Notes

Introduction

1. Victoria Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1986), 170.

2. Lillian Breslow Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 174.

1. The Wage Conceived

1. Henry A. Landsberger, Hawthorne Revisited: Management and the Worker, Its Critics, and the Developments in Human Relations in Industry (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1958), 19.

2. New York State, Factory Investigating Commission, Fourth Report (Albany: S.B. Lyon Co., 1915), vol. 1, app. 3, passim. (Hereinafter referred to as FIC.)

3. N. Arnold Tolles, Origins of Modern Wage Theories (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 8.

4. This theory, known as marginal productivity theory, was predicated on the assumption of perfect competition and emphasized the demands of employers in calculating the wage. Its classic exposition is John Bates Clark, The Distribution of Wealth (New York: Macmillan, 1899).

5. FIC, Fourth Report, vol. 4, 435.

6. In the United States, organized workers agitated for the idea beginning in the 1830s.

7. Melton McLaurin, Paternalism and Protest: Southern Cotton Mill Workers and Organized Labor, 1875–1905 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971), 23, describes how the notion of a family wage that rested on the labor of all family members could contribute to expectations of female and child labor. In southern textile mills, “mill management argued that the total annual income of a mill family was far greater than that of a farm family. Thus the ‘family wage’ was used as a cover for the low wages paid individuals” (23). But this is not the usual understanding. See Martha May, “The Historical Problem of the Family Wage: The Ford Motor Company and the Five Dollar Day,” Feminist Studies, 8 (Summer 1982), 394–424.

8. For access to the opposing positions, see Jane Humphries, “The Working Class Family, Women’s Liberation, and Class Struggle: The Case of Nineteenth Century British History,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 9 (Fall 1977), 25–41; Michelle Barrett and Mary Mcintosh, “The Family Wage: Some Problems for Socialists and Feminists,” Capital and Class, 11 (1980), 51–72; and Hilary Land, “The Family Wage,” Feminist Review, 6 (1980), 55–78.

9. John A. Ryan, A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 117.

10. William Smart, Studies in Economics (London: Macmillan, 1985), 34. Smart added that “in addition perhaps some consumption of alcohol and tobacco, and some indulgence in fashionable dress are, in many places, so habitual that they may be said to be ‘conventionally necessary’” (34).

11. Cited by Ryan, Living Wage, 130, from the American Federationist, 1898.

12. Ryan, Living Wage, 117.

13. Ibid., vii.

14. Italics mine. Quoted in May, “Historical Problem of the Family Wage,” 402. Samuel Gompers believed the worker’s living wage should “be sufficient to sustain himself and those dependent upon him in a manner to maintain his self-respect, to educate his children, supply his household with literature, with opportunities to spend a portion of his life with his family.” In Samuel Gompers, “A Minimum Living Wage,” American Federationist, 5 (April 1898), 26.

15. See, for example, the list compiled by F. Spencer Baldwin in Louise Bosworth, The Living Wage of Women Workers (New York: Longmans Green and Co., 1911), 7; see also Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, Women and the Trades: Pittsburgh, 1907–1908 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984 [1909]), 346–47.

16. J. Laurence Laughlin, ed., Principles of Political Economy by John Stuart Mill (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1885), 214.

17. Italics mine. Ryan, Living Wage, 107.

18. Lynn Y. Wiener, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985), 19, 26, 84.

19. Ryan, Living Wage, 107.

20. Ibid., 120.

21. Kellogg Durland, “Labor Day Symposium,” American Federationist, 12 (September 1905), 619.

22. Ryan, Living Wage, 107.

23. Ibid., 133.

24. Dorothy W. Douglas, American Minimum Wage Laws at Work (New York: National Consumers’ League, 1920), 14.

25. Butler, Women and the Trades, 346; Bosworth, Living Wage of Women Workers, 9. The Women’s Bureau estimated that the minimums in effect from 1913 to 1915 ranged from $8.50 to $10.74. See Bulletin no. 61, The Development of Minimum Wage Laws in the United States: 1912– 1927 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1928).

26. Thomas Herbert Russell, The Girl’s Fight for a Living: How to Protect Working Women from Dangers Due to Low Wages (Chicago: M.A. Donahue, 1913), 108.

27. Elizabeth Brandeis, “Labor Legislation,” vol. 3 of John Commons, History of Labor in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1935), 524–25, makes the point that these budgets were calculated in one of two ways: on the basis of actual expenditures (a problem because women had to live on what they earned, however small) or on the basis of theoretical budgets (a problem because employer-members of boards resisted the inclusion of such items as recreation, “party dress,” etc.). They were then “modified” by estimates of prevailing wages, consideration of the amounts of the proposed increases, and possible consequences for business conditions.

28. Sue Ainslee Clark and Edith Wyatt, “Working-Girls’ Budgets: A Series of Articles Based upon Individual Stories of Self-Supporting Girls,” McClure’s, 35 (October 1910). Additional articles appeared in McClure’s in vol. 36 in November and December 1910 and February 1911. They were published in book form under the title Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working-Girls (New York: Macmillan, 1911). The classic study is that of Louise Bosworth, cited above.

29. Clark and Wyatt, “Working-Girls’ Budgets,” McClure’s, 35 (October 1910), 604. See the discussion of these budgets in Wiener, From Working Girl to Working Mother, 75–77; and Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 33–35.

30. The magazine advertised for contributions in January 1908 and published from four to six contributions from February 1908 to January 1909. In September 1908 it announced that it was flooded with contributions and would no longer accept any more. There is no way of knowing how heavily these were edited, so they have been used here only to extract a broad gauge of opinion.

31. “The Girl Who Comes to the City,” Harper’s Bazaar, 42 (January 1908), 54.

32. “The Girl Who Comes to the City,” 42 (October 1908), 1005; 42 (July 1908), 694.

33. “The Girl Who Comes to the City,” 42 (August 1908), 776. The maximum achieved by any of these women was the $100 a month earned by a Washington, D.C., civil servant (42 [November 1908], 1141). That sum was sufficient for a single woman not only to live reasonably well but to save and invest some of her income. It was rarely achieved by women.

