Possibilities and Limitations of Government Action

Presidential commissions are commonly thought to be worse than useless. A rhyme that appeared in Punch in the 1950s expresses the common view:

If you're pestered by critics and hounded by faction
To take some precipitate, positive action,
The proper procedure, to take my advice, is
Appoint a commission and stave off the crisis.^[1]

Herbert Hoover admitted creating "a dozen committees" in order to divert crusaders into research.^[2]

Yet presidential commissions have often resulted in worthwhile outcomes. They have built support for controversial courses of action, helped to provide data to back up proposals for mainstream legislation, dramatized the existence of a problem, and broken policy deadlocks. Thomas R. Wolanin, investigating the policy achievements of presidential advisory commissions from Harry Truman through Richard Nixon, concluded that 68 percent of presidential commissions produced "substantial" or "major" presidential responses to their recommendations, and

59 percent elicited "substantial" or "major" responses from federal government agencies.^[3]

The experience with the President's Commission on the Status of Women sustains Wolanin's thesis that commissions can meaningfully affect issues. The president's commission and its state-level offspring helped to legitimize the issue of sex discrimination, made data available to support allegations that discrimination against women constituted a serious problem, drew up agendas to ameliorate inequities, raised expectations that responsible parties would take action, and, most important, sensitized a nationwide network of women to the problems women faced. This network proved to be in the vanguard of the creation of the widespread, vocal women's movement that surfaced at the end of the 1960s. Betty Friedan, the first president of the National Organization for Women, repeatedly acknowledged the model the president's commission had provided for NOW, although she expressed disappointment with the commission's accomplishments.^[4] The change in approach from highly publicized but ephemeral token appointments to a presidential commission proved beneficial.

The initiatives of the Kennedy administration anticipated, rather than responded to, the appearance of a broad-based feminist movement and ultimately helped to bring it about. Characterized by the quest not for fundamental change but for attainable goals, this significant policy shift occurred despite the absence of a grassroots movement seeking federal action.

If the fate of women's issues in the Kennedy administration demonstrates that representatives of interest groups can initiate significant policy change, it also indicates the limits of such a course of action. The president's commission proposed moderate steps, placing the responsibility for implementation on government and private institutions. But none of these institutions had strong incentives to execute the proposals on their own, and Congress was loath to establish new bureaucracies to control private businesses. New bureaucracies cost money and make people angry; employers are important campaign contributors and vigilant lobbyists. Without political pressure, legislation would be hard to come by. So the temperate federal steps taken as the result of internal policy pressures

engendered expectations the federal government did not intend to fulfill.^[5]

Jo Freeman has pointed out that policy is "the means by which government stimulate[s], respond[s] to, and/or curtail[s] social change."^[6] It represents an attempt to channel or preempt the conflict. Yet policy can also incite reformers. By collecting information and offering modest solutions, the federal government helped to turn a latent issue into a salient one and to supply data to those who wanted to go further than the government did. In order to justify even limited steps, the president's commission and the Women's Bureau had gathered copious evidence to substantiate their proposals so that they could persuade Congress and other political actors to respond appropriately. By doing so, they pointed out problems of which the general populace had before been largely unaware. The minimal change the federal government supported could not have eliminated the pervasive problem it documented. So the government action heightened awareness, raised expectations, and then disappointed the new observers.

But in order to achieve an effective and coherent government policy concerning women's issues, women activists had not only to resolve internal contraditions within their own groups but also to reach a rapprochement with other women's organizations. The philosophies of the National Women's party and the Women's Bureau represented thesis and antithesis—two sides of the ambivalent attitude toward women in the postwar period—but a new resolution or restatement of the problem was essential if a united front was to be presented to policy makers.

That resolution grew out of the changing status of women, but it was also made possible by an ideological leap—new feminist theory separated childbearing from childraising, philosophically if not in fact, and permitted a redefinition of the "problem" of women's status. Without such a resolution, policy makers could have continued to exploit the differences in the views of women. Once NOW adopted the position that both mothers and fathers were responsible for the care of children, a coherent feminist philosophy could inform responses to questions of policy.

The new women's movement was also able to move beyond the

president's commission because by now the remedies the Commission had recommended had been tried and found wanting. As halfway measures proved inadequate, those who previously had hesitated now came to acknowledge the need for potent curatives. The National Organization for Women quickly became aware that the proposals of the president's commission, based as they were on traditional conceptions of sex roles, had no power to get at the root causes of discrimination. The group's endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment soon followed. Thus the president's commission, formed in part to ward off the ERA, unintentionally contributed both to its endorsement by virtually every liberal group that once had opposed it and to the recognition that the sex roles on which special legislation for women had been based had limited utility for the final three decades of the twentieth century. As Sara Evans remarked: "The purpose, in fact, may have been to quell a growing pressure for an Equal Rights Amendment, but unwittingly the government organized its own opposition."^[7] And Frances Kolb has observed: "The network's realization of the need for action collided with the inaction of the government agencies producing the classic revolutionary situation in which the revolution began in the government's backyard, at a government sponsored event!"^[8]

Not only did federal activity assist in the development of the women's movement, it made it more broad based. The vigor of the women's movement came partly from its solid roots in traditional liberal politics. Both at its inception and at its height, the women's movement at the national level operated largely in the context of prevailing values and institutions. It was at its most effective when it sought incremental changes, invoking equality of individual opportunity, the central tenet of liberal theory. Moderate demands cloaked the magnitude of fundamental change that took place whenever women were viewed by the government as individuals rather than as instruments of the family.

The array of feminist organizations formed by middle-class women, in addition to the community-based groups formed by younger, more radical women, provided women across the country a site of activity on as broad or narrow a range of issues as they wished. In time, the distinctions between "radical" and "middle-class" feminists became less clear. Histori-

cally, radical organizations have not been successful in the United States, which is a system organized to sustain the politics of the center. Jo Freeman has observed that, whereas the political system rewards those who seek reform, it excludes proponents of fundamental change. Yet, ironically, the mainstream women's organizations, such as NOW, have advocated one of the most fundamental changes in American life.^[9]

In short, the women who became federal policy makers during an era in which they themselves eschewed the term feminist ultimately helped to bring about a revitalization of feminism—to create, in the words of James Q. Wilson, an "enduring organizational base" for influencing policy.^[10] These leaders, without a women's movement to back them up, forced the federal government to recognize that changes were taking place in women's lives, and they shaped the government's response. Ultimately—predictably—demands outstripped the possibilities of ready government acquiescence.

The presidential commission's report came at a critical moment. As Ethel Klein has documented, women were poised to expand their roles in the world. Between 1960 and 1970 the fertility rate declined from 118 per thousand to 87.9; mothers with preschool children increased their labor force participation rate from 19 percent to 30 percent; and the divorce rate rose from 15 per thousand women to 26 per thousand.^[11] In 1966, the cumulative efforts of the President's Commission on the Status of Women and the federal agencies it spawned, the state commissions on women, ERA activists, and women both inside and outside the government culminated in the emergence of an independent women's movement. In December 1967, the New York Times alerted its readers to the fact that "the feminists are on the march once more."^[12]