Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (14 page)

When Helen Dudley conducted Seminars for Women Executives in the Federal Government in 1968, she introduced an analysis of sex discrimination as part of the curriculum. Dorothy Nelms, an African-American woman working in the Social Security Program, attended one of the seminars as part of an executive development program. Recently divorced, raising two children on her own, Nelms was seeking ways to enhance her career. During the 2 day meeting, leaders invited participants to describe their experiences of sex discrimination. Dorothy recalls that they all said, “we know what it is but it doesn’t affect us.” So the leader went around the circle asking, “Did you ever come up for promotion in your job? Did you get it? Tell me what happened.” She “made us all relive things we had experienced but had buried. Within four hours we were raging maniacs, we had become so livid.” After a series of such seminars, a few women took the next step. They called themselves Federally Employed Women, with the pointed acronym, FEW. Nelms, who had already joined NOW and the International Toastmistress Clubs, joined FEW as soon as she heard about it in late 1968: 10 years later she was its president, and 30 years later she served a second term.
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Highly focused on job discrimination in the federal government, FEW set out to train members in administrative skills and to give them the knowledge and tools they needed to challenge discrimination. It also set out to train the government itself. An executive order in 1967 had set up a Women’s Program throughout the government, appointing people to see that antidiscrimination rules were enforced, but it was FEW that saw to it that the women placed in those positions were properly trained, for example, in how to read statistics and how to frame policy recommendations. Soon FEW was also heavily involved in lobbying
on Capitol Hill on such issues as the Equal Rights Amendment and affirmative action.
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Similarly, professional women began to organize themselves. In academia, professors of sociology, history, political science, psychology, and modern languages organized caucuses to pressure their associations to set up formal committees on the status of women.
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Soon their example spread to fields in the natural sciences as well as the rest of the humanities and social sciences. Between 1968 and 1971, 50 such women’s groups were established. Between 1969 and 1972, such groups sparked 30 studies on women in academic disciplines, documenting the extent of discrimination in detail.
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Academic women’s caucuses did not simply pressure for professional advancement: some went so far as to challenge the intellectual premises of their professions.
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In 1970, a panel of young, feminist historians (including Bread and Roses founder Linda Gordon) at the American Historical Association (AHA) accused the profession not only of ignoring women in the historical narratives presented in textbooks but also of treating women, when they did so, with condescending stereotypes. Male historians reacted with incredulity, claiming the mantle of scholarly objectivity and accusing the women of political bias. It was a turbulent, angry meeting at the usually decorous AHA.
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Bernice Sandler initiated one of the most far-reaching challenges to discrimination in colleges and universities after she was denied tenure at the University of Maryland. Upon discovering that her experience had been repeated many times over, she approached WEAL about taking action. In January 1970, WEAL filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor demanding a review of all colleges and universities holding federal contracts to determine whether they complied with antidiscrimination regulations; 250 institutions were targeted for more specific charges of sex discrimination. By the end of the year, suits brought by individual women and for women as a class had been brought against more than 360 institutions of higher education.
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In response to similar pressures, most professional schools not only began to pay new attention to their own employment patterns but also to drop barriers and quotas designed to limit the enrollment of female
students. The revolution was quiet. Two decades of rapidly increasing access to higher education had prepared a large number of women for law school, medical school, and the like. As the floodgates opened, thousands seized the opportunity. The number of female applicants to law school, for example, grew 14-fold between 1969 and 1972.
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By 1976, women were more than 19 percent of medical school graduates, up from 7.5 percent in 1969.
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Stories of hostile treatment in this formerly male terrain abound. Doctoral students in chemistry found dog feces in their desk drawers.
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Less hostile departments simply reminded women from time to time that they didn’t quite fit. Kathleen Graham’s female classmates at Stanford Law School (1968-1971) developed intense bonds to help them cope. What they faced was not hostility but a generalized inability of those around them—both in and out of school—to entertain the category female lawyer. “It took a lot of energy to think about how to respond to the broad spectrum of response to us that suggested we weren’t serious…. [We were] being constantly, subtly undercut and relegated to a complementary, soft, feminine role that [undermined] the possibility and opportunities and reality of being intellectually rigorous and articulate and strong.”
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The dramatic increase in the number of women “in the pipeline,” in turn, began to change the workforce, heralded by a growing number of “firsts.” Among the earliest were women who had been waiting, fully prepared, for ordination. In 1970, two major Lutheran denominations approved the ordination of women. In 1972, Sally Preisand became the first female rabbi. Most major Protestant denominations experienced turbulence as “women’s liberation” presentations appeared on the agendas of major national meetings. Episcopalians in 1970 seated female deputies for the first time but denied ordination on the grounds that women were not in the “image of Christ.” Sandra Hughes Boyd had been devastated by the rejection of women’s ordination. When she heard that 11 women deacons and several bishops planned an “irregular” ordination in Philadelphia on July 29, 1974, she “knew [she] had to be there.”

A group of us borrowed a van to drive to Philadelphia. En route we emerged only shaken up following a triple spin on the wet, slippery
Pennsylvania turnpike and left unspoken the extent to which we believed this somehow confirmed the lightness not only of the event itself but also of our own participation in it…. Despite the considerable anxiety about the potential for violent reaction against this open challenge to the church’s authority, it was a day of unforgettable joy and celebration.
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The church quickly declared such ordinations “invalid,” but after 2 more years of intense debate and politicking, in 1976 the Episcopal Church reversed itself, recognized the ordinations of these rebellious pioneers, and allowed future women’s ordination.
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A
LTHOUGH MANY OF
the most powerful and visible symbols of women’s new access to the world of public work were highly educated professionals, greater numbers lay in the tenacious and courageous challenges raised by women in the “pink and blue collar” ghettos of factories and offices. In 1974, clerical workers in Boston and Chicago created a new kind of workplace organization using the techniques of community organizing pioneered by Saul Alinsky rather than traditional trade union methods.