34. “The Girl Who Comes to the City,” 42 (November 1908), 1141; see also October 1908, 1007.

35. See, for example, Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford, 1982), 99–101; Meyerowitz, Women Adrift, 34–36.

36. “The Girl Who Comes to the City,” 42 (March 1908), 277; 42 (May 1908), 500. The widespread nature of this assumption is apparent in “Women’s Wages,” Nation, 108 (February 22, 1919), 270–71: “The employer of women today is in a large proportion of cases heavily subsidized; for there is a considerable gap between the $9 a week that is paid to a girl and her actual cost of maintenance. Who makes up the difference? In the employer’s mind it is usually the girl’s family—which is often mythical.”

37. Smart, Studies in Economics, 115.

38. Butler, Women and the Trades, 346.

39. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift, 33.

40. Butler, Women and the Trades, 344.

41. FIC, Fourth Report, vol. 4, app. 3, 450.

42. Scott Nearing, “The Adequacy of American Wages,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 59 (May 1915), 122.

43. “Women’s Wages and Morality,” American Federationist, 20 (June 1913), 467.

44. Smart, Studies in Economics, 125.

45. Russell, Girl’s Fight for a Living, 21. On pay differences by race, see Meyerowitz, Women Adrift, 36; and Dolores Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 110–13.

46. FIC, Fourth Report, vol. 2, app. 3, 468; Don D. Lescohier, then a Minnesota statistician and later to become an eminent gatherer of labor statistics, commented at the same hearings that “custom . . . plays a far larger part in holding wages stationary than we have been accustomed to think” (ibid., 459).

47. Smart, Studies in Economics, 116. The radical Scott Nearing, in a minority opinion, held that the male wage was not determined by another principle at all. He protested industry’s lack of attention to social relations: “The man with a family is brought into active competition with the man who has no family obligations. The native-born head of a household must accept labor terms which are satisfactory to the foreign-born single man. Industry does not inquire into a worker’s social obligations” (Nearing, “Adequacy of American Wages,” 123).

48. Which is not, of course, to imply that all males who earned wages were paid enough to support families. See Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied, for illustrations of wages in the southern tobacco and textile industries that required the labor of three or more people to sustain a family.

49. Bosworth, Living Wage, 4.

50. Russell, Girl’s Fight for a Living, 73.

51. Ibid., 108.

52. Ibid., 83.

53. Smart, Studies in Economics, 107.

54. Samuel Gompers, “Woman’s Work, Rights and Progress,” American Federationist, 20 (August 1913), 625.

55. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 8th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 685.

56. Quoted in Russell, Girl’s Fight for a Living, 16; and see “Women’s Wages and Morality,” 465.

57. Russell, Girl’s Fight for a Living, 38; cf. also the testimony of Ida Tarbell in ibid., 39.

58. Butler, Women and the Trades, 342–43.

59. Francis Amasa Walker, The Wages Question: A Treatise on Wages and the Wages Class (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1876), 374.

60. Ibid., 378.

61. Quoted in Marjorie Shuler, “Industrial Women Confer,” Woman Citizen, 8 (January 27, 1923), 25.

62. Such arguments were prefigured in the late nineteenth century by assertions that the greedy were taking jobs from the needy. See Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 99ff.

63. “Women as Wage Earners,” New York Times, January 28, 1923, 26.

64. Maurine Greenwald, Women, War, and Work: The Impact of World War One on Women in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 155. Greenwald notes that a female janitor who might have made $35 a month earned $75–80 a month as a conductor.

65. Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 145.

66. Quoted in “Women and Wages,” The Woman Citizen, 4 (June 7, 1919), 8. The article went on to report that one plant had “reckoned women’s production as 20 per cent greater than that of the men preceding them. But this did not prevent the same plant from cutting down the women’s pay one-third.”

67. Typescript, “Memoranda Regarding Women’s Bureau,” in National Archives, Record Group 86, Box 4, File: WTUL Action on Policies. The bureau lost this battle. As a result, its professional staff tended to work more out of loyalty and commitment than for monetary gain. See Judith Sealander, As Minority Becomes Majority: Federal Reaction to the Phenomenon of Women in the Work Force, 1920–1963 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), chap. 3, for the early days of the Women’s Bureau.

68. Ronald W. Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 32.

69. Quoted in Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 140.

70. Schatz, Electrical Workers, 20–21.

71. Quoted in Schatz, Electrical Workers, 21; Nelson, Managers and Workers, 118, confirms that the wage as welfare differed for men and women: “Manufacturers who employed large numbers of women usually emphasized measures to make the factory more habitable. Lunchrooms, restrooms, landscaping and other decorative features conveyed the idea of a home away from home. At the same time, the classes in domestic economy and child rearing, social clubs, outings and dances (women only) assured the worker that she need not sacrifice her femininity when she entered the male world of the factory. But, because the female operative was (or was thought to be) a secondary wage earner and probably a transient, she was not offered pensions, savings programs and insurance plans.”

72. Meyer, Five Dollar Day, 140; implicit in the Ford policy was a quite conscious attempt to circumscribe the roles and self-perceptions of men as well as of women. Meyer quotes a Ford policy manual from the 1920s to the effect that “if a man wants to remain a profit sharer, his wife should stay at home and assume the obligations she undertook when married” (141). See the commentary on this issue in “Housework Wages,” The Woman Citizen, 4 (October 4, 1919), 449.

73. Russell, Girl’s Fight for a Living, 101; the same investigator asked an employer, “If you raised a little girl from $3 to $8 would a man getting $15 feel aggrieved?” (112)—a question that loads the dice by imagining women as no more than children.

