many others (Ehrenreich and Stallard 1982).

Yet despite this attention to women's poverty, the very terms of the "feminization of poverty" discussion exposed some lingering class and race bias within mainstream feminism. Advocates for black and poor women were antagonized by an analysis that stressed only gender as a cause of poverty and by a movement that voiced concern only when large numbers of white, formerly middle-class women began to fall into poverty (particularly when poverty rates for black women remain three times as high; Burnham 1985). For example, Sparr (1984, 9) wrote: "Proponents of that argument may leave a mistaken impression that sexism is the fundamental prob-

[26] By 1983, 21 percent of employed women had husbands earning less than $ 15,000 per year. Another 26 percent had never married, and 19 percent were divorced, widowed, or separated (U.S. Bureau of the Census, cited in Diamond 1984).

lem. They fail to examine thoroughly the nature of the capitalist economy, which requires and maintains an impoverished class." And Malveaux (1985, 10), citing Sparr, added: "To the extent that this impoverished class is black . . . a set of policy initiatives that solely addresses the 'feminization of poverty' may have limited interest for black women" (also see Burnham 1985).

In sum, while contemporary feminism may be moving to a more class-inclusive agenda, American gender politics and the construction of women's rights issues have traditionally involved considerable class antagonism. The extension of formal rights of equal opportunity in the workplace and equality before the law symbolized by the Equal Rights Amendment speaks more to the interests of middle- and upper-class women and has a history of antagonizing labor-identified women's advocates. Even after the demise of protective legislation and the resulting consensus behind the ERA, the resurgent feminist movement has continued to represent a narrow constituency. Although many of its tenets have become quite broadly diffused, actual membership is small, and the sense of identification among working-class and minority women is low (Klein 1987). Nonetheless, in response to both the limitations of earlier strategies and a more hostile political and economic climate, the movement has become more sensitive to women it previously marginalized. Its embrace of the comparable worth issue can be understood as a part of this response. Issues like comparable worth, which might heal the class schism that has so impeded progress in the past, have the potential to greatly increase the effectiveness of the feminist movement. Although comparable worth emerged locally, primarily in distinct grass-roots efforts, by the mid-1980s it was being claimed as one of the few successes for the national women's movement (Chavez 1987; Lawrence 1985; Lawson 1985a).