Day Piercy, as an undergraduate at Duke University and then a student in social work at the University of North Carolina in the late sixties, had become intensely involved in community organization and briefly connected to women’s liberation groups. After moving to Chicago in 1969, she served as the first staff member of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU), working out of a small office in the YWCA. She convinced the YWCA to hire her “to do rap groups with working class women,” which led to a strong interest in day care. She and Heather Booth (one of the founders of the West Side Group and later the CWLU) created an action committee for decent child care through the CWLU despite serious debates about “whether it was correct to work on issues like child care.”

It was the demise of the day care project—in the aftermath of Nixon’s veto of federal child care funding—that provoked Piercy to shift her focus toward organizing working women. Heather Booth had recently
founded the Midwest Academy, a training center for community organizers. Together they and several others debated the possibilities of organizing women workers. They modeled themselves on the farmworkers’ union led by Caesar Chavez. Piercy recalls thinking that the development of the Farm Workers, which began with civil rights issues and then moved to more traditional forms of collective bargaining, “was totally parallel to feminism in many ways. I began to wonder if you couldn’t [use] those same principles: dignity for women workers, equal opportunity for women, equal pay for equal work—by the end of 1972 [these were] widespread.”
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Women Employed, then, was founded by two women in their middle twenties who had been active in the women’s liberation movement, influenced by civil rights, farmworkers, and community organizing, and who had an institutional connection to the YWCA, where Piercy was still employed. Aware that labor unions denigrated the possibility of organizing women, they set their sights on women workers in the Chicago Loop.

One of their first steps was to conduct training sessions for women at the Midwest Academy. Ann Ladky and Ann Scott from Chicago NOW showed up. Piercy quickly discovered among them a capacity for strategic and pragmatic thinking and a strong interest in organizing she had missed in more ideological groups. Ellen Cassedy arrived from Boston, where she worked with an organization of Harvard office workers started by Bread and Roses member Karen Nussbaum. Cassedy recalls that after her years of antiwar and women’s movement activism in Chicago and Berkeley, she was stunned by discussions that began with “‘OK, what are you going to win?’ Just the word ‘victory’ felt weird.” She spent 2 months more working with the fledgling Women Employed and returned to Boston inspired to change their small group into an organization that could win concrete changes for working women.
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That group became 9 to 5, ultimately a national network of organizations of clerical workers.

Women Employed and 9 to 5 took the insights generated by several years of consciousness-raising and applied them to the problem of organizing women in one of the most female-dominated sectors in the labor
force. Instead of focusing on the traditional labor union issues of wages and hours, they talked about the little daily humiliations that reminded office workers of their subordinate status
as women
. Highly trained legal secretaries made coffee for the entire office; secretaries performed personal services outside their job descriptions—shopping for presents for their boss’s wife or children and delivering and picking up laundry; office workers regularly trained inexperienced men to take over senior positions for which they could never be considered and endured sexual harassment from men at all levels; and clerical pay remained extremely low on the assumption that women didn’t really need the income. Aware that office workers were often isolated from one another and extremely vulnerable, WE and 9 to 5 developed methods of gathering information and feeding it back in a public forum. They passed out questionnaires at subway stops and near office buildings. Then they announced survey results at a press conference and through flyers that invited clerical workers to meetings at the end of the workday. In the flyer, secretaries could read information about salary discrepancies, about limitations on advancement, and about how these practices were not only unfair but illegal.

Like the Farm Workers’ Union, Women Employed proposed to begin with an assertion of legal civil rights, win some early victories, and move from there—perhaps—to more traditional forms of union organization. Using information gained from questionnaires, they filed suits against major corporations, including Kraft, Sears, and banks and insurance companies, for violations of Title VII. They also held flamboyant demonstrations that were empowering for women previously considered “unorganizable.” Darlene Stille, for example, worked in an insurance company where despite her hard-won college degree (against her parents’ wishes) she found herself “… in a great bullpen with a lot of other people. It was noisy; it was uncomfortable; it was gloomy; it was depressing. I just couldn’t believe that after all those years of effort, this is what it had come to.” Then she was rejected for a supervisory post because she was a woman. “I just had this notion that I could pull myself up by my bootstraps. And my bootstraps kept: breaking.” In April 1973, however, a friend in NOW persuaded her to attend a Women Employed
demonstration and for the first time she saw that change was possible. She joined a WE picket line at Kraft Foods 2 days later. “It was wonderful, feeling that all this anger that had been backing up inside me now had a release, that I could bark back somehow … that I could find my voice in a larger community of women.” Inspired, Stille became an activist and eventually served as Chairperson of Women Employed.
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Demonstrations not only recruited members, they were carefully designed to provoke media coverage and spread the word. Iris Rivera was an excellent legal secretary in a major Chicago law firm. When her supervisor ordered her to prepare the office coffee every morning, she refused on the grounds that “I don’t drink coffee; it’s not listed as one of my job duties, and ordering the secretaries to fix the coffee is carrying the role of homemaker too far.” When she was fired, Women Employed saw a wonderful opportunity to dramatize their issues. They held a demonstration at the law office, national media in tow, and presented the lawyers with a bag of used coffee grounds and a flyer on how to make your own coffee. Step 5 was “Turn switch to on. This is the most difficult step, but, with practice, even an attorney can master it.” Iris Rivera’s face and words flashed across the country on TV screens and in newspapers, sparking debates and small revolutions in thousands of offices. She got her job back.
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