74. Microfilm records, Western Electric Plant, Hawthorne Works, Operating Branch M., interviews, Reel 6, July 8, 1929. Records of individuals are not identified or tagged beyond the branch where the interviews were taken. The growing sense of entitlement to comparable wages was captured by an experienced female worker who declared herself satisfied with her work “because it was more interesting and I could make my rate” but nevertheless complained that “I don’t see why they didn’t raise me anyway like they did the other girls, every half year or every year.” In ibid., July 9, 1929. This phenomenon was not specific to women alone. F. J. Roethlisberger and William Dickson, analyzing the Western Electric research, commented, “The results of the interviewing program show very clearly that the worker was quite as much concerned with these differentials, that is the relation of his wages to that of other workmen as with the absolute amount of his wages.” See Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), 543. But nothing in the interviews indicates that women compared their wages with those of men, nor did men with those of women.

75. Mary Schaill and Ethel Best to Mary Anderson, November 5, 1919, Virginia Survey, Bulletin no. 10, National Archives, Record Group 86: Records of the Women’s Bureau, Box 2.

76. Pauline Newman, veteran trade unionist, challenged old notions of a living wage in “The ‘Equal Rights’ Amendment,” American Federationist, 45 (August 1938), 815. She wrote, “It is not a wage which affords an opportunity for intellectual development; it is not a wage which allows for spiritual growth; it is not a wage on which wage-earning women can enjoy the finer things of life.”

77. Ronald Edsforth, Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus: The Making of a Mass Consumer Society in Flint, Michigan (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 95.

78. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America: 1850– 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 196.

79. Theresa Wolfson, The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions (New York: International Publishers, 1926), 42.

80. Microfilm records, Western Electric Plant, Hawthorne Works, Operating Branch M., interviews, Reel 6, July 8, 1929.

81. Wolfson, Woman Worker, 42–43.

82. Microfilm records, Western Electric Plant, Hawthorne Works, Operating Branch M., interviews, Reel 6, Folder 1, Box 14, July 1, 1929.

83. Mary Anderson, “Industrial Standards for Women,” American Federationist, 32 (July 1925), 565.

84. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 255–56.

85. See interviews with Ada Mae Wilson, Mary Ethel Shockley, Ina Wrenn, and Gertrude Shuping in Southern Oral History Project Collection, Martin Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Used with the kind help of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall.

86. The quotation is from FIC, Fourth Report, vol. 4, 440. The percentage of married Black women working and supporting families was far higher than that for white women.

87. Shuler, “Industrial Women Confer,” 12.

2. Law and a Living

This essay originated in the Conference on Women and the Progressive Period, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution and the American Historical Association in March 1988.

1. Quoted in Florence Kelley, Women’s Work and War, 1 (July 1918), 3.

2. The other states were Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin. Bills were under consideration in Missouri, Ohio, New Jersey, and New York. For a summary of minimum wage legislation to 1919, see Lindley D. Clark, “Minimum Wage Laws of the United States,” Monthly Labor Review, 12 (March 1921), 1–20.

3. “Calls Wage Ruling by Court a Calamity,” New York Times, April 12, 1923, 11. And see “The Minimum Wage Law,” editorial, New York Times, April 11, 1923, 20; and “Freedom of Contract,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 10, 1923, 18. For contrary opinions with different reasoning, see “The Minimum Wage Decision,” Milwaukee Journal, April 10, 1923, 8; and “The Minimum Wage Decision,” Washington Post, April 10, 1923, 6.

4. “Minimum Wage Law for Women Is Void,” New York Times, April 10, 1923, 23.

5. New York World, April 11, 1923, 13.

6. “New Wage Decision Stirs Women to Act,” New York Times, April 11, 1923, 13.

7. “Labor Leaders Hit Wage Law Decision,” New York Times, May 16, 1923, 5; and “Gompers Assails Wage Decision as Reactionary,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 10, 1923, 1.

8. Henry R. Seager, “The Minimum Wage: What Next? A Symposium,” Survey, 50 (May 15, 1923), 216.

9. “Mr. Untermyer on the Minimum Wage Decision,” American Federationist, 30 (May 1923), 408; see also opinions quoted by Seager in “The Minimum Wage: What Next?”; Barbara Grimes, “Comment on Cases,” California Law Review, 11 (1923), 361; and “Minimum Wage Ruling Attacked,” New York Evening Post, April 10, 1923, 1.

10. Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908).

11. The phrase is quoted from Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923), 546. For background see Judith Baer, The Chains of Protection: The Judicial Response to Women’s Labor Legislation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978); Susan Lehrer, Origins of Protective Labor Legislation for Women: 1905–1925 (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1987); and Elizabeth Faulkner Baker, Protective Labor Legislation with Special Reference to Women in the State of New York, Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, 116 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925).

12. Stettler v. O’Hara, 243 U.S. 629 (1917).

13. Clark, “Minimum Wage Laws,” 5; in addition to Oregon, the highest courts of Minnesota (Williams v. Evans et al., 139 Minn. 32 [1917]); Arkansas (State v. Crowe, 130 Ark. 272 [1917]); Massachusetts (Holcombe v. Creamer, 231 Mass. 99 [1918]); and Washington (Spokane Hotel v. Younger, 113 Wash. 359 [1920]) had all explicitly sustained such legislation. See Rome G. Brown, “Oregon Minimum Wage Cases,” Minnesota Law Review, 1 (June 1917), 471–86.

14. In part, the relatively low level of opposition reflects the fact that many states excluded from coverage industries in which female labor was most crucial. For example, Texas excluded agriculture, domestic service, and nursing. Arkansas excluded cotton factories and fruit harvesting.

15. Baker, Protective Labor Legislation, 101–2, writing in 1924, raises the question as to whether this gender-based strategy might not in retrospect have been a mistake. After all, Sutherland struck down the law in part because, he argued, women were no longer different from men. And the Court had in Bunting v. Oregon, 243 U.S. 426 (1917), sustained a law protecting the health of male workers.

16. Cited in Stettler v. O’Hara et al., 69 Ore. 519 (1914), 519; and in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 525.

17. Muller v. Oregon, 422.

18. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 546.

