THE BACKLASH AGAINST women’s rights would be just one of several powerful forces creating a harsh and painful climate for women at work. Reaganomics, the recession, and the expansion of a minimum-wage service economy also helped, in no small measure, to slow and even undermine women’s momentum in the job market.
But the backlash did more than impede women’s opportunities for employment, promotions, and better pay. Its spokesmen kept the news of many of these setbacks from women. Not only did the backlash do grievous damage to working women—it did it on the sly. The Reagan administration downplayed or simply shelved reports that revealed the extent of working women’s declining status. Corporations claimed women’s numbers and promotions were at record highs. And the press didn’t seem to mind. As the situation of working women fell into increasing peril in the ’80s, the backlash media issued ever more upbeat reports—assuring that women’s only problem at work was that they would rather be home.
Many myths about working women’s “improving” circumstances made the rounds in the ’80s—while some discouraging and real trends that working women faced didn’t get much press. Here are just a few examples.
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THE TREND story we all read about women’s wages:
PAY GAP BETWEEN THE SEXES CLOSING!
The difference between the average man’s and woman’s paycheck, we learned in 1986, had suddenly narrowed. Women who work full-time were now said to make an unprecedented 70 cents to a man’s dollar. Newspaper editorials applauded and advised feminists to retire their “obsolete” buttons protesting female pay of 59 cents to a man’s dollar.
The trend story we should have seen:
IT’S BACK! THE ’50S PAY GAP
The pay gap did not suddenly improve to 70 cents in 1986. Women working full-time made only 64 cents to a man’s dollar that year, actually slightly worse than the year before—and exactly the same gap that working women had faced in 1955.
The press got the 70-cent figure from a onetime Census Bureau report that was actually based on data from another year and that departed from the bureau’s standard method for computing the gap. This report artificially inflated women’s earnings by using weekly instead of the standard yearly wages—thus grossly exaggerating the salary of part-time workers, a predominantly female group, who don’t work a full year. Later, the Census Bureau calculated the pay gap for 1986 using its standard formula and came up with 64 cents. This report, however, managed to elude media notice.
By that year, in fact, the pay gap had only “improved” for women by less than five percentage points since 1979. And as much as half of that improvement was due to men’s falling wages, not women’s improving earnings. Take out men’s declining pay as a factor and the gap had closed only three percentage points.
By 1988, women with a college diploma could still wear the famous 59-cent buttons. They were still making 59 cents to their male counterparts’ dollar. In fact, the pay gap for them was now a bit worse than five years earlier. Black women, who had made almost no progress in the decade, could wear the 59-cent buttons, too. Older and Hispanic women couldn’t—but only because their pay gap was even worse now than 59 cents. Older working women had actually fared better in 1968, when they had made hourly wages of 61 cents to a man’s dollar; by 1986, they were down to 58 cents. And Hispanic women, by 1988, found their wages backsliding; they were now making an abysmal 54 cents to a white man’s dollar.
The pay gap was also getting worse in many occupations, from social work to screenwriting to real estate management, as U.S. Labor Department data detail. By 1989, the pay gap for women in all full-time managerial jobs was growing worse again; that year, while the average male manager enjoyed a four-percent income boost, his average female counterpart received none. And the gap was widening most in the very fields where female employment was growing most, a list that includes food-preparation and service supervisory jobs, waiting tables, and cleaning services. In public relations, where women doubled their ranks in the decade, the pay gap grew so massively that communications professor Elizabeth Lance Toth, who tracks women’s status in this profession, reported, “In a forty-year career, a woman will lose $1 million on gender alone.”
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THE TREND story we all read about integrating the workplace:
WOMEN INVADE MAN’S WORLD!
Women, we learned, charged into traditional “male” occupations. A sea of women in their dress-for-success suits and stride-to-work sneakers abandoned the “pink-collar” ghettos and descended on Wall Street, law firms, and corporate suites. Still other women laced up army boots, slapped on hard hats, and barged into the all-male military and blue-collar factories.
The trend story we should have seen:
MORE AND MORE, WOMEN STUCK IN SECRETARIAL POOL.
While the level of occupational segregation between the sexes eased by 9 percent in the 1970s—the first time it had improved in the century—that progress stalled in the ’80s. The Bureau of Labor Statistics soon began projecting a more sex-segregated work force. This was a bitter financial pill for women: as much as 45 percent of the pay gap is caused by sex segregation in the work force. (By one estimate, for every 10 percent rise in the number of women in an occupation, the annual wage for women drops by roughly $700.) A resegregating work force was one reason why women’s wages fell in the ’80s; by 1986, more working women would be taking home poverty-level wages than in 1973.
Women were pouring into many low-paid female work ghettos. The already huge proportion of working women holding down menial clerical jobs climbed to nearly 40 percent by the early ’80s, higher than it had been in 1970. By the late ’80s, the proportion of women consigned to the traditionally female service industries had grown, too. A long list of traditionally “female” jobs became more female-dominated, including salesclerking, cleaning services, food preparation, and secretarial, administrative, and reception work. The proportion of bookkeepers who were women, for example, rose from 88 to 93 percent between 1979 and 1986. Black women, especially, were resegregated into such traditional female jobs as nursing, teaching, and secretarial and social work. And the story was the same at the office of the nation’s largest employer, the federal government. Between 1976 and 1986, the lowest job rungs in the civil service ladder went from 67 to 71 percent female. (At the same time at the top of the ladder, the proportion of women in senior executive services had not improved since 1979—it was still a paltry 8 percent. And the rate of women appointed to top posts had declined to the point that, by the early ’80s, less than 1 percent of the G.S. 13 and 14 grade office holders were women.)
In the few cases where working women did make substantial inroads into male enclaves, they were only admitted by default. As a job-integration study by sociologist Barbara Reskin found, in the dozen occupations where women had made the most progress entering “male” jobs—a list that ranged from typesetting to insurance adjustment to pharmaceuticals—women succeeded only because the pay and status of these jobs had fallen dramatically and men were bailing out. Computerization, for example, had demoted male typesetters to typists; the retail chaining of drugstores had turned independent pharmacists into poorly paid clerks. Other studies of women’s “progress” in bank management found that women were largely just inheriting branch-manager jobs that men didn’t want anymore because their pay, power, and status had declined dramatically. And still another analysis of occupational shifts concluded that one-third of the growth of female employment in transportation and half of the growth in financial services could be attributed simply to a loss of status in the jobs that women were getting in these two professions.
In many of the higher-paying white-collar occupations, where women’s successes have been most heavily publicized, the rate of progress slowed to a trickle or stopped altogether by the end of the decade. The proportion of women in some of the more elite or glamorous fields actually shrank slightly in the last half of the ’80s. Professional athletes, screenwriters, commercial voice-overs, producers and orchestra musicians, economists, geologists, biological and life scientists were all a little less likely to be female by the late ’80s than earlier in the decade.
The breathless reports about droves of female “careerists” crashing the legal, medical, and other elite professions were inflated. Between 1972 and 1988, women increased their share of such professional jobs by only 5 percent. In fact, only 2 percent more of all working women were in professional specialties in 1988 than fifteen years earlier—and that increase had been largely achieved by the early ’80s and barely budged since.
Hardly any progress occurred in the upper echelons of corporations. In fact, according to scattered studies, in the top executive suites in many industries, from advertising to retailing, women’s already tiny numbers were beginning to fall once more by the end of the decade. The rate of growth in numbers of women appointed to Fortune 1010 boards slacked off by the late ’80s, after women’s share of the director chairs had reached only 6.8 percent. Even the many reports of the rise of female “entrepreneurs” founding their own companies masked the nickel-and-dime reality: the majority of white female-owned businesses had sales of less than $5,000 a year.
Under Reagan, women’s progress in the military soon came under fire. In the mid-’70s, after quota ceilings on female recruits had been lifted and combat classifications rewritten to open more jobs to women, women’s ranks in the armed services had soared—by 800 percent by 1980. But shortly after Reagan’s election, the new army chief of staff declared, “I have called a pause to further increases in the number of army women”—and by 1982, the army had revised combat classifications to bar women from an additional twenty-three career occupations. All the services reined in their recruitment efforts, subsequently slowing female employment growth in the military throughout the ’80s.
The blue-collar working world offered no better news. After 1983, as a Labor Department study quietly reported to no fanfare, women made no progress breaking into the blue-collar work force with its better salaries. By 1988, the tiny proportions of women who had squeezed into the trades were shrinking in a long list of job categories from electricians and plumbers to automotive mechanics and machine operators. The already tiny ranks of female carpenters, for example, fell by half, to 0.5 percent, between 1979 and 1986. Higher up the ladder, women’s share of construction inspector jobs fell from 7 to 5.4 percent between 1983 and 1988.
Where women did improve their toeholds in blue-collar jobs, the increments were pretty insubstantial. The proportion of women in construction, for example, rose from 1.1 to 1.4 percent between 1978 and 1988. Women made the most progress in the blue-collar professions as motor vehicle operators—more than doubling their numbers between 1972 and 1985—but that was only because women were being hired to drive school buses, typically a part-time job with the worst pay and benefits of any transportation position.
