1. WE RECOGNIZED THE HONEST FIRE
At ten o’clock in the evening on June 29, 1966, about twenty women crowded into Betty Friedan’s suite at the Washington Hilton hotel. The room’s elegance matched the mandate of the conference that brought them to the capital—the third annual gathering of State Commissions on the Status of Women—as a place for ladies, not troublemakers. Returning to their hotel by chartered bus, after a boozy “reception and buffet” in the State Department’s “beautiful” Thomas Jefferson Room, the women passed through the lobby, which was decked out with plush furniture, pink globe lights, and art nouveau stained-glass windows, and into one of six elevators. Once in Friedan’s suite, they filled paper cups with liquor from Friedan’s “little bar.” Some lit cigarettes and kicked off their shoes, some folding their legs beneath their smart skirt suits or stretching them out. It was a relief to unwind after a “long, long” day packed with meetings.
Pauli Murray surveyed the swelling gathering she had helped to plan. Murray was a seasoned, fifty-five-year-old organizer and attorney with deep roots in the civil rights and workers’ movements. The descendant of enslaved women and men, Murray was raised in segregated North Carolina. She understood how inequities of race, class, and gender interlocked in people’s lives. In her view, the flourishing civil rights movement needed women’s energies but gave priority to Black men’s concerns. The labor movement privileged white women when it regarded their sex at all. Women’s activism was segmented by race. Several decades earlier, white suffragists had marginalized Black women, then accepted narrowly framed voting rights that left Jim Crow limits intact.
Murray was on a mission to link the struggles for gender equality and racial justice by centering Black women in both. She and her co-author had recently coined the term “Jane Crow” in an article for The George Washington Law Review, where they wrote about an analogy between racism and sexism in the law. But Murray was not content to keep her ideas on the pages of an academic journal. She waited somewhat impatiently for everyone to settle in: she felt the moment’s urgency.
After several minutes, Murray and Friedan told the group of their meeting’s purpose: starting “an independent national civil rights organization for women,” as Murray later described it, that would have “enough political power to compel government agencies to take seriously the problems of discrimination because of sex.” Murray and most of the others had spent the past year debating how to end officials’ foot-dragging, and they were ready for action. Those East Coast lawyers and government workers in the room had seen women’s rights become a common joke among powerful men in Washington. Fearful that outspoken activism would jeopardize their own careers, they believed that Friedan—by then a minor celebrity for publishing The Feminine Mystique three years earlier—had the independence and notoriety to become the public face of a strong new organization. Such a group was needed, they explained, because the landscape of women’s activism, while robust, was diffuse. There were women’s groups dedicated to myriad causes; women were also active in political parties, labor unions, and civil rights, antiwar, and consumer groups. A new pressure group could unite them and focus their power.
Murray and her collaborators were surprised to be met with ambivalence. The Wisconsin labor leader Catherine Conroy was among those who listened with skepticism. At forty-seven, she was nearly a decade younger than Murray, but she, too, had spent many years inside male-led movements. Conroy was “built square,” said a friend, “wore no makeup,” and “dressed like a dowdy elementary school teacher,” with “no pearls for sure.” The daughter of a Milwaukee antiques dealer who was ruined in the Great Depression, Conroy found a job after high school as a telephone operator. It was hard work for low pay, and she saw how the bosses exploited women through stereotypes about their docility. She took a post in her union, the Communications Workers of America, where her “brothers” put their own needs first. But Conroy and the other members of Wisconsin’s Commission on the Status of Women were working well with state lawmakers. Why should women jeopardize good relationships with government officials? Wouldn’t another association simply stretch their efforts thinner?
Murray tried to keep order, explaining the plan she had outlined on her yellow legal pad. But the tensions escalated. The Wisconsinites became frustrated that the gathering they had believed was purely social seemed to have an unspoken agenda. Those from the East Coast in the room were treating their questions as though they were not “worth considering.” As the Wisconsinites surmised, the meeting’s planners, including Murray and Friedan, had already decided, after months of strategizing, that a new organization was desperately needed. After a few more minutes of debate, the room erupted into chaos. Eventually, Friedan, overcome with resentment, locked herself in the bathroom. The meeting was over, she claimed. Their proposed civil rights group for women seemed to collapse before they had finished drawing its blueprint.