19. For the pre–Civil War notion, compare Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford, 1970); for legal development in the gilded age, see William Forbath, “The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and the Law in the Gilded Age,” Wisconsin Law Review (1985), 767–817.

20. John B. Andrews and W. D. P. Bliss, History of Women in Trade Unions (New York: Arno Press, 1974 [1911]), 47, 48. Joan Scott has phrased the issue this way: “Since women were not considered to have property in labor,” there was no solution to competition with men except to remove them from the labor force. “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” International Labor and Working Class History, 31 (Spring 1987), 10.

21. The struggle is chronicled in such books as Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); and Brian Greenberg, Worker and Community: Response to Industrialization in a Nineteenth Century American City, Albany and New York, 1850–1884 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

22. Exceptions to a worker’s right to freedom of contract generally included only such occupations as railroad workers, miners, and seamen, where public health and safety were at risk. Where private health was concerned, as in the case of bakers and cigar makers, courts generally refused to support state intervention.

23. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 554; this led one commentator to observe that “the idea of the opinion seems to be that somehow the Constitution entitles the employer to such benefits as he may derive from the independent resources of possible women employees” (Thomas Reed Powell, “The Judiciality of Minimum Wage Legislation,” Harvard Law Review, 37 [1924], 565), which may not be literally the case, but which would certainly have been supported by prevailing notions of women’s family roles. The effort to shake this false assumption was one of the goals of progressive reformers and is, as chap. 1 of this volume illustrates, repeated in much of the literature.

24. Leon Fink, “The New Labor History and the Powers of Historical Pessimism: Consensus, Hegemony, and the Case of the Knights of Labor,” Journal of American History, 75 (June 1988), 115–36, argues that the idea of free labor retained much of its zest long after the corporate attack dropped. John Diggins, “Comrades and Citizens: New Mythologies in American Historiography,” American Historical Review, 90 (June 1985), 614–38, argues in contrast that the corporate image won over most workers by the late 1880s. My own sense is that the issue of gender kept the question alive into the 1930s.

25. Quong Wing v. Kirkendall, 223 U.S. 59 (1912), 62.

26. Ibid., 63.

27. Quong Wing v. Kirkendall, 63. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Lamar denied that difference could be so arbitrarily used: “The individual characteristics of the owner do not furnish a basis in which to make a classification for purposes of taxation,” he declared (64–65).

28. The best known case is Bradwell v. Illinois, 16 Wall 130 (1873), in which Justice Miller, speaking for the Court, argued that the privileges and immunities protected by the Fourteenth Amendment did not supersede state laws—in this case the Illinois law that reserved membership in the bar to men. But it is Justice Bradley’s concurring opinion that is widely cited, for Bradley chose to broaden the Illinois Supreme Court’s assertion that Bradwell was properly deprived access to the bar because she was a married woman and thus could not be bound by contracts. According to Bradley, “the civil law has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life” (132). See also Leslie Friedman Goldstein, The Constitutional Rights of Women: Cases in Law and Social Change (New York: Longman, 1979), 45–51; Leo Kanowitz, Sex Roles in Law and Society: Cases and Materials (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 42–46.

29. New York State, Factory Investigating Commission, Fourth Report, vol. 1 (Albany: S.B. Lyon Co., 1915), 25. (Hereinafter referred to as FIC.)

30. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 555–56.

31. See the testimony of John Mitchell, Norman Hapgood, Edward Bates, and Albertus Nooner published in FIC, Fourth Report, vol. 1, 706, 769, 777, 780; and the testimony of Mary Simkhovitch, Frederick Whitin, and Martha Falconer in app. 3, 414, 410, 394.

32. Morehead v. New York, ex rel Tipaldo, 298 U.S. 587 (1936), 590.

33. Testimony of Harry Allen Overstreet and Roger Babson in FIC, Fourth Report, vol. 1, 730 and 790.

34. Crystal Eastman, “Equality or Protection,” Equal Rights, 15 (March 1924), 156.

35. Testimony of Tim Healey and Homer Call in FIC, Fourth Report, vol. 1, 771, 770. Helen Marot (774) had an opposite perspective. And see William Green: “Women with centuries of homework and with traditions of legal wardship as a background do not find it as easy to establish voluntary collective bargaining with the employer as men workers,” in “Equal Rights Amendment,” American Federationist, 45 (March 1938), 245.

36. Testimony of Maude Miner, James Brown Reynolds, and Frederick Whitin in FIC, Fourth Report, vol. 1, Appx. III, 410, 412, 416.

37. Testimony of Charles Augustus Yates, New York State, Factory Investigating Commission, Syracuse Hearings (Albany: S.B. Lyon, 1911), 1097.

38. Brown, “Oregon Minimum Wage Cases,” 478.

39. Powell, “Judiciality of Minimum Wage Legislation,” 545.

40. Martha Minow, “Rights in Relationship,” unpublished paper, suggests that this dilemma might have been avoided by a relational view of the law that asks us to reimagine social relationships in wages that include the differences of some groups as parts of the community of interest instead of antithetical to it. While this offers a wonderful solution to some contemporary dilemmas, such a view in the early twentieth century would have vitiated freedom of contract altogether.

41. National Consumers’ League, The Supreme Court and Minimum Wage Legislation (New York: New Republic, 1925), 204. Elizabeth Baker argued, “Both men and women need a living wage in order to live. A subliving wage for men is perhaps the largest single cause of the entrance of their wives and children into gainful employment; thus the argument for prescribing the payment of a living wage by law may prove to be as strong for one sex as for the other” (Protective Labor Legislation, 424–25).

42. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 556.

43. State v. Crowe, 285.

44. Brief of Defendant in Error, U.S. Supreme Court, Records and Briefs, Stettler v. O’Hara, October term 1916–17, Docket no. 25 and 26, A12. And see testimony of Timothy Healey and Edward T. Devine in FIC, Fourth Report, vol. 1, 771, 697; as well as the discussion of these issues in Irwin Yellowitz, Labor and the Progressive Movement in New York State, 1897–1916 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), 131–35.