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The trend story we all read about equal opportunity:
DISCRIMINATION ON THE JOB: FADING FAST!
Corporations, we read, were now welcoming women. “Virtually all large employers are now on [women’s] side,” Working Woman assured female readers in 1986. Discrimination was dropping, mistreatment of female workers was on the wane—and any reports to the contrary were just “propaganda from self-interested parties,” as Forbes asserted in 1989—in its story on the “decline” of sexual harassment on the job.
The trend story we should have seen:
NOW MORE THAN EVER! INEQUITY AND INTIMIDATION
Reports of sex discrimination and sexual harassment reached record highs in the decade—by both private and federal employees. Women’s sex discrimination complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission climbed by nearly 25 percent in the Reagan years—and by 40 percent among federally employed women just in the first half of the ’80s. Complaints of exclusion, demotions, and discharges on the basis of sex rose 30 percent. General harassment of women, excluding sexual harassment, more than doubled. And while the EEOC’s public relations office issued statements claiming that sexual harassment in corporate America was falling, its own figures showed that annual charges of sexual harassment nearly doubled in the decade.
Throughout much of the ’80s, women were also far more likely than men to lose their jobs or get their wages cut—and legal challenges to remedy the imbalance went nowhere in the courts. Press accounts to the contrary, the mass layoffs of the ’80s actually took a greater toll on female service workers than male manufacturing workers—the service sector accounted for almost half of the job displacement in the decade, nearly 10 percentage points more than manufacturing. And even among blue-collar workers, women suffered higher unemployment rates than men. In the federal “reductions in force” in the early ’80s, too, women who held higher-paid civil-service jobs (G.S. 12 and above) got laid off at more than twice the average rate. Far more working women than men were also forced into the part-time work force and expanding “temp” pools of the ’80s, where women faced an extraordinary pay gap of 52 cents to a man’s dollar and labored with little to no job security, insurance, benefits, or pension. Even among displaced workers who managed to get rehired, women had it worse. Women in service jobs who were reemployed had to settle for pay reductions of 16 percent, nearly double the reductions borne by their male counterparts.
If we heard less about discrimination in the ’80s workplace, that was partly because the federal government had muzzled, or fired, its equal-employment investigators. At the same time that the EEOC’s sex discrimination files were overflowing, the Reagan administration was cutting the agency’s budget in half and jettisoning its caseload. The year Reagan came into office, the EEOC had twenty-five active class-action cases; a year later, it had none. The agency scaled back the number of suits it pursued by more than 300 percent. A House Education and Labor Committee report found that in the first half of the ’80s, the number of discrimination victims receiving compensation fell by two-thirds. By 1987, a General Accounting Office study found that EEOC district offices and state equal-employment agencies were closing 40 to 80 percent of their cases without proper, or any, investigation.
A similar process was taking place in the other federal agencies charged with enforcing equal opportunity for women and minorities. At the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, for example, back-pay awards fell from $9.3 million in 1980 to $600,000 in 1983; the number of government contractors that this agency barred from federal work because of discrimination fell from five in the year before Reagan took office to none a year after his inauguration. In fact, in a 1982 study, every OFCC staff member interviewed said that they had never found a company not to be in compliance. This wasn’t because American corporations had suddenly reformed: the majority of federal contractors polled in the same study said they just felt no pressure to comply with the agency’s affirmative action requirements anymore.
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AN EXHAUSTIVE study of women’s occupational patterns in the ’80s would be outside the scope of this book. But it is possible to tell the stories of some women in key representative employment areas—from the white-collar media to the pink-collar sales force to the most embattled blue-collar universe. These are women who, one way or another, set themselves against the backlash in the work force and, in the process, ran up against the barriers built by employers, male peers, judges, government officials, and even “feminist” scholars. They had to face ridicule, ostracism, threats, and even physical assaults—as they simply tried to make a living.
Women’s employment in the press and broadcasting is worth special attention because of the media’s central role in propagating the myths of the backlash. If newspapers, magazines, and television stations had managements and staffs that more nearly reflected the proportion of women in the general population—or, for that matter, in their audiences—maybe they would have reported all the backlash trends of the ’80s exactly the same way. But maybe, just maybe, they would have told a different story.
In the winter of 1988, some prominent figures in the media gathered on a stage on the University of Southern California campus for a three-day conference, entitled “Women, Men and Media, Breakthroughs and Backlash.” But as the hours passed and the speakers delivered their reports, it became increasingly difficult to spot the breakthroughs through all the backlash.
Four female media executives had been enlisted a year earlier to represent “Breakthrough Women” on the panel; but by the time the conference rolled around, three of them no longer held their high-level posts. The female panelists said they weren’t surprised. “Women have not grasped the power and there’s an enormous amount of backsliding,” newscaster Marcia Brandwynne told the audience. Jennifer Siebens, a CBS broadcaster, called the situation in her field “extraordinarily bleak” and warned young women in the audience, “Anybody who has a fantasy of becoming a serious on-air reporter with a major network or more critically with a local station, forget it.” Former ABC vice president Marlene Sanders, the first woman to anchor a network news show in 1964, told the conference that women at ABC were now reporting the same set of grievances that “we had attempted to resolve ten years earlier.”
The news from the audience was just as discouraging: A former local TV news producer told what happened at her station after the network downsized the newsroom—all the women on staff were fired. News camerawoman Catherine Cummings reported, “There is less opportunity now. . . . It’s worse than fifteen years ago when I started. It’s actually worse.” Even on the USC campus at the Daily Trojan, a journalism student stood up to say, women’s representation was slipping, and only two of the sixteen senior editors were now women. Even in the auditorium, conference participants could witness the female vanishing act in progress: the proceedings here were being filmed by an all-male camera crew.
In another era such an outpouring of grievances from working women at a conference might have ignited outrage and a call to action. But in keeping with the resigned and more “femininely” decorous tone that often prevailed under the backlash, a number of panelists counseled against lawsuits or confrontation, and the conference’s leaders vowed only to form a steering committee that would “monitor” events and meet once a year. And when it came time for assigning blame, some of the speakers simply turned on women—or the women’s movement. Panelist Linda Alvarez, a weekday news co-anchor at KNBC in Burbank, said women had plenty of opportunities at her station and the only thing holding women back in broadcasting was their “attitude”—some women just didn’t try hard enough. (Alvarez didn’t mention the sex discrimination suit pending against her station, a suit charging the station with repeatedly promoting less experienced young men to the all-male camera crew while repeatedly bypassing its only female sound technician, a veteran with a hard-working reputation.) Another speaker dismissed the glass ceiling as a “self-inflicted metaphor.” Panelist Anne Taylor Fleming, then a columnist for the New York Times, didn’t make any critical comments about her employer’s weak affirmative action efforts. But she was happy to blame feminism for working women’s troubles. The movement sidetracked her sex, she charged, by focusing efforts on greater public access and power for women. “This word empowerment,” she said in a tone of genteel distaste. “I keep hearing it as a male word.” The womanly part of her, she said, “just shrinks” from it. Her speech sparked a hearty round of applause.
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IN THE early ’70s, federal legislation enacted under intense lobbying efforts by NOW culminated in the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. This act first cleared the way for women to enter broadcasting and print journalism in significant numbers. As a result, a group of women who were to become the most prominent female newscasters of their generation joined the networks around the same time. The “Class of ’72,” as they were later dubbed, included such well-known names as Jane Pauley, formerly of NBC’s “Today” show, former CBS White House correspondent Lesley Stahl, and “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour”’s correspondent Judy Woodruff. Under the Carter administration, women’s numbers in broadcasting and print continued to rise because of the FCC’s strict enforcement of affirmative action and the many legal actions taken by female journalists themselves. This litigation led to a series of consent decrees that required news employers to take steps to hire and promote women and equalize wages.
But Reagan’s new FCC commissioner, Mark Fowler, like so many Reagan appointees, sought to abolish his agency’s own regulations. Under his tenure, the FCC severely cut back on the information it compiled on women and minority employees, making it virtually impossible to document discrimination in class-action suits. And the information the FCC did still make available was misleading, often ludicrously so. “Eighty percent of TV employees can’t all be decisionmakers,” a five-year study of the broadcasting industry’s hiring practices wryly observed of a particularly absurd case of statistic-doctoring.
With government pressure gone, the little progress that women had made at the networks began unraveling. Before, the networks had only had two female nighttime anchors, Marlene Sanders and Barbara Walters; by the late ’80s, they had none. CBS forced out Sanders, a distinguished, senior TV newscaster, by “reassigning” her to a late-night radio slot usually reserved for junior reporters. At the “MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,” Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of the first black women to anchor a national newscast, was quietly pushed back into a slot as secondary backup anchor. “60 Minutes” correspondent Meredith Vieira was fired because she was pregnant and wanted to work part-time temporarily. By 1990, even one of the backlash’s favorite bugaboos—the ticking biological clock—helped clear another female face off the set. CBS’s Connie Chung announced she was sharply curtailing her anchoring duties—and taking an $800,000 pay cut—because she needed to take “a very aggressive approach” to getting pregnant.