* * *
These women had good reasons to gather that night and imagine their sex as a united class. Many Americans in the mid-1960s believed that their prospects were on the upswing. The previous two decades had been the longest era of economic expansion in world history. That strong postwar economy appeared capable of eternal growth, and President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty sought to help those it left behind. At that time, in the United States, any high school graduate, provided he was white and male, could expect his paycheck alone to support his family, secure his home and car, and bankroll his kids through college. Organized labor was still formidable, and the Black freedom movement was a powerful example of how collective action could change society. On the heels of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, full citizenship was more available than ever before to any group that demanded inclusion. More radical advocates believed that the time was right to push for revolution.
Women often felt painted out of this optimistic portrait of America. Every aspect of their lives reinforced the message that men were, and should be, in charge. America was still firmly a patriarchy, still running a well-oiled, centuries-old system that funneled social, economic, and political power to white men. Across their differences, across the country, women started noticing the contrast between the nation’s limitless potential and the limits they faced themselves. All of the major institutions in American life treated women as subordinate and unequal.
The nation’s laws positioned women as second- and third-class citizens. Many states forced wives to take their husbands’ surnames; if she refused, a wife could have her voter registration or driver’s license withdrawn. Abortion was illegal, and rape was rarely prosecuted. State domestic violence laws were likewise weak and thin, with some requiring that a police officer personally witness abuse before charging the offender. Others applied a “stitch rule,” punishing an abuser only when his spouse’s wounds took more than a set number of stitches. States could exempt women from jury service; the U.S. Supreme Court reasoned that such a benign distinction did women a favor by preserving their time and energy for their families. For women of color, sexist injustices were compounded by explicitly racist provisions, such as sixteen states’ bans on interracial marriage. Masculine women and those who desired women endured all of these harms and more. Some states prohibited women from wearing “men’s” clothing, and every state criminalized sexual acts beyond heterosexual intercourse. In every way, the law kept women beholden to men’s power and control.
Women’s presumed inferiority shaped American culture as well. Paging through a magazine or an advice book in the early 1960s, a woman learned to prize marriage and protect her youthfulness above all else. One bestselling self-help manual in 1963 described a good wife as “the perfect follower” who only admonished her husband in ways that stroked his ego—by calling him a “big hairy beast,” for example. Turning on her television, she would see only white male news anchors, for producers believed that such men were the only people credible enough to do the job. An anchor who read a feminine name might be referencing a film star or a First Lady, always covered for her fashion choices, or a hurricane, if one was coming. These major storms were always named for women: allegedly as volatile and destructive as foul weather.
If they ventured beyond home, women found their access to the public sphere restricted. In addition to the racial segregation that still plagued many areas of the country, some proprietors denied women access to bars and eateries in order to sell camaraderie to male customers. “It’s men only at lunch,” claimed the spokesman of a San Francisco hotel of its cocktail lounge, “with man-sized drinks and hearty sandwiches.” Groups ranging from professional associations to Little League kept women and girls out. United Airlines offered an “executive flight” reserved for male travelers, although the flight attendants serving them were always young, attractive women. To test the policy and highlight its absurdity in the mid-1960s, the advertising executive Muriel Fox booked her young son on one such flight, unaccompanied, but she could not buy a ticket for herself. The Chicago “business woman” Nan Wood was able to make executive flight reservations for herself and her twelve-year-old grandson. When she arrived at the airport, the gate agents blocked her from boarding. They relented to Wood’s pressure, but she had to ride to New York in the cockpit while her grandson sat with the men in the cabin. Political leadership, too, was a man’s world, with women sidelined in civic groups and party auxiliaries. They folded pamphlets and rang doorbells but had no real power to shape platforms or hold office.