45. Ellis Brief, U.S. Supreme Court, Records and Briefs, Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, October term 1922, Docket no. 795 and 796, 43.

46. Brown, “Oregon Minimum Wage Cases,” 486.

47. Transcript of D.C. Supreme Court Opinion, June 6, 1921, U.S. Supreme Court, Records and Briefs, Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, October term 1922, Docket no. 795 and 796, 42.

48. Van Orsdel opinion, Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 284 Fed. Rep. 613 (1922), 617.

49. Ibid., 621.

50. Ibid., 623.

51. This was countered by a supporter who argued, “If we fail to give adequate remedy to real oppressive conditions, the people will turn to other economic systems for remedies” (State of Wisconsin, Amicus Curaie, Records and Briefs, Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 14).

52. Barbara H. Grimes, “Constitutional Law; Police Power; Minimum Wage for Women,” in National Consumers’ League, Supreme Court and Minimum Wage Legislation, 107.

53. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 553.

54. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 562; Taft’s logic ran as follows: employees with the lowest pay are not equal to employers; they are subject to the overreaching of harsh and greedy employers; the result is the evils of the sweating system.

55. “Gompers Assails Wage Decision as Reactionary,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 10, 1923, 1.

56. In Radice v. New York, 264 U.S. 292 (1924), the Court sustained legislation that prohibited women from working at night. Other cases that turned back attempts to establish minimum wages included Murphy v. Sardell, 269 U.S. 530 (1925), re: Arizona; Donham v. West Nelson Co., 273 U.S. 657 (1927), re: Arkansas; Morehead v. New York, ex rel Tipaldo, re: New York. For commentary on Morehead, see Robert L. Hale, “Minimum Wage and the Constitution,” Columbia Law Review, 36 (April 1936), 629–33.

57. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), 391.

58. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 399; note the shift in imagery here. Where earlier discussions had described women as a burden on the community, Hughes argued, “The community is not bound to provide what is in effect a subsidy for unconscionable employers” (399). Sutherland, dissenting, repeated at length his defense of freedom of contract as affirmed by Adkins, concluding somewhat plaintively, “We do not understand that it is questioned by the present decision” (406).

59. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 400.

60. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 399; Hughes quoted an earlier Court decision to the effect that “if the law presumably hits the evil where it is most felt, it is not to be overthrown because there are other instances to which it might have been applied” (400).

61. United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 125 (1940); Kanowitz, Sex Roles in Law and Society, notes, “The cases relied on by the Court in Parrish were all cases that made no distinction between the sexes insofar as the constitutionality of the states’ regulation of the employment relationship was concerned” (190). West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 393. Kanowitz also notes that the Court’s decision in Darby signified its belief that in Parrish it had upheld a general minimum wage, not a minimum wage for women only (468).

62. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 411, 412.

63. Morehead v. New York, 635.

3. Providers

This essay appeared in Gender and History, 1 (Spring 1989), 31–49. It appears here by permission of the publishers, Basil Blackwell.

1. Mrs. A. B. Grimm of Menasha, Wisconsin, to FDR, May 21, 1934, National Archives, Record Group 9: Records of the National Recovery Administration, Entry 23, Box 491. (Hereinafter referred to as NA RG 9.)

2. Earl A. Leiby to FDR, May 10, 1933, National Archives, Record Group 174: General Records of the Department of Labor, Chief Clerk’s Files, Entry 167/838, Box 183. (Hereinafter referred to as NA RG 174. All quotations are cited as in the original. Changes in the letters have been made only for the purposes of clarity.)

3. Blanche Crumbly to FDR, October 26, 1933, NA RG 9, Entry 398: Records relating to employee complaints in the textile industry, Box 5, File: Bibb Manufacturing Co., Macon, Ga. (Hereinafter referred to as NA RG 9, Entry 398.)

4. The most coherent statement appears in Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 67–74; see also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America,” and “The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Disorder and Gender Crisis, 1870–1936,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 53–75, 245–96; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); and Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman,” Chrysalis, 3 (1977), 43–62.

5. See the essays in Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest: A Century of Women’s Labor History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), including Ardis Cameron, “Bread and Roses Revisited: Women’s Culture and Working-Class Activism in the Lawrence Strike of 1912,” 42–61; and Collette Hyman, “Labor Organizing and Female Institution Building: The Chicago Women’s Trade Union League, 1904–1924,” 22–41. See also, Dana Frank, “Housewives, Socialists and the Politics of Food: The New York Cost of Living Protests,” Feminist Studies, 11 (Summer 1985), 255–85.

6. Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History, 75 (June 1988), 11.

7. Nancy Hewitt, “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women’s History in the 1980s,” Social History, 10 (October 1985), 299–322.

8. Ellen DuBois et al., “Patterns and Culture in Women’s History: A Symposium,” Feminist Studies, 6 (Spring 1980), 26–64.

9. I am here following the definition of Frances E. Olsen: “A dichotomy exists when a significant aspect of experience is divided sharply between two categories that are mutually exclusive but together account for the entire aspect.” See “The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal Reform,” Harvard Law Review, 96 (May 1983), 1498.

10. Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), offers an excellent example of how this happened.

11. Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); Barbara Melosh, “The Physician’s Hand”: Work, Culture and Conflict in American Nursing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). See also Louise Lamphere, From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987); and Sallie Westwood, All Day, Every Day: Factory and Family in the Making of Women’s Lives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).

12. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “‘Practical Women’: Waitress Unionists and the Controversies over Gender Roles in the Food Service Industry, 1900–1980,” Labor History, 29 (Winter 1988), 5–31; Alice Kessler-Harris, “Problems of Coalition Building: Women and Trade Unions in the 1920s,” in Milkman, Women, Work and Protest, 110–38. Stephen H. Norwood, Labor’s Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878- 1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

13. Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Working Class Female Perspectives on Gender Equality: Waitress Unionists in the Twentieth Century,” unpublished paper delivered at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Reno, Nevada, April 1988. Cited by permission.