The networks took a string of “aging” women anchors and put them out to pasture, replacing them with either much older men or much younger—and much less well paid—women. In 1989, at the ripe old age of thirty-nine, the popular Jane Pauley was pushed out of her co-anchor slot on the “Today” show, in a very public and humiliating campaign, and replaced by the younger and blonder Deborah Norville (who was later bumped for another youthful model, Katie Couric, at half her salary). This wasn’t a decision made with viewers in mind: Pauley’s ratings were much higher than those of her male co-host, Bryant Gumbel, and her expulsion caused the show to torpedo to the very bottom of the morning ratings, even below the cartoons. At CBS, Kathleen Sullivan was yanked from the morning news show to make way for the younger and blonder Paula Zahn, whom the network’s male brass deemed both a more comely and upstanding model of true womanhood than the divorced Sullivan. “Paula’s married with a child; Kathleen is a single woman” was how CBS executive producer Erik Sorenson explained it to the press. “You get some differences in how settled a per son feels.” (Ironically, Sullivan was the same anchor who had so gamely hosted the network’s patronizing series on the psychic ills of single women a few years earlier.)
This pattern was even more prevalent at local news stations. “Most of the male-female co-anchors on local TV,” Marlene Sanders observed, “resemble most men’s second marriages.” In the most celebrated dismissal of a local female news anchor, Christine Craft of Metromedia’s KMBC-TV in Kansas was demoted to reporter in 1982 because she was deemed “too old, too unattractive, and not sufficiently deferential to men.” When a jury ruled in her favor in a later court case, the judge simply threw out the jury’s verdict, and then tongue-lashed Craft for her “apparent indifference to matters of appearance.”
By 1983, the number of female anchors was falling at commercial TV stations nationwide, a national survey by the Radio-Television News Directors Association reported. By 1989, only eight women were among the one hundred most frequently seen correspondents—down from fifteen just a year earlier. And the trouble female anchors were facing was repeated across the spectrum of TV jobs: the number of female sportscasters, for instance, dropped from 2 to 0.4 percent between 1977 and 1987. And at the highest levels in the networks, the already tiny numbers of women in policymaking posts stalled or shrunk. A 1987 survey found that women constituted about 6 percent of all TV news vice presidents, general managers, and presidents—barely changed from 1978. At CBS, the count of female vice presidents had gone from four to one; at NBC from one to zero.
Meanwhile at major newspapers, the court-negotiated consent decrees were running out by the mid ’80s—and the media corporations’ enthusiasm for equal opportunity expired with them. Progress in improving newsrooms’ sex ratios stalled after 1982, a survey conducted by Ohio State University researchers found. At the Washington Post, a guild study finds, the pay gap between the sexes worsened after 1985—the final effective year of the Post’s conciliation agreement to settle a sex-discrimination suit. By 1987, Newspaper Guild records show, white women at the Post were making an average of $204 less a week than men, and the gap for black female reporters had doubled in five years. While the New York Times’s consent decree was in effect, the wage gap at the paper had slowly improved—and, again, once the decree expired, the gap quickly began to widen once more. By 1989, women’s representation in the New York Times newsroom hadn’t improved much, either. The total number of women employed as reporters, critics, and correspondents was fifty-four, only fourteen more than in 1972. The New York Times sports department had no female reporters in 1972; in 1989, it had one.
After 1982, newspaper managements’ efforts to promote women to top newspaper posts fell off, too. After having reached a “high” of 2 percent in 1982, the annual gain women made in becoming directing editors slipped to 0.5 percent by 1984, and barely improved for the rest of the decade. Nearly 90 percent of directing editor jobs were held by men. By the late ’80s, 76 percent of newspaper dailies had no female associate editors, executive editors, managing editors, editors, editorial chiefs, or any women in variations of these job titles, according to a national survey conducted for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Despite this pathetic record, at an ASNE panel on women’s status in 1988, Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee pronounced from the podium that women’s presence in media management has “changed radically in the last ten years.”
The problem wasn’t on the supply end. Women’s desire to enter media jobs was at an all-time high. The numbers of women entering journalism schools climbed steeply, and throughout the decade two-thirds of all journalism school graduates were women. A 1989 ASNE survey found these female journalists had even higher grades and expressed more ambition than their male colleagues. Yet, in this same period, newsrooms remained 65 percent male and continued to hire far more men than women. At large daily papers, women made up less than a third of the staff. In fact, women were only in the majority at small suburban papers with substandard pay.
Remarkably, at the same time that women’s status in journalism was eroding on almost every front, complaints began surfacing in newsrooms and broadcasting crews that the field now had “too many women.” While on assignment in 1982, NBC sound technician Lee Serrie recalls, one of the cameramen started to complain bitterly about “all the ground men have lost in the last ten years.” Yet, he held his job because the station had earlier laid off its only female camerawoman during a downsizing—and then had given the vacancy to him. (Serrie, on the other hand, had to sue to get the network even to consider her for a probationary camera slot.) Fears of a “feminized” profession may have been reinforced by the tendency of the media’s personnel officers to use affirmative action as the all-purpose alibi when rejecting white male applicants. “I’ve seen them send out these rejection letters saying, ‘Sorry, but we had to hire a black or a woman,’ when the real reason they didn’t hire the guy was that he’s unqualified,” says an editor who witnessed this practice firsthand at the New York Times.
The real problem for media men was not that there were “too many women” but simply fewer jobs in journalism. Corporate mergers, falling ad lineage, declining circulation, collapsing afternoon newspapers, and a shrinking market share for network news—all of these forces helped to cut into employment in print journalism and, at the networks, to provoke mass layoffs in the 1980s, layoffs that, despite male complaints, hurt women more than men.
Under the economically contracting, backlash-influenced climate of ’80s newsrooms, female journalists started backing away from the more aggressive tactics that a previous generation of women had exercised to claim their rights. Dangled instructively before this younger generation of women were the fates of former female activists at their companies. At NBC, two female producers who had played key roles in a sex discrimination suit against the network were forced out and replaced by inexperienced young white men—at the same salary. At the New York Times, all the named plaintiffs in the sex discrimination suit suffered major career setbacks, and most had to leave the paper. These stories did not inspire those who remained behind to mount a repeat performance. “There’s apparently a smell of cordite that we give off that terrifies the younger women,” observed Betsy Wade, a central figure in the New York Times suit, who was herself shunted to late-night duty.
Not surprisingly, women became increasingly reluctant to fight discrimination collectively the way they had in the ’70s. At a meeting in 1986 of the Journalists’ Trade Group of the National Writers Union, a journalist reviewed the erosion of women’s progress in the media and proposed forming a women’s caucus. As she wrote later: “The group’s response was informative, if depressingly predictable. Every woman who spoke after me agreed with my assessment of the situation, and each had a story of sexist treatment to tell. At the same time, every woman in the group made a point of saying that she was not a feminist and was not interested in forming a women’s caucus.”
Two efforts to organize women in the ’80s, at NBC and ABC, were hastily scrubbed in the face of management resistance. At NBC, women organized a grievance committee and began to talk about launching a legal challenge. Soon after, in September 1984, the network announced a new round of staff cuts that hit women hardest; when NBC handed out pink slips to employees in its news documentary unit, for example, nine of the ten fired were women. The grievance committee quickly disavowed any litigious intentions and began referring to its gatherings as mere “support” sessions. After a while, the obsequious nature of the group became so obvious that the members themselves began to joke bleakly about their “Ladies Sewing Circle.”
In the mid-’80s, ABC was most notorious in the industry for its poor showing on women’s employment. It had the worst record of the networks in hiring and promoting women; by 1986, it had no female executive producers and only one female bureau chief. Women that year had reported only 12 percent of the evening news spots. And the network boasted a 30 percent pay gap and several egregious cases of sexual harassment.
In 1983, Rita Flynn arrived at ABC’s Washington bureau, a seasoned newswoman from CBS with ten years of broadcasting experience. But her new employer, she recalls, treated her and the other female broadcasters like cub reporters, begrudging them serious assignments and air-time. After a while, she began to feel like she had tumbled into “a time warp.” It felt, she says, “like 1969 all over again.”
Finally, the women in the bureau met for dinner one night to discuss the problem. “None of us could ever get on prime time so it was no problem getting together,” Flynn observes wryly. When the women compared stories, they realized they had the makings of a discrimination lawsuit. They started collecting network statistics on women’s employment and pay. Flynn met with a labor lawyer.
A decade earlier, such rumblings would have prompted management to offer a settlement to fend off a damaging and embarrassing lawsuit. But in the environment of that time, corporate executives were more inclined to dig in their heels. It took months of appeals from the women just to get a brief hearing with ABC News president Roone Arledge. At the session, they presented their numbers and grievances; the executives disputed them, and the meeting was over. ABC management made only one concession: promoting one woman, a company loyalist, to vice president of public relations. As company cheerleader in this traditional female job, she served the network’s, not the women’s, cause, by defending the network’s treatment of women before the press.