Despite these rigid rules and norms, women’s lives were changing. The breadwinner-homemaker model had always been out of reach for some, but as the cost of living climbed, it became less possible for most families. Women’s workforce participation rose in the 1950s, undermining the stereotype of the wife and homemaker, and it kept rising. Even before a female job seeker entered the labor force, she saw white male entitlement laid out in print. Classified ads in newspapers, the usual place to job hunt, were split into “Help Wanted—Men” and “Help Wanted—Women.” This separation previewed a divided labor force. Work assigned to women, especially women of color, was typically low paid and a dead end, reflecting the notions that their efforts were less valuable or that their pay merely topped off a husband’s income. Sexual harassment, which was rampant, would not even be named for another decade. Activists coined the term in 1975, and the U.S. Supreme Court did not affirm it as discrimination until 1986.
Women’s workplace experiences varied, but economic security and independence were almost always out of reach. Black women’s pay was especially critical to their families’ income because of discrimination against Black men, but some pundits accused them of eroding their husbands’ rightful authority. For women who were not attached to male wage earners, welfare was stingy and paid out by biased bureaucrats with punitive aims. Even the most elite women huddled on the margins of the professions. “Hell yes, we have a quota” for women, said a medical school dean in 1961. It was as small as possible. “We do keep women out, when we can. We don’t want them here,” he bragged. Women were 7 percent of doctors in the United States, 3 percent of lawyers, and 1 percent of engineers, figures that had declined steadily since World War II, when they were not high. Ninety percent earned less than $5,000 annually, or just over $37,600 today. Even in the rare case where a wife outearned her husband, she could not legally control her money or qualify for a credit card. Unmarried women faced higher barriers to credit than their male counterparts.
This regime of white male supremacy was never uncontested, but those women demanding equality and respect were overlooked and even mocked. After the early twentieth-century push for voting rights further fractured in the 1920s, women remained active in all kinds of organizations and politics, but rarely fought on behalf of their entire sex. The concept of women’s rights had atrophied and developed a negative connotation, with the label “feminist” deployed as a joke or an insult. Since the nineteenth century, women had built community and influence through reform movements, both domestic and international, but never before in the United States as part of a dedicated, expansive organization with the central mission to demand full equality.
Young women in the early 1960s, the first baby boomers to come of age, chafed against these limits. They sought out new concepts to describe their situation and tools for changing it. Meanwhile, an older generation of women approached the problem from their own perspective. Perhaps the way to dismantle these injustices, some suggested, was to start to act like the unified class they were so often treated as in the law, at work, and in the broader culture.
* * *
Many Americans in the 1960s were debating the nature of equality and identity-based rights, and this group included the women’s advocates who worked inside the government and had for decades. Their most important official foothold was the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, which opened in 1920. It was not a very powerful federal agency, but its leaders were respected reformers and intellectuals. The bureau’s longtime priority was shoring up the patchwork of state laws designed to shield women from the abuses of industrial labor. These laws put a floor under many women’s wages and a ceiling on their working hours, and they required employers to provide basic accommodations for woman workers like adequate restrooms and regular breaks. These protections granted some women valued benefits, but they also defined the sexes against each other; since women required accommodations, the better jobs—and pay—were saved for men.
The Women’s Bureau adjusted its stance in the middle of the century as activists nationwide appealed to civil and human rights to attack broad social inequalities. The bureau struck a newly measured tone and balanced demands for gendered protections with calls for equality and opportunity. It also defined progress within the limits of Cold War liberalism. At the vanguard of this agenda was the human rights champion and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The first chairperson of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Roosevelt was instrumental in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirmed equal “rights and freedoms” on account of sex. More than a decade later, President John F. Kennedy tapped Roosevelt to chair a new federal commission to study women’s status in American life: the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW), which working women’s advocates had pursued for more than a decade.
Brimming with bigwigs in white gloves and pearls from government, labor, and education, the twenty-six-member PCSW worked from the premise that women had enough in common to be studied as a group. Murray, who served on its Committee on Civil and Political Rights, called the PCSW “the most significant and exciting development affecting women in decades” because it opened up a national conversation on their status and how to improve it. The commission’s final report in 1963, American Women, sought a balance between creating new opportunities and strengthening the older protections. Issued just weeks after the watershed March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech to a crowd of two hundred thousand, American Women echoed that event’s hopeful mood. Its authors encouraged employers to make their workplaces more equal and called for government services to help women live full, productive lives, whether they were wage earners or homemakers, and for women to have the freedom to choose either path, or both.
