The President's Commission on the Status of Women

The program of the Women's Bureau spoke to the unresolved problems in women's lives, and the President's Commission on the Status of Women was its centerpiece. Emerging in part from the animus of the Women's Bureau coalition against the ERA, the commission succeeded in undermining the amendment. But its role was not merely negative. Peterson, Arthur Goldberg, and John Kennedy recognized the hardships caused by the injustices that the ERA sought to correct. Women were often denied the right to serve on juries; some states gave husbands total control of family income or barred women from certain professions; the right to contract, own, and convey property or to establish domicile was available to women only within limits. In addition, women in the labor force consistently earned lower wages than did men, and they had fewer opportunities for advancement. Even the adversaries of constitutional equality recognized the need to better women's condition.

Using models provided by the civil rights movement (federal commissions, legislation, executive orders) and drawing on the same liberal ideology of individual equality, these advocates for women's rights—at a time of continuing ambivalence about appropriate roles for women—addressed many of the legal and extralegal inequities women faced. The commission affirmed the primacy of women's traditional roles, and the tension between this ideal and the simultaneous quest for expanded opportunities for women as paid workers pervaded all the commission's discussions and recommendations. At the same time, however, the commission also conferred new respect on the subject of equality for women, and it forged into one agenda the proposals of the three diverse groups fighting for women's opportunities: the proponents of constitutional equality, the advocates of increased opportunity in the workplace, and those who sought appointments for women.

At its conclusion in 1963, the commission proposed, and President Kennedy established, two continuing federal bodies to monitor action on the status of women. State legislatures and governors followed the presidential model and instituted their

own commissions on the status of women, developing a national network of women and men knowledgeable and concerned about the position of women in society.

When ERA supporters succeeding in adding to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a provision protecting the employment rights of women, many women activists responded with hesitation because of the conflict between women's role in the labor force and their responsibilities in the home, which the president's commission had left unresolved. But the disdain with which the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission treated its obligation to enforce this section of the law catalyzed the network created by the presidential commission of those involved in women's issues and led to the formation of the first women's rights group of the new wave of feminism, the National Organization for Women.