Then discouragement came from another quarter of ABC, as the treatment of one woman served as a bitterly instructive lesson for many others. Cecily Coleman, the executive director of ABC’s Advisory Committee on Voter Education, had filed a confidential complaint of sexual harassment against James Abernathy, vice president for corporate affairs. Coleman said that he had repeatedly harassed her—cornering her in his office to grab and fondle her, trying to force his way into her hotel room on business trips and implying that she would lose her job if she didn’t succumb to his advances. Instead of investigating her complaint, the network fired her at once—while she was away on a business trip—then riffled through her office.
As a woman on the committee said later, its members “backed off fast” after Cecily Coleman’s firing. “It was like someone threw a snake in a barnful of horses and everybody jumped.” The number of committee members dropped to a half dozen and the group dropped its demands. Soon the committee’s spokeswoman was describing its grievances as “challenges rather than problems.”
Rita Flynn, one of the most outspoken committee members, found her career suddenly on the skids. First she was shifted to weekend hours—and told it was a “promotion.” Then she was shunted from the White House beat to “the parade route.” Soon she was no longer invited to the bureau’s social functions and was ostracized by nervous colleagues. Because she had been the one to consult with discrimination lawyers and speak to the press, “I was seen as the real bad gal.”
After a while, the experience wore her down. When Flynn’s husband was offered a job at a Portland, Oregon, newspaper, she quit ABC and moved with him, confident she could find a job in the more enlightened West. When she arrived in Oregon, however, she found that her reputation had preceded her. The general manager at one of the network affiliates there told her that he heard she was “a big-time feminist troublemaker.” No TV station in Oregon would touch her. After Flynn’s husband left her, she wound up working at a bank and taking free-lance jobs in public relations to support herself.
In the end, she came away from the experience with only one conclusion: “I’m more convinced than ever that it’s a man’s world.”
Most American working women, of course, aren’t fortunate enough to land a job in a middle-class profession like journalism. This was even more true in the ’80s, when real job growth was occurring in the lowest levels of the service sector. In the first five years of the ’80s alone, almost 7 million new jobs were created in the poorly paid female-dominated sales and service occupations. While 146,000 women were editors and reporters by the end of the decade, 4.2 million were salesworkers, the lowest paid of all the major occupations. American saleswomen suffer the largest pay gap of women in any field (51 to 53 cents to a man’s dollar in the last decade) and they make less than men in any other occupation, including day laborers. The average female salesworker earns $226 a week; her male counterpart makes $431. In retail, that’s largely because the average department store is still set up like the traditional family household, with the women dusting the cosmetics counters and straightening the dress racks in the minimum-wage “ladies’” departments, while the men adjust television sets and maneuver hot-water heaters in the “big-ticket” departments—and rack up big commissions on these sales. The result: women selling apparel (and about 83 percent are women) make an average wage of about $170 a week; men selling cars and boats (and about 93 percent are men) earn about $400.
In 1973, the EEOC began investigating such employment practices at Sears, Roebuck & Company. The federal agency had received hundreds of sex discrimination complaints about the giant retailer, the nation’s largest private employer of women. And EEOC investigators had found evidence of major disparities between the sexes at Sears in pay, hiring, and promotion. The average commissioned salesman at Sears in his first year on the job, the EEOC estimated, was earning twice as much as the average non-commissioned female salesclerk, no matter how many years she had worked for the retailer. The agency calculated that about 60 percent of Sears’s job applicants were women and at least 40 percent of the applicants who met all the requirements for commission sales were women. Yet, in the five years before the EEOC launched its investigation, less than 10 percent of the high-paying commission sales jobs had gone to women each year.
By the end of the ’70s, the EEOC had negotiated multimillion-dollar settlements from every other corporate defendant it had targeted through class-action litigation. In 1973, for example, AT&T paid $50 million in settlement fees and, after claiming for years that it could find no women interested in technical work, it met 90 percent of its hiring goals within a year, quickly signing on ten thousand women to climb telephone poles, crawl into cable tunnels, and install equipment. In the next ten years, behemoth corporations from General Electric to General Motors hastened to negotiate with the EEOC, and each eventually shelled out tens of millions of dollars for compensation, back pay, and training programs, rather than face what they feared would be much higher costs in the courts.
The Sears suit, however, would take a different course. The EEOC and women’s rights organizations had hoped it might extend the gains women were making in other fields to the vast retail sales force. But the Sears case came up last to bat; the EEOC filed suit in 1979, and as the national climate shifted and the leadership in Washington changed, the case’s prospects dimmed. Seeing no need to settle in such an environment, Sears vowed to fight the government in the courtroom. In 1986, the company won—with help from a judge who had trouble believing that any working woman had ever faced discrimination, from a women’s history scholar who provided “evidence” that women just preferred lower-paying jobs, and from the government itself.
In court, Sears’s defense was largely based on portraying the typical saleswoman as a shrinking violet—a timid and dependent homebody who works for pin money and doesn’t like to muss her skirts. Women, as Sears’s attorneys repeatedly and euphemistically put it, simply had different “interests” from men; they just weren’t interested in higher-paying, more “demanding” jobs. This in-court argument didn’t exactly jibe with the in-store developments that followed news of the EEOC’s investigation. As soon as Sears found out that it was the subject of an EEOC probe, the retailer’s personnel office had managed to find plenty of interested women in a hurry—enough to double the proportion of women in commission sales by the following year, and even triple and quadruple the ranks of women in such “male” departments as auto parts, plumbing, heating, and fencing.
Nonetheless, during the ten-month trial of 1984-85, Sears stuck to its “interest” argument about women. A Sears personnel manager named, aptly enough, Rex Rambo explained to the court that saleswomen were “more interested in the idea of dressing up the home and that sort of thing.” Women wouldn’t want to sell tires because they might have to go out “if it’s snowing or raining or whatever it is.” They wouldn’t want to sell household equipment because women “did not like the idea of going into strangers’ homes.” Sears salesman Ed Michaels testified that women couldn’t cope with selling fences: “It does require walking through the yards,” he said. “You have to have boots with you.” And Ray Graham, Sears’s director of equal opportunity, offered only this piece of evidence to support his theory that women recoiled from big-ticket sales work: When he was a store manager back in 1965, he recalled, he once assigned three women to sell kitchen stoves; two quit within months and one asked for a transfer. Under cross-examination, he admitted there might be another reason for the women’s dissatisfaction: at the time, employees of both sexes considered the stoves division one of the least desirable assignments.
The company’s hiring procedures codified the idea that only the manliest could stomach what one Sears witness called the “rough and tumble” of commission sales. All applicants for commission jobs at Sears had to take a “vigor” test that asked questions like: “Do you have a low-pitched voice?” “Have you played on a football team?” “Have you ever done any hunting?” “Do you swear often?” Though Sears told the court that by the 1970s it no longer paid much attention to the test results, the company continued to administer the exam—even after an in-house study actually linked higher “vigor” scores with poorer salesmanship.
To make its case that women were simply uninterested in commission jobs, Sears needed an expert with more credibility and less partiality than its own managers. The company found a key witness in Rosalind Rosenberg, a women’s history professor at Barnard College. And she came with a big bonus: she was a feminist. Rosenberg might have seemed an odd choice. Her 1982 book, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism, focused on the success of feminist social scientists in the early 1900s in challenging the late-Victorian view of sex differences as ironclad and biologically determined. One might assume that she would make a similar argument about the sex roles assigned modern-day saleswomen. But in Rosenberg’s testimony for Sears, the scholar argued that the tiny number of women in commission sales reflected only “the natural effect” of women’s special “differences.” To regard these natural disparities as evidence of sex bias at Sears, she told the court, was “naive.”
A lot of saleswomen simply prefer low-paying salesclerk jobs, Rosenberg maintained. They tend to be less competitive than men, she said, and less eager to work full-time or nighttime and weekend shifts, which could interfere with their child-rearing duties. These were, of course, the same arguments as Rex Rambo’s, but Rosenberg delivered them with loftier lingo. “Many women choose jobs that complement their family obligations over jobs that might increase and enhance their earning potential,” was how Rosenberg put it. Or, women “are less likely to make the same educational investments as men.”
Rosenberg didn’t explain what “educational investments” are necessary to sell Sears sofas. Nor did her theory that women would rather not work evenings and weekends make sense: Sears’s non-commissioned salesclerks have no choice but to work evenings and weekends, too, and some lower-income working mothers who can’t afford high-priced day care prefer such shifts anyway, because their husbands are more likely to be home to mind the children. Finally, by arguing that saleswomen prefer part-time work, Rosenberg assumed that they don’t bear major responsibility for supporting their households. But at Sears, a 1982 survey found that almost a third of the saleswomen were married to unemployed husbands, another 25 percent had husbands who earned less than $15,000 a year, and 75 percent had husbands who made less than $25,000 a year.