14. Mary Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

15. Carole Turbin, “Beyond Dichotomies: Interdependence in Mid-Nineteenth Century Working Class Families in the United States,” Gender and History, 1 (Autumn 1989), 293–308.

16. Charles Sabel, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1892), 80.

17. I am drawing here on a formulation offered by Michael Piore in “Labor Market Segmentation: To What Paradigm Does It Belong?” unpublished paper delivered at the American Economic Association meetings, New York, 1982, 13.

18. For a critique of Thompson in relationship to gender, see Joan Wallach Scott, “Women in The Making of the English Working Class,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 68–90.

19. David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology and Labor Struggles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 13–14.

20. Some of these are discussed in Patricia Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 321–23.

21. Linda Frankel, “Southern Textile Workers: Generations of Survival and Struggle,” in Karen Brodkin Sacks and Dorothy Remy, eds., My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me: Everyday Trials and Triumphs of Women Workers (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 46. For a discussion of other perceptions on which women might have acted in the 1920s, see Kessler-Harris, “Problems of Coalition Building.”

22. See, especially, Ardis Cameron, “Bread and Roses Revisited,” in Milkman, Women, Work and Protest; Carole Turbin, “Reconceptualizing Family, Work and Labor Organizing: Working Women in Troy, 1860–1890,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 16 (Spring 1984), 1–16; and Michael Kazin’s critique of David Montgomery’s The Fall of the House of Labor, in Labor History, 30 (Winter 1989), 110–13.

23. Sally Alexander, “Women, Class and Sexual Difference,” History Workshop, 17 (Spring 1984), 125–49.

24. Warren Susman, “The Culture of the Thirties,” in Culture and Commitment: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984); U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Women Workers and Family Support, Bulletin no. 49 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1925).

25. Lois Scharff, To Work and to Wed: Female Employment, Feminism, and the Great Depression (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980); Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982).

26. The Women’s Bureau estimated that 1,603 federal employees lost their jobs between June 30, 1932, and December 31, 1934. U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, “Gainful Employment of Married Women” (mimeographed pamphlet, 1936), Martin Catherwood Library, Cornell University, American Association for Labor Legislation Collection, Box: Women. And see Ruth Milkman, “Women’s Work and the Economic Crises: Some Lessons from the Great Depression,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 8 (Spring 1976), 73–97; Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 9; Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture in San Antonio, 1929–1939 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1984).

27. E. E. Jett to FDR, June 23, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183. Jett described his letter as “the bravest thing I have ever tried” and concluded it with, “Will you reply to this, please.”

28. William Launder to Louis Howe, May 17, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183.

29. June 15, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183.

30. Women’s Bureau, “Gainful Employment of Married Women,” 17.

31. “Resolution,” The Texas Federation of Business and Professional Women, June 11, 1932, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183. In the same file, see also a resolution from the Government Workers’ Council of the National Woman’s Party, March 7, 1933, demanding the removal of section 232 from the National Economy Act “as soon as the 73rd Congress convenes.” On July 13, 1932, Secretary of Labor William Doak replied to a similar resolution: “It is my endeavor to administer the Economy Bill in such a way that no discharges will be necessary. You can be assured that full justice will be rendered to all women employees, married or unmarried.” NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183.

32. Mrs. C. C. Beach to Frances Perkins, April 27, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183.

33. The empirical work of Judith Buber Agassi, which explores worker attitudes in the 1970s, indicates that the stance still prevails: Comparing the Work Attitudes of Women and Men (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1982), especially chap. 5 and 10.

34. William Einger of Cincinnati, Ohio, to FDR, April 9, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183. For a striking example of conflicted feelings among married men about single men holding jobs while those with families were unemployed, see the testimony of Frank Davidson, re: The Fisher Body Company. “There was one time in 1932 the company asked for them to bring their marriage certificates when they got a job and was hired for proof whether they were married or whether they were single. I know of cases where they went out and borrowed somebody else’s marriage certificates. It is an awful stirred up mess, everything mixed up” (National Recovery Administration, Hearings on Regularizing Employment and Otherwise Improving the Conditions of Labor in the Automobile Industry, Flint, Mich., December 18, 1934, typescript in NA RG 9, Entry 44, Box 7265, 482). See also testimony of M. R. Egbert, in ibid., Milwaukee, Wis., December 30, 1934, Box 7266, 136.

35. Mary Winslow, Married Women in Industry, Women’s Bureau Bulletin no. 38 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1924), 6.

36. Tamara Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship between Family and Work in a New England Community (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 78; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), chap. 2.

37. Miss Thelma Pontney to FDR, June 30, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183.

38. Miss Clara Rossberg of St. Paul, Minn., to FDR, May 18, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 107/838, Box 183.

39. Mrs. C. M. Rogers to FDR, April 4, 1933, in ibid. Her position was echoed by Adele Simmonds of Chester, Pa., who wrote to Frances Perkins on behalf of her daughter (May 15, 1933): “I take on myself the pleasure of having a heart to heart talk with you concerning the idea of married women holding positions and single girls whose parents have denied themselves so much . . . fail to find jobs. . . . I do hope,” she concluded, “for the good of our young generation there will soon be a law where married women will be illimenated from schools and offices. A single girl can’t even get a position in a store because they are all taken up with married women.”

40. Ankron to FDR, March 21, 1933, in ibid.

41. Mrs. Georgia Ervin of Columbus, Ga., to FDR, August 8, 1933, NA RG 9, Entry 398, Box 5, File: Bibb Manufacturing Co.

42. Jno Brogan of Pittsburgh, Pa., to Frances Perkins, July 12, 1933. And see M. B. Henley to the president, May 18, 1933. She is a single woman from Rossville, Ga., who castigated the “reconstruction army” for accepting “young single men who do not need the money they would get,” while rejecting “young married men with families . . . willing to send their money home to help take care of their wives and children,” both in NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183.