The reformers on the PCSW took a nuanced approach to gender equality, but other activist currents surged and reworked the terrain for women’s rights campaigns. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, and Americans’ grief helped to give new momentum to his civil rights agenda. Under pressure from a well-organized and grassroots-driven civil rights movement, legislators debated the Civil Rights Act, a bill designed to attack race discrimination in employment, public accommodations, voting, and education. Conservative members of Congress, including the Virginia segregationist Howard W. Smith, wanted to kill the bill. Smith believed that the gender issue could be his weapon. At the request of the National Woman’s Party, which advocated for strict sex equality in the law, Smith proposed adding a ban on sex discrimination to Title VII—the portion of the act that addressed the workplace.
Simultaneous to Smith’s maneuvering, feminist members of Congress promoted the sex amendment, and Murray saw Title VII’s unique potential to help Black women. Born in Baltimore in 1910 and raised in Durham, North Carolina, Murray became an attorney and a labor and civil rights activist, as well as an architect of the legal strategy that persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Murray herself was denied admission to the University of North Carolina because of her race and Harvard Law School because of her sex. “The harsh reality,” she noted, “was that I was a minority within a minority.” Murray was also sexually attracted to women, and while she publicly identified as female, she knew herself to be male: she was, in her words, “one of nature’s experiments: a girl who should have been a boy.” While Congress debated Title VII, Murray sent a memo to federal officials arguing that without the sex amendment “the civil rights bill would be including only one half of the Negroes.” Black women especially needed these protections. They had the harshest, lowest-paid jobs and were often breadwinners themselves.
Lawmakers signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964 with Title VII’s sex amendment in place. A new lifeline for working women, it codified equality as the bedrock principle for women’s rights. The leaders of the Women’s Bureau, unlike Murray, took a cautious approach to Title VII. They feared that its sweeping guarantee of equality would uproot all of the state-level protections for working women, some of which put guardrails on the wages and working hours of women whose jobs were excluded from federal protections. But the officials charged with policing Title VII showed no interest in enforcing the law. Leaders of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission disparaged the sex provision as a “fluke” that had been “conceived out of wedlock.” Other D.C. power brokers derided Title VII as the “Bunny Law,” feigning fear that in order to create the equality that the still-ambiguous law would require, men might have to don leotards and fluffy white tails as Playboy Club servers. Such wisecracks infuriated the women looking on.
But these reluctant officials could not contain the energy that Title VII unleashed. It transformed the legal landscape and inspired more women to demand equality outright. Among them were members of state commissions on the status of women that had sprouted alongside the PCSW and continued to meet after the federal body disbanded; women in government, who had firsthand knowledge of their male colleagues’ sexist attitudes; union members frustrated with union men’s lack of solidarity; and ordinary working women who claimed their rights as they understood them. Nearly one-third of complaints sent to the EEOC in its first year referred to sex discrimination. The concept of state-enforced sex equality had new momentum and a legal foundation.
Americans were beginning to challenge authority in other ways. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Kennedy, proponents of the Cold War foreign policy of containment, had edged into Vietnam’s internal conflict to weaken the Communist cause. President Johnson sent a substantial military presence to the country in 1965. By the end of that year, a small but vocal core of antiwar activists was emerging on college campuses. Soon their cause rippled across the nation. In tandem with the civil rights movement, antiwar activists revealed that popular protest could reshape foreign and domestic policy.
By June 1966, when those twenty women were gathered in Betty Friedan’s hotel room, Title VII was two years old. The law’s watchdogs had done little about its ban on sex discrimination beyond making jokes. Many women no longer saw federal officials as powerful allies who could be trusted to act in the interest of their sex. Advocates’ decades-old bargain—in which women received modest access to political power as long as their methods were polite and their demands incremental—seemed like a bad deal. Friedan and the fed-up participants who withdrew from the conference of state women’s commissions with her would discuss a new feminism rooted in women’s common need for equality. “How did we know each other?” she asked. “We recognized the honest fire.”