Rosenberg was initially drawn into the Sears case for personal reasons; she was friendly with Sears’s chief defense lawyer, Charles Morgan, Jr., employer of her former husband. But when Morgan first asked her to testify, she was reluctant. “My gut personal feeling was EEOC were the good guys and private employers weren’t,” she recalls. “I suggested some other names.” Besides, as she told Morgan at the time, labor history wasn’t even her field. But when the labor historians that Sears approached refused to testify, Morgan asked her again, and this time she consented.
Rosenberg says that in part she decided to testify after hearing of the EEOC’s plan to rely on statistical evidence—which she maintains is insufficient to prove discrimination. But the scholar also says her decision to participate was influenced by the new relational feminist scholarship that had emerged on women’s “difference.” These academic ideas, she says, inspired her to rethink her attitudes about feminism and to regard the demand for simple gender equality in a new light—as “old ’70s feminism” and “simpleminded androgyny.”
In forming her opinions on this case, Rosenberg didn’t conduct any independent research. She didn’t talk to any actual saleswomen or interview any female employees at Sears: “I just pretty much relied on what [the Sears legal team] gave me.” To help the Sears lawyers, she culled evidence from other scholars’ books, evidence that she said showed that women traditionally prefer “different,” more female types of jobs. She handed over this material to the Sears lawyers. They wrote her court statement for her, she says—then handed her the completed brief to sign.
In her historical survey, Rosenberg relied on the texts of several labor scholars, most extensively the writings of Alice Kessler-Harris, a feminist labor historian at Hofstra University and author of Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States, a historical study of wage-earning women. When the EEOC lawyers received a copy of the written testimony, they passed it on to Kessler-Harris for her comments. She read it, with increasing disbelief. “This is not an argument that any reasonable historian would make,” Kessler-Harris recalls thinking at the time. She was sure Rosenberg wouldn’t actually testify to it. Moreover, she felt Rosenberg’s statement had misrepresented her work. When Rosenberg did proceed to court, Kessler-Harris agreed to testify for the EEOC to correct the record on her own writings.
In court, Kessler-Harris pointed out where Rosenberg had twisted the meaning of her work, mostly through the creative use of ellipses. For example, Rosenberg had quoted Kessler-Harris as saying that women quit industrial jobs in droves after World War II—as historical evidence that women have “chosen” not to hold traditional male jobs. But she skipped over the part where Kessler-Harris said that women hadn’t willingly abandoned their posts, but had been forced out to make way for returning soldiers. Rosenberg had taken similar liberties with the works of other scholars. One of the distortions, of Phyllis Wallace’s study of the AT&T case, was so egregious that when she was challenged in court, Rosenberg retracted it and asked that it be expunged from the record. “It was a mistake,” she says now, made in the rush of compiling her evidence for Sears.
If claiming support from feminist scholars was one cornerstone of the Sears defense, hunting down feminist infiltration of the EEOC was the other. It was here that the backlash mentality surfaced most blatantly, as Sears attorney Charles Morgan twice tried to have the suit dismissed on the grounds that he had heard that some of the EEOC’s employees were members of women’s rights groups. Throughout the litigation, Morgan and his legal team harped on this “conflict of interest,” embarking on a kind of feminist witch hunt that became increasingly extravagant in its accusations and its rhetoric. With words that could have been lifted from a Jerry Falwell tract, the Sears attorneys charged that the National Organization for Women and other women’s groups had created “a female underground within the EEOC” that had orchestrated the “usurpation” of the agency and was now plotting to “injure” Sears. In other words, the company’s attorney held, Sears wasn’t hurting women’s rights; advocates of women’s rights were hurting Sears. “There was no victim here except one,” Charles Morgan proclaimed in court, “and that one victim is Sears, Roebuck and Company.”
Eager to support their claim of a feminist invasion, the Sears attorneys hauled in dozens of EEOC employees for depositions and demanded lists of EEOC colleagues who were members of women’s rights groups or who had so much as “communicated” with any of twenty-six women’s organizations or thirty-nine feminist leaders. An elderly sales-clerk, who was suing Sears independently, was called before the Sears inquisitors. Isn’t it true, they demanded, that her daughter was a member of a group called Stewardesses for Women’s Rights? The Sears defense even grilled one EEOC employee for having capitalized the word “now” in a memo. Perhaps, the lawyers insinuated, the adverb was a covert reference to the women’s organization.
The NOW connection proved almost entirely insubstantial. When Sears’s lawyers demanded that Isabelle Capello, the EEOC assistant counsel who had originally proposed the Sears suit, reveal her feminist-group ties, it turned out she had none. The whole fishing expedition netted only one potential conflict of interest: David Copus, former acting director of the EEOC’s National Programs Division, had served on the board of NOW’s Legal and Education Defense Fund for less than a year. The question was murky, since Copus had no role in the EEOC’s decision to file the Sears suit and, at the EEOC chairman’s request, had stepped down from the NOW board a decade before the case came to trial. The Sears legal team tried to discredit Copus, anyway, by raising questions about his relationship with a NOW activist. Sears even submitted deposition testimony that the couple had been observed “walking in the halls . . . together.”
Finally, the presiding judge called a halt to Sears’s inquisition. But if Morgan hadn’t proved any of his charges, they nonetheless lingered to affect the case’s outcome. Both the trial judge and the appellate justices who reviewed the case all accepted the “conflict of interest” allegation as valid; although they didn’t deem it grounds to dismiss the suit, they took it seriously, chastising the EEOC and devoting extensive space to the “female underground” threat in their written decisions.
In the end, these legal maneuverings would be almost irrelevant to the outcome of the case. The simple fact was that the government itself had changed sides. Far from desiring to prosecute Sears, the EEOC leadership that came in with the Reagan administration was desperate to back out; they tried twice to settle with Sears, midtrial, without demanding any fines or back-pay compensation. A high-ranking Justice Department official described the Sears suit to the press as a “straw man we would like to have beaten to death to prevent future class-action cases.” EEOC chairman and Reagan appointee Clarence Thomas told the Washington Post in 1985, as his own litigators were arguing the case in court, “I’ve been trying to get out of this since I’ve been here.” Thomas maintained that all the pay, hiring, and promotional inequities in the Sears docket could be easily explained by such factors as education and, curiously, commuting patterns. Thomas was, in fact, so outspoken that the Sears lawyers at one point even considered calling him as their own witness.
As it turned out, the trial judge, Reagan-appointee John A. Nordberg, didn’t stand far from Thomas on the issues in the Sears case. At one point in the trial, Nordberg actually demanded that EEOC attorneys demonstrate that American women had ever faced employment discrimination; he was skeptical. “It was very bizarre,” Karen Baker, one of the three EEOC attorneys on the case, recalls. “We actually had to go through and explain the history to him.”
Nordberg’s decision, which was upheld on appeal, threw out the EEOC case. The judge agreed with Sears that the jobs women naturally “prefer” happen to be lower-paying ones. His vision of the squeamish Sears saleswoman was close to Rex Rambo’s. If women weren’t working in men’s clothing departments, he opined in his decision, it was probably “because it sometimes involved taking personal measurements of men.”
The EEOC drew the most criticism, from Nordberg and also from the press, for relying on statistics alone. Where were the actual victims? the media demanded. The EEOC attorneys said they stuck to the numbers because in the past they found that putting individual women on the stand just sidetracked the case into debates about personal character. But in criticizing the EEOC for this omission, the press overlooked a crucial fact of the Sears trial: the EEOC did put women on the stand.
During the trial, Sears attorneys kept alluding to the vast numbers of female job applicants who weren’t interested in commission sales work. The EEOC attorneys pressed them to produce some names from this reputedly voluminous list. After much stalling, Sears offered only three. Through social security records, the EEOC’s attorneys were able to track down two of them. And both agreed to testify—for the EEOC.
“I was after commission work,” Lura Lee Nader recalls a few years after her Sears testimony. A soft-spoken woman nearing sixty, she nurses a cup of tea in a Columbus, Ohio, coffee shop by her home. “I don’t really like office work.” Nader had been working for years before she applied to Sears. In 1965, when she was pregnant with her fifth child, her husband fell off a ladder and died. The very first job Nader took as a widow was making draperies on commission. The only aspect of the job she disliked: it involved working at home. As she told the court later, “I needed to get out into the world, where there were adults to talk to.” So she went to work as a supermarket meat buyer; to supplement her income, she took a second evening job selling Sarah Coventry jewelry—on straight commission. She liked it and soon went full-time. Later, she switched to Max Factor, also on commission; she spent half her job on the road. Then she applied to Sears “because of the volume of sales you could do” at a big retailer. When she did not get the job, she went to work for an eyeglass firm, again on commission.
Nader was hardly the helpless damsel that Sears officials had described as the store’s typical female applicant. A national roller-skating champion, she also built the garage for her house, installed the shingles on her roof, and repaired her own car. And throughout her life, she was the sole provider for her five children.