43. L. A. Cook to Gen. Hugh Johnson, March 7, 1934, NA RG 9, Entry 398, Box 8, File: Cannon Mills, Plant No. 6, Concord, N.C. Written in pencil on lined paper. Compare also W. K. Valley to Hugh Johnson in the same file. Workers in Flint, Mich., echoed the complaint that their employers had brought in farmers in order to “lay the old men off and keep wages down” (Hearings, Flint, Mich., December 18, 1934, 572, 582).

44. Mrs. Lee A. Crayton to NRA, February 16, 1934. See also S. J. Gwynn to Hugh Johnson, June 7, 1934. Both in NA RG 9, Entry 398, Box 8, File: Cannon Mills, Plant No. 6, Concord, N.C.; and see as well Mr. and Mrs. P. J. Rookes to Hugh Johnson, March 9, 1934, NA RG 9, Entry 398, Box 3, File: Arnall Mills, Sargeant, Ga.

45. R. A. Gailey of Monitor, Wash., to Gen. Hugh Johnson, August 9, 1933, NA RG 9, Entry 23, PI 44, Box 491.

46. Sam Raspy of Anderson, Ind., to FDR, May 21, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183.

47. Mr. R. D. Nio, Jr., to FDR, February 2, 1935, NA RG 9, Entry 23, Box 491. The tone of many letters indicated their refusal to believe that there might be another sense of justice. For example, Sarah M. Jones of Winsted, Conn., to FDR, April 25, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183, asked why married women were “allowed to work in factories.” And Earl Leiby protested “the fact that married women are permitted to work” at all. Glenn Purdy of Tulsa, Okla., to FDR, April 18, 1933, in ibid., argued that “no married woman has any right to command a salary when her husband is employed. . . . If you would bring prosperity back to our country, put married women by legislation out of the jobs which rightfully belong to men and unmarried women” (emphasis in these quotes mine).

48. Frank Dale to Hugh Johnson, September 21, 1933, NA RG 9, Entry 23, Box 491.

49. Rogers to FDR, April 4, 1933, in ibid.

50. Joseph Gildard to FDR, January 31, 1935, NA RG 9, Entry 23, Box 491.

51. Miss E. Blanche Evans, of Topeka, Kans., to FDR, May 9, 1933. And see as well F. J. Moeckly to FDR, August 11, 1933. Both in NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183. The latter, a male, identified himself as the president of the People’s Economic and Social Welfare Association, and asserted that the President should “issue a proclamation asking public officials and private enterprises to eliminate duplication [of incomes] . . . in order to give employment to those who are a public charge.”

52. Frances S. Key-Smith of Washington, D.C., to Vice-President Charles Curtis, November 12, 1931, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183. He is a lawyer.

53. L. W. Taylor of Atlanta, Ga., to FDR, April 4, 1933, in ibid. He identifies himself as a disabled American veteran.

54. Miss Winifred Murray of Syracuse, N.Y., to FDR, July 18, 1933, in ibid.

55. Henley to FDR, May 18, 1933. See also Lola E. Painter of Cincinnati, Ohio, to Frances Perkins, April 26, 1933, in ibid., who told the story of how she had confronted a married woman at her job. It was, she wrote, “so pitiful at night to walk down [Main Street] and see lovely young women trying to sell their body for enough to pay room rent and get something to eat. So I said to this woman: do you ever go down Main St. near midnight. She said: certainly not, no self-respecting decent woman would and I said, and yet women like you put so many of them on Main St.”

56. Murray to FDR, July 18, 1933.

57. Mrs. Beatrice Hobart Steely of Beverly Hills, Calif., to FDR, May 5, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183.

58. John P. Holley to FDR, March 10, 1933, ibid.

59. Sam Raspy to FDR, May 21, 1933.

60. A. H. Davenport of Tampa, Fla., to FDR, May 22, 1933, NA RG 174, Entry 167/838, Box 183. The historical roots of this sense of justice about the purpose of a wage clearly go back some distance, as is indicated by the following quote from a group of Harrisburg, Penn., employees of the Pennsylvania Railroad during World War I. Women, they claimed, “spend all they make on their backs, while hard working men sacrificed their personal desires for the greater welfare of their families” (Maurine Greenwald, Women, War and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980], 131).

61. Frances S. Key-Smith to Charles Curtis, November 12, 1931.

62. Rossberg to FDR, May 18, 1933.

63. Steely to FDR, May 5, 1933. Steely went on to say, “And I, a woman of fifty, am forced to do menial work to keep from starving, largely because some married woman is holding a position I could occupy with equal efficiency.” And see also Murray to FDR, July 19, 1933, who complained that “many of the married women so employed use the money derived there-from for personal luxuries, while the same amount of money, or possibly less, would be used for food, clothes and shelter for some unemployed single girl with perhaps no home or parents.”

64. Forbush to Wanda Dabkowski, April 10, 1934, NA RG 9, Entry 23, Box 491.

4. The Double Meaning of Equal Pay

1. From an American Federation of Labor resolution quoted by Elizabeth J. Hauser, “Women Workers and the Trade Union Movement,” American Federationist, 17 (April 1910), 305.

2. For example, the bill replaced the word comparable with equal and added the conditions of effort, responsibility, and working conditions. It took the form of an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which reduced coverage to those included within the scope of the FLSA. I have cited the text of the bill from the Report of the House Committee on Education and Labor, May 20, 1963, as reprinted in the Bureau of National Affairs, Equal Pay for Equal Work (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs, 1963), 93, 98.

3. Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 96, 99. Harrison contains an excellent description of the political process of passing the bill.

4. “Equal Pay for Women,” American Federationist, 71 (July 1964), 14.

5. “When Women Get Paid as Much as Men,” U.S. News and World Report, June 3, 1963, 97.

6. Thomas P. Nelson, “Bill to Assure Women ‘Equal Pay’ Alarms Employers’ Lobbyists,” Wall Street Journal, August 10, 1962, 1.