* * *
That fire had been building for more than a decade. As a cohort of career women connected across boundaries of class, race, and region, a new feminism crystallized. Black women were at its core, for they had been central to the savvy activism of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since the World War II era as well as in newer upstart civil rights groups that had compelled government officials to promote racial equality. It had taken years of pressure from Black activists and white allies to pass the Civil Rights Act; now women would have to unite to make it work on their behalf, too. The Women’s Bureau attorney Dollie Lowther Robinson, who was Black, told a meeting of women in the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Milwaukee in early 1966 that the EEOC was faltering. “What we need,” she said, “is an NAACP for women.”
Pauli Murray agreed. Frustrated by male civil rights movement leaders’ “sex-based discrimination,” she had been “incensed” when they excluded women from the delegation of civil rights leaders who met with President Kennedy on the morning of the March on Washington. Later that day, women were “accorded little more than token recognition on the March program,” Murray fumed, and given none of the major speaker slots. Just before the event, the organizer A. Philip Randolph advertised it in a presentation at the National Press Club. That venue banned women from joining and from asking questions in its press conferences. Their sex could attend provided they sat in the balcony. Murray wrote Randolph an open letter: “It is as humiliating for a woman reporter assigned to cover Mr. Randolph’s speech to be sent to the balcony as it would be for Mr. Randolph to be sent to the back of the bus.”
Murray understood the power of social categories and the potential of solidarities that bridged them. Black women “can no longer postpone or subordinate the fight against discrimination because of sex to the civil rights struggle,” she wrote in 1964, “but must carry on both fights simultaneously.” Title VII’s promise to women would never be realized, she determined, until women themselves applied united pressure. Murray outlined this idea in a speech to a conference of women’s clubs in 1965. “It should not be necessary to have another March on Washington in order that there be equal job opportunities for all,” she said. “But if this necessity should arise, I hope women will not flinch from the thought.”
Murray joined a secretive network of Washington feminists who had firsthand evidence that officials were doing little to fight sex discrimination. Her closest tie was to Mary Eastwood, a white attorney at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. The two co-authored the landmark 1965 article “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII.” They also met Catherine East, a white researcher at the Department of Labor. East became adept at linking frustrated women with one another while remaining firmly in the background. Her fellow feminists later called her “Deep Throat,” comparing her essential hidden efforts to those of the shadowy Watergate whistleblower Mark Felt. These and other white-collar women knew, from their own experience, that entry into male-typed jobs did not guarantee fair treatment there. They were well positioned to analyze gender bias at work and then take action in their off-hours.
This handful of professionals started plotting a new kind of women’s association. They decided that Betty Friedan had the influence to lead it, and they knew her already. Friedan had contacted Murray after seeing coverage of her speech calling for a women’s march on Washington, and Murray introduced Friedan around. Right away, the others noted Friedan’s striking presence. She was not conventionally beautiful, recalled a colleague, yet she exerted “a powerful, haunting attractiveness.” The author had dark, intense eyes, a high forehead, and graying hair that was “often askew” despite faithful trips to the beauty parlor. Friedan balked at the suggestion that she should be involved in a women’s civil rights group. “I don’t even like organizations,” she protested. Traumatized by the Cold War persecutions of left-wing activists, writers, and actors, Friedan had long obscured her own history as a radical labor journalist and author of profiles of political women for women’s magazines. From this experience, she was well aware of the impact that an outspoken organization of women could make.
Friedan warmed to the idea as she worked on a kind of sequel to The Feminine Mystique. Her first book had raised women’s expectations, but she realized that they needed better access to the education and child care that would allow them to establish the “new life patterns” that bestseller had prescribed. Meanwhile, East and Eastwood flattered the author over dinner, and others nudged her, too. After Friedan addressed the group American Women in Radio and Television, its leader, Muriel Fox, followed up with a note: “If you ever start an NAACP for women, count me in.” Friedan signed up to attend the 1966 conference of state women’s commissions as a “writer-observer.” She was not yet sold on forming a new group, but Murray, Eastwood, and the rest of their “underground network” were already planning to use the conference to do just that.
Copyright © 2023 by Katherine Turk