Alice Howland, the other woman who took the stand, was also a sole provider when she applied to Sears. Years earlier in the ’50s, this straight-A student had quit college—she “panicked,” she recalls, after a sociology teacher told the class, “Women who don’t get married by the time they are twenty-five are old maids”—and married a man she met in a car lot. At first she had stayed home because her husband, a department-store salesman, told her, “No wife of mine is going to work.” But after he fell behind on the mortgage, he allowed her to accept a job as a translator. (A World War II refugee who fled Russia as a little girl, Howland spoke several languages.) The longer she worked, the less he liked it. In 1971, they divorced. He never paid any child support. So Howland raised their five children by herself.
After the divorce, she took a tough commission job with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: straight commission, cold-call, door-to-door sales of chamber memberships. There was no product to sell, only a subscription to the chamber newsletter. She was on the road for weeks at a time. “I was out all hours because some people you couldn’t reach except evenings,” she remembers. “I called on dairy farmers out in the country. I would be out in the winter with the wind blowing, the snow all around my ankles. I’d walk into dirty machine shops; sometimes the men would yell lewd things.” But she remained unfazed. “I’d just try to stay as professional as I could. I just kept going. I don’t give up very easily.” Each subscription was $40, from which she took a 50 percent commission. In her first six months, she made $10,000, a company record. She held the job for three years.
When Howland applied to Sears, she marked on the form that she preferred full-time work. By then, she had remarried and, with the children from her new husband’s first marriage, they now had ten mouths to feed. She, too, was hoping for commission work. “I like the idea of my income depending on the amount I choose to put out.” She wanted a job selling appliances. “I find selling women’s clothing boring, and you can’t make as much money.” When Sears turned her down, she took her first and last “woman’s” job, as an office clerk. She hated it. “My boss would say, ‘If my coffee cup needs cleaning, I will put it on this side of the desk; if my pencils need sharpening, I will put them in the out-box.’ I don’t like that in an office you are dependent on someone to say, ‘Okay, you are doing a good job, I guess you can have a ten-cent raise.’” In 1982, she quit the office job and she and her husband purchased a run-down marina in Erie, Pennsylvania. He was still working full-time at AT&T, so she managed the marina’s operations, supervised the mechanics, and sold the forty-two-foot boats, motor parts, and bilge pumps.
“For Sears to say that I wasn’t interested in commission sales, it was just so—” Howland stops, speechless. She looks around the house that she largely designed and built herself. “I just couldn’t believe it.”
• • •
IN ALL the years of government investigation, multimillion-dollar litigation, and intensive media coverage, no one—from the lawyers to the reporters—ever asked any actual Sears saleswomen what their “interests” were. In an admittedly unscientific experiment, I wandered into the Sears outlet in San Francisco one day and walked up to the first salesclerk by the door, an elderly woman in the apparel department, wearing a pink sweater and lace-collared dress. She seemed a likely spokeswoman for traditional “women’s work.” But it turned out she had just been bumped, against her will, from the camera section to the dress department. She was fuming.
“I’ve been in cameras since 1964,” she said. “I liked it because I learned all about photography, films, projectors. Now, all of a sudden my manager comes over and says, ‘You’re in dresses from now on.’ No explanation, no nothing.” She hates the dress department: “Here it’s just: they try on the dresses, you hang them up again, they try them on again, you hang them up again. Then it’s tear off the tags, ring it up, tear off more tags.”
Told of Sears’s contention that women don’t have the same interests as men, she waves a gnarled dismissive hand in the air. “That’s a bunch of baloney. I had two kids to raise. If they would have offered me commission sales, I would have taken it. I needed the job.” What about women preferring to work days, as Rosenberg had maintained. The hand sails in the air once more. “The lady in personnel said to me, ‘Either you come to work the hours we give you or you stay home.’ There was no choice. When I started out, I worked all nights and Saturdays. I didn’t have a baby-sitter, so my kids just stayed home by themselves.”
In another section of the ladies’ department, Ann Sirni is ringing up sales. She says she remembers the EEOC suit because all of a sudden, store managers were running around, “asking all of us women if we wanted to sell big-ticket items.” She adds, “They had no trouble getting women to take those jobs. A lot of them liked it because there’s more money in big-ticket items.”
Charlotte Mayfield, a salesclerk in the jewelry department, remembers the suit, too; she was one of the women who signed up when the recruiters came around. “They wanted minority women to get into management when that suit came out,” recalls Mayfield, who is black. “They invited me into this management training program, but I was a little disappointed, if you want to know the truth. We went to this classroom and they gave us a manual and a diploma and everything, but they never did offer us management jobs.”
She would have taken a commission sales job if they had offered it, she says. “The pay is better.” Would she have been afraid of the “competition,” as the Sears officials said in court? She thought about it. “I probably would have been a little scared at first, but I was scared when I came here and got put on the registers, because I’d never worked a register before. Even if I was nervous, I would have taken the job. I would have challenged myself to do it.”
But with the pressure off retailers to uphold equal employment laws, women like Charlotte Mayfield would have fewer opportunities to challenge themselves outside of the “ladies’” departments. In the backlash decade, as Labor Department data chronicle, the ranks of women relegated to sales-counter jobs climbed still higher—and the small proportions of women in such “men’s” departments as hardware, building supplies, parts, and furniture began to shrink once more.
It would take Diane Joyce nearly ten years of battles to become the first female skilled crafts worker ever in Santa Clara County history. It would take another seven years of court litigation, pursued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, before she could actually start work. And then, the real fight would begin.
For blue-collar women, there was no honeymoon period on the job; the backlash began the first day they reported to work—and only intensified as the Reagan economy put more than a million blue-collar men out of work, reduced wages, and spread mounting fear. While the white-collar world seemed capable of absorbing countless lawyers and bankers in the ’80s, the trades and crafts had no room for expansion. “Women are far more economically threatening in blue-collar work, because there are a finite number of jobs from which to choose,” Mary Ellen Boyd, executive director of Non-Traditional Employment for Women, observes. “An MBA can do anything. But a plumber is only a plumber.” While women never represented more than a few percentage points of the blue-collar work force, in this powder-keg situation it only took a few female faces to trigger a violent explosion.
Diane Joyce arrived in California in 1970, a thirty-three-year-old widow with four children, born and raised in Chicago. Her father was a tool-and-die maker, her mother a returned-goods clerk at a Walgreen’s warehouse. At eighteen, she married Donald Joyce, a tool-and-die maker’s apprentice at her father’s plant. Fifteen years later, after working knee-deep in PCBs for years, he died suddenly of a rare form of liver cancer.
After her husband’s death, Joyce taught herself to drive, packed her children in a 1966 Chrysler station wagon and headed west to San Jose, California, where a lone relative lived. Joyce was an experienced bookkeeper and she soon found work as a clerk in the county Office of Education, at $506 a month. A year later, she heard that the county’s transportation department had a senior account clerk job vacant that paid $50 more a month. She applied in March 1972.
“You know, we wanted a man,” the interviewer told her as soon as she walked through the door. But the account clerk jobs had all taken a pay cut recently, and sixteen women and no men had applied for the job. So he sent her on to the second interview. “This guy was a little politer,” Joyce recalls. “First, he said, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ before he tells me, ‘You know, we wanted a man.’ I wanted to say, ‘Yeah, and where’s my man? I am the man in my house.’ But I’m sitting there with four kids to feed and all I can see is dollar signs, so I kept my mouth shut.”
She got the job. Three months later, Joyce saw a posting for a “road maintenance man.” An eighth-grade education and one year’s work experience was all that was required, and the pay was $723 a month. Her current job required a high-school education, bookkeeping skills, and four years’ experience—and paid $150 less a month. “I saw that flier and I said, ‘Oh wow, I can do that.’ Everyone in the office laughed. They thought it was a riot. . . . I let it drop.”
But later that same year, every county worker got a 2 to 5 percent raise except for the 70 female account clerks. “Oh now, what do you girls need a raise for?” the director of personnel told Joyce and some other women who went before the board of supervisors to object. “All you’d do is spend the money on trips to Europe.” Joyce was shocked. “Every account clerk I knew was supporting a family through death or divorce. I’d never seen Mexico, let alone Europe.” Joyce decided to apply for the next better-paying “male” job that opened. In the meantime, she became active in the union; a skillful writer and one of the best-educated representatives there, Joyce wound up composing the safety language in the master contract and negotiating what became the most powerful county agreement protecting seniority rights.
In 1974, a road dispatcher retired, and both Joyce and a man named Paul Johnson, a former oil-fields roustabout, applied for the post. The supervisors told Joyce she needed to work on the road crew first and handed back her application. Johnson didn’t have any road crew experience either, but his application was accepted. In the end, the job went to another man.
Joyce set out to get road crew experience. As she was filling out her application for the next road crew job that opened, in 1975, her supervisor walked in, asked what she was doing, and turned red. “You’re taking a man’s job away!” he shouted. Joyce sat silently for a minute, thinking. Then she said, “No, I’m not. Because a man can sit right here where I’m sitting.”
In the evenings, she took courses in road maintenance and truck and light equipment operation. She came in third out of 87 applicants on the job test; there were ten openings on the road crew, and she got one of them.
For the next four years, Joyce carried tar pots on her shoulder, pulled trash from the median strip, and maneuvered trucks up the mountains to clear mud slides. “Working outdoors was great,” she says. “You know, women pay fifty dollars a month to join a health club, and here I was getting paid to get in shape.”