7. Michelle Barrett and Mary Mcintosh, “The ‘Family Wage’: Some Problems for Socialists and Feminists,” Capital and Class, 11 (1980), 52.

8. For example, see Mary Blewett, Men, Women and Work: Class, Gender and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 175, 283.

9. Bureau of National Affairs, Equal Pay for Equal Work, 3; see also Luke Grant, “Women in Trade Unions,” American Federationist, 10 (August 1903), 656.

10. U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, “Equal Pay” for Women in War Industries, Bulletin no. 196 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), 17; Bureau of National Affairs, Equal Pay for Equal Work, 3; Valerie Conner, “‘The Mothers of the Race’ in World War I: The National War Labor Board and Women in Industry,” Labor History, 21 (Winter 1979/80), 51. And see also “Women and Wages,” Woman Citizen, June 17, 1919, 8, which reports that a Massachusetts union that admitted women to membership during the war concluded that “finding that employers began at once to exploit women by paying them as small a wage as was possible, the men have now decided to demand equal pay for equal work.”

11. Olga S. Halsey to Mary Van Kleeck, typescript memo entitled “Equal Pay for Equal Work,” July 8, 1918, National Archives, Record Group 86: Records of the Women’s Bureau, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1918. (Hereinafter referred to as NA RG 86.)

12. But this was by no means exclusive. For example, Haverhill shoe stitchers (female) included a demand for equal pay in the 1895 shoe workers’ strike, which seems to have been for the purpose of fostering female independence rather than fending off male complaints of competition. See Blewett, Men, Women and Work, 283.

13. See Lynn Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1985), chap. 2, for a summary of increases around the turn of the century. The figures were greater in large cities. According to Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 5, between 1880 and 1930, Chicago’s female labor force increased by 1,000 percent, or three times the rate of women in the labor force as a whole.

14. Grant, “Women in Trade Unions,” 656.

15. Hauser, “Women Workers and the Trade Union Movement,” 306.

16. Florence Thorne, “Women and War Service,” American Federationist, 24 (June 1917), 455; during the war Gompers added the demand for equal pay to several demands to regulate women’s entry into the labor force. See, for example, the editorials entitled “Women Workers in War Times,” American Federationist, 24 (September 1917), 747; and “Don’t Sacrifice Womanhood,” in ibid., 24 (August 1917), 640. For prewar statements about equal pay, see Melinda Scott, “The Way to Freedom,” in ibid., 22 (September 1915), 731. Maurine Greenwald, Women, War and Work: The Impact of World War I on Women Workers in the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 128–38, 177–80, notes that these boundaries were not permanently crossed.

17. Cited in typescript from “Women’s Work and War,” 1 (July 1918), 3, in NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1918.

18. “The Government and Women in Industry,” American Federationist, 25 (September 1918), 788.

19. Elizabeth Anne Payne, Reform, Labor and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 129.

20. Arthur Ross, Trade Union Wage Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953 [1948]), 46–64, chap. 5.

21. Typescript, “Equal Pay Examples (Equal or Unequal),” in NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1918.

22. “Women Workers Organize to Win,” American Federationist, 23 (March 1916), 200.

23. Thorne, “Women and War Service,” 455.

24. See Ronald Schatz, The Electrical Workers: A History of Labor at General Electric and Westinghouse, 1923–60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 126, 172, for a discussion of these issues.

25. Testimony of John Bartee, NRA, Hearings on Regularizing Employment and Otherwise Improving the Conditions of Labor in the Automobile Industry, South Bend, Ind., January 2, 1935, National Archives, Record Group 9, Records of the National Recovery Administration, Entry 44, Box 7266. (Hereinafter referred to as NA RG 9.)

26. Maud Younger to Hugh Johnson, October 28, 1933, NA RG 9, Entry 23, Box 489.

27. Typescript of Introduction to Bulletin 152, NA RG 86, Box 385, Files Regarding Equal Pay, File: Equal Pay, 1935.

28. Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Ruth Roach Pierson, “They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1986); Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women during World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981).

29. Anna Weitzel to Bertha Nienburg, January 16, 1943, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1943.

30. Mrs. Anna Matson of Sioux City, Iowa, to FDR, May 14, 1943, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1943.

31. Mrs. Gertrude Coburn, of Alliance, Ohio, to Frances Perkins, August 28, 1943, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1943.

32. Mrs. Adeline Hering to FDR, June 23, 1943, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1943.

33. Nora Galloway to FDR, September 29, 1942, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1942.

34. Ethel Lee to Mary Anderson, undated, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1944.

35. Typescript headed, “Equal Pay Section of Statement dictated by Mary Anderson for War History of Women’s Bureau; then revised by Rachel F. Nyswander after consulting official files and conferring with Miss Nienburg,” NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1945, 2.

36. William H. Davis to Frances Perkins, June 4, 1943, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1943.

37. Typescript of excerpts from Helen Baker, “Wage Rates and Wage Policies,” in NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1942.

38. NA RG 86, Box 251, File: Wage Determination—Notes, Case no. 8.

39. Typescript of a talk by A. L. Kress, “Equal Pay for Equal Work,” in NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1943.

40. Z. Clark Dickinson, “Men’s and Women’s Wages in the United States,” International Labour Review, 47 (June 1943), 711.

41. Typescript, “Importance to Postwar American Economic Objectives of Equal Pay for Women and Men and the Raising of Substandard Wages of Women,” July 9, 1945, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, July 1945. The memo was apparently prepared in an effort to persuade the War Labor Board (which had long acknowledged the weight of community tradition in setting wages for gender-differentiated jobs) to alter its policies.

42. Christian Science Monitor, Magazine section, April 13, 1946; found in NA RG 86, Box 390, File: Equal Pay, News Clippings. Note that this comes close to, but does not quite reach, today’s conception of comparable worth in that it called for comparing only jobs that were similar, not those that required similar skill, effort, and responsibility.

43. Wage Determination Hearings, NA RG 86, Box 252, File: Alden’s Incorporated.

44. Wage Determination