The road men didn’t exactly welcome her arrival. When they trained her to drive the bobtail trucks, she says, they kept changing instructions; one gave her driving tips that nearly blew up the engine. Her supervisor wouldn’t issue her a pair of coveralls; she had to file a formal grievance to get them. In the yard, the men kept the ladies’ room locked, and on the road they wouldn’t stop to let her use the bathroom. “You wanted a man’s job, you learn to pee like a man,” her supervisor told her.
Obscene graffiti about Joyce appeared on the sides of trucks. Men threw darts at union notices she posted on the bulletin board. One day, the stockroom storekeeper, Tony Laramie, who says later he liked to call her “the piglet,” called a general meeting in the depot’s Ready Room. “I hate the day you came here,” Laramie started screaming at Joyce as the other men looked on, many nodding. “We don’t want you here. You don’t belong here. Why don’t you go the hell away?”
Joyce’s experience was typical of the forthright and often violent backlash within the blue-collar work force, an assault undisguised by decorous homages to women’s “difference.” At a construction site in New York, for example, where only a few female hard-hats had found work, the men took a woman’s work boots and hacked them into bits. Another woman was injured by a male co-worker; he hit her on the head with a two-by-four. In Santa Clara County, where Joyce worked, the county’s equal opportunity office files were stuffed with reports of ostracism, hazing, sexual harassment, threats, verbal and physical abuse. “It’s pervasive in some of the shops,” says John Longabaugh, the county’s equal employment officer at the time. “They mess up their tools, leave pornography on their desks. Safety equipment is made difficult to get, or unavailable.” A maintenance worker greeted the first woman in his department with these words: “I know someone who would break your arm or leg for a price.” Another new woman was ordered to clean a transit bus by her supervisor—only to find when she climbed aboard that the men had left a little gift for her: feces smeared across the seats.
In 1980, another dispatcher job opened up. Joyce and Johnson both applied. They both got similarly high scores on the written exam. Joyce now had four years’ experience on the road crew; Paul Johnson only had a year and a half. The three interviewers, one of whom later referred to Joyce in court as “rabble-rousing” and “not a lady,” gave the job to Johnson. Joyce decided to complain to the county affirmative action office.
The decision fell to James Graebner, the new director of the transportation department, an engineer who believed that it was about time the county hired its first woman for its 238 skilled-crafts jobs. Graebner confronted the roads director, Ron Shields. “What’s wrong with the woman?” Graebner asked. “I hate her,” Shields said, according to other people in the room. “I just said I thought Johnson was more qualified,” is how Shields remembers it. “She didn’t have the proficiency with heavy equipment.” Neither, of course, did Johnson. Not that it was relevant anyway: dispatch is an office job that doesn’t require lifting anything heavier than a microphone.
Graebner told Shields he was being overruled; Joyce had the job. Later that day, Joyce recalls, her supervisor called her into the conference room. “Well, you got the job,” he told her. “But you’re not qualified.” Johnson, meanwhile, sat by the phone, dialing up the chain of command. “I felt like tearing something up,” he recalls later. He demanded a meeting with the affirmative action office. “The affirmative action man walks in,” Johnson says, “and he’s this big black guy. He can’t tell me anything. He brings in this minority who can barely speak English. . . . I told them, ‘You haven’t heard the last of me.’” Within days, he had hired a lawyer and set his reverse discrimination suit in motion, contending that the county had given the job to a “less qualified” woman.
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled against Johnson. The decision was hailed by women’s and civil rights groups. But victory in Washington was not the same as triumph in the transportation yard. For Joyce and the road men, the backlash was just warming up. “Something like this is going to hurt me one day,” Gerald Pourroy, a foreman in Joyce’s office, says of the court’s ruling, his voice low and bitter. He stares at the concrete wall above his desk. “I look down the tracks and I see the train coming toward me.”
The day after the Supreme Court decision, a woman in the county office sent Joyce a congratulatory bouquet, two dozen carnations. Joyce arranged the flowers in a vase on her desk. The next day they were gone. She found them finally, crushed in a garbage bin. A road foreman told her, “I drop-kicked them across the yard.”
• • •
SEVERAL MONTHS after the court’s verdict, on a late summer afternoon, the county trucks groan into the depot yard, lifting the dust in slow, tired circles. The men file in, and Joyce takes their keys and signs them out. Four men in one-way sunglasses lean as far as they can over the counter.
“Well, well, well. Diii-ane. How the hell are you?”
“Hey, Diane, how the fuck are you?”
“Oh, don’t ask her. She don’t know that.”
“Yeah, Diane, she don’t know nothing.”
Diane Joyce continues to smile, thinly, as she collects the keys. Some of the men drift over to the Ready Room. They leaf through dog-eared copies of Guns magazine and kick an uncooperative snack vending machine. When asked about Diane Joyce, they respond with put-downs and bitterness.
“She thinks she is high class now that she’s got her face on TV,” one of the men says. “Like we are dirt or something.”
“Now all a girl has got to do is say, Hey, they’re discriminating, and she gets a job. You tell me how a man’s supposed to get a promotion against something like that.”
“She’s not qualified for ninety-nine percent of the jobs, I’ll tell you that right now. I bet next foreman’s job opens up, she’ll get it just because she’s female. I’ve been a road maintenance worker sixteen years. Now you tell me what’s fair?”
Paul Johnson has since retired to the tiny fishing town of Sequim, Washington. From there, he dispatches an “Open Letter to the White Males of America” to newspaper offices across the country: “Fellow men,” he writes, “I believe it is time for us to object to OUR suppression.” His wife Betty, Johnson explains, helped compose and typed the letter. Her job at a bank also helped pay the bills—and underwrote much of his reverse discrimination lawsuit.
Women’s numbers in the Santa Clara County’s skilled-crafts jobs, after the Supreme Court ruling, increased by a paltry two to three a year. By the end of 1988, while the total number of available craft slots had grown from 238 to 468, the number of women rose only to 12. This was not because women had lost interest in these jobs. They were enrolling in union craft apprenticeship programs in the area in record numbers. And a county survey of its own female employees (who were still overwhelmingly relegated to the clerical pool) found that 85 percent of these women were interested in higher-paying “men’s” jobs. Moreover, 90 percent of the women surveyed said they believed they knew the reason why they weren’t getting these higher-paying positions: discrimination.
The Supreme Court would ultimately undercut Diane Joyce’s legal victory, too—only two years after she “won” in Washington. Within ten days in June 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back two decades of landmark civil rights decisions in four separate rulings. The court opened the way for men to challenge affirmative action suits, set up new barriers that made it far more difficult to demonstrate discrimination in court with statistics, and ruled that an 1866 civil rights statute doesn’t protect employees from discrimination that occurs after they are hired.
One of the four cases that summer, Lorance v. AT&T Technologies, dealt a particularly hard blow to blue-collar women. The court ruled that women at AT&T’s electronics plant in Illinois couldn’t challenge a 1979 seniority system that union and company officials had openly devised to lock out women. The reason: the women had missed the 180-day federal filing deadline for lodging unfair employment practices. The court made this ruling even though five past court rulings had all allowed employees to file such challenges after the deadline had passed. And ironically enough, that very same day the court ruled that a group of white male firefighters were not too late to file their reverse discrimination suit—against a settlement of an affirmative action case filed in 1974.
In the economically depressed town of Montgomery, Illinois, forty miles outside Chicago, nearly all the jobs pay minimum wage—except at the Western Electric plant, where circuit boards are assembled and tested for AT&T. As long as anyone at the plant can remember, the factory had been rigidly divided by sex: the women had virtually all the lowly “bench-hand” jobs (assembling and wiring switching systems by hand) and the men had virtually all the high-paying “testing” jobs (checking the circuit boards). So it had remained until 1976, when three women decided, without so much as a nudge from affirmative action recruiters, to cross the gender line.
Pat Lorance was one of the first to ford the divide. She had been working since adolescence, ever since her father had deserted the family and left her mother with no job and five children to raise. She joined the plant as a bench-hand; after eight years she was weary of the tedious work and even wearier of the low pay. When she heard that the local community college was offering courses to qualify as a tester, Lorance decided to give it a try. She brought two women, both bench-hands, with her.
“In the beginning, it was a little intimidating because the teacher, who was from Western Electric, told us, ‘You know, women don’t usually finish.’ But by the fourth course, we won his respect.” She eventually completed sixteen courses, including electronic circuitry, computer programming, and “AC/DC fundamentals.” To fit it all in, Lorance worked the five A.M.—or sometimes even the three A.M.—shift, studied in the afternoon, and attended class until 9:30 at night.
Officials at Western Electric—AT&T were closely, and uneasily, following the women’s efforts. At the time, the EEOC was pursuing its highly visible round of class-action suits against industrial employers, including other divisions of AT&T, and the company’s managers knew that if the women at the plant began raising questions publicly about the company’s equal employment record, they could well be the next target. In 1976, as employees at the time recall, the personnel office suddenly began calling in some of the female bench-hands, one by one, and offering them a deal. As several women who got the summons remember, a personnel manager informed them that the company had “mistakenly” overlooked them for some job openings. They could now receive a check of several hundred dollars as “compensation;” all they had to do in return was sign a statement promising never to sue the company for discrimination. The women say they were also instructed not to discuss the matter with their co-workers. “Some of the girls wanted to know what the jobs were,” recalls one woman, a bench-hand, who, like the others, asked that her name not be used for fear she will lose her job. “Some didn’t want to take the money. But it was like, ‘Take the money or you are out the door.’ I got over $600.” (Company officials say they have no record of these sessions in the personnel office. “We have found no facts to support such claims,” the company’s attorney Charles Jackson says.)
By the fall of 1978, Lorance had all the academic credentials she needed and she applied for the first vacancy in testing. Company officials accepted her for the job—then, a week later, told her the job had been eliminated. Then she heard that the company had hired three men as testers that same week. She protested to the union, and after a struggle, finally became the company’s first female tester.
By the end of 1978, about fifteen of the two hundred testers were women. To the men in the shops, that was fifteen too many. “They made these comments about how women were dumb and couldn’t do the job,” Lorance recalls. “I have a pretty good personality and I just shrugged it off, figured they’d get over it.” But as the number of women rose, so did the men’s resentment.
Some of the men began sabotaging women’s test sets, hooking up the wires the wrong way while the women were on their breaks or spilling ink on their schematic notebooks. They tacked up a series of humiliating posters around the plant. A typical example: a picture of a grotesquely fat woman standing on a table with her nylons down around her calves and money spilling out of her shoes. The men wrote on it: “Yesterday I couldn’t spell tester. Today I are a tester.”
In 1980, Jan King joined the second round of women to break into the tester ranks. She had worked at the company as a bench-hand since 1966, starting at $1.97 an hour. King desperately needed the extra money: her husband, a violent alcoholic, spent most of the money he earned on drink and gambling, and she had a child to support. “I looked around at the plant one day and I realized I had just accepted what I saw there,” she says. “I thought I wasn’t any good in math because that’s what they said about women. But part of my brain said, Wait a minute, if they can do it, I can. Just because I was brought up to be a certain way, that doesn’t mean I have to stay that way.”
King had to fight for the job on two fronts, work and home. “My husband said, ‘You are not going to go to school for this. It’s a waste of time.’” First he threatened her. Then, when she went to class anyway, “he’d do stuff like five minutes before it was time for me to leave, he’d announce that he wasn’t going to baby-sit. But I just kept at it because there was this little voice in the back of my mind saying, ‘You are going to end up taking care of your daughter by yourself.’ I knew if he left, he was the kind of guy who was not going to be paying child support.”
The company officials weren’t any more helpful. As King recalls, “The whole attitude at the company was, women can’t do it. Women can’t do math, women can’t do electronics.” As women began applying to become testers, the company suddenly issued a new set of training and examination requirements. Some of the tactics were peculiar. One of the top managers tried to require that female testers be sent home if they didn’t carry see-through purses, a strategy supposedly to discourage thieving.
When some of the men who were testers heard that twelve more female bench-hands had signed up for training at the community college, they decided matters had gone far enough. The younger men were the most upset; because they had the least seniority, they knew that the bench-hand women who had worked at the plant for years would be ahead of them for advancement—and behind them for layoffs. In the winter of 1978, the men organized a secret union meeting; when Lorance heard about it, she and a female co-worker made a surprise appearance.
“They weren’t real happy to see us,” she recalls. Lorance sat in the union hall and listened. She discovered they were drafting a new seniority system that would prevent women from counting their years as bench-hands in calculating their length of employment. If approved, it would mean that women would take the brunt of any layoff in the testing department. Lorance and her friend went back and spread the word to the other female testers.
At the union meeting to vote on the new seniority proposal, ninety men gathered on one side of the hall, fifteen women on the other. One man after another stood up to speak on behalf of the proposed seniority plan: “I have a family to feed. Do you know how much a loaf of bread costs now?” Then the women stood up, to say that many of them were divorced mothers with families to feed, too; their ex-husbands weren’t paying any child support. “This is a man’s job,” one of the men yelled. “Yes, but this is a woman’s factory,” a woman retorted, pointing out that more women than men were on the company payroll; he just didn’t notice them because they were tucked away in the lowest-paying jobs.
In the end, the men won the vote; in the testing universe, anyway, they still had numbers on their side. The union officialdom assured Lorance and the other women at the time that the seniority plan would have no effect on downgrades or layoffs, just advancement. Company officials, who had helped design the new seniority system and quickly approved it, made similar promises about layoffs. The women accepted their guarantees—and didn’t file suit. As Lorance points out, no one was being laid off in 1978, so “why cause trouble when you don’t have to?” None of the women wanted to risk losing the jobs they had fought so hard to get.
Jan King, for one, needed her paycheck more than ever; she was facing even more problems at home. “It was like every step I took toward improving myself, every step forward, he saw it as a rejection of him,” she says of her husband. “As long as he could keep me dependent on him, then he could think that I would stay.” Her husband turned even more violent; he began dragging her out of bed by the hair, beating and, ultimately, raping her. Whenever she made a move toward divorce, he would threaten murder. “If you leave me, you’re dead,” he told her. “If I can’t have you, no one can.”
• • •
WHEN THE recession hit in 1982, the women discovered that the union and company officials had misled them; the seniority plan did apply to layoffs, and the women were the first ones out the door. Eventually, women with nearly twenty years’ experience would lose their jobs. Even women who weren’t let go were downgraded and shunted back to the bench-hand side of the plant, a demotion that cost some women more than $10,000 in yearly wages.
Lorance was downgraded immediately. She went to a superior she trusted and asked for an explanation. He spoke to his bosses, then came back and told her, “I’m sorry, Patty, but they told me I have to write you up [for a reprimand].” But what, she asked, had she done? He explained that she had “asked a question.” Then he pulled her aside and said he suspected the real reason was they hoped this would discourage her from taking legal action. “Well, you know what that made me do,” Lorance says. The next day she pulled out the Yellow Pages and started dialing lawyers.
Ultimately, Lorance and three other female testers filed suit against the company. (One of the women later dropped out, after her husband forbade her to pursue the litigation.) Bridget Arimond, a Chicago attorney who specializes in sex discrimination law, took the case, which was promptly derailed in the courts over a technical debate about the filing deadline for unfair employment practices. The company contended that the clock started running in 1978, when the seniority system was first adopted, and their complaints constituted “stale claims.” “The ladies hadn’t exercised their legal rights at the appropriate time,” Charles Jackson, Western Electric’s counsel on the case, asserts later. “It was really their fault.” The women maintained the clock started when they were fired; how could they have known until then that the policy was unfair? “The irony of it all,” Arimond says, “was that the whole fight in court came down to whether women who had no background in the law didn’t file on time. Yet, the judge [in the lower court] waited over a year to rule on the motion.” That judge: John Nordberg of the Sears case.
Meanwhile, Pat Lorance kept getting laid off and rehired. Finally, on March 31, 1989, she was laid off for good. She had to take a job as a bartender. Two months later, when she turned on the television set one night to watch the news, she learned that she had lost the ruling. “I was very disappointed,” she says. “I don’t think the court gave it a fair look. None of us were screaming. We just wanted to right a wrong, that’s all.”
King wasn’t surprised by the decision. “You could see, the way the court had been going, we weren’t in good water.” The ruling was a financial disaster for King, who was now a single mother. Her violent husband had been killed in a street brawl in 1983. After his death, she took a leave of absence to pull herself together. While she was away, the company fired her, maintaining she had failed to notify the personnel office at the appropriate time of her return date. Desperate for work to support her two children, King cleaned houses, then took a job as a waitress. She lost all her benefits. “Today I cleaned the venetian blinds at work,” she says. “I make $2.01 an hour and that’s it, top pay. It’s demeaning, degrading. It makes you feel like you are not worthwhile.”
As she scrapes gravy from diners’ plates, King replays the scenes that led her to this dismal point. “Whenever I’m thinking about it, the feeling I get is of all these barricades, the ones with the yellow lights, and every time you try to take a step, they throw another barricade at you.” But in spite of everything, she says—the legal defeat, her late husband’s reign of terror, the humiliating descent to dishwasher—she has never regretted her decision to ask for more. “If it gets someone fired up enough to say, ‘We’ve got to turn this thing around,’ then it’s been worth it,” she says.
That same year, back at the “Breakthroughs and Backlash” media conference in California, some of the most influential female journalists and women’s rights leaders were busy recoiling from conflict. They were pondering the question of whether women really wanted “male” jobs and “male” power. Jan King, who likes to say, “Just call me one of those women’s libbers,” would have doubtless found such proceedings strange and depressing—even shameful. She hasn’t lost sight of what she and many other economically deprived women want, and she is still willing to rush the backlash barricades to get it. “I don’t believe you have to accept things the way they are,” she says. “I’ll never change my mind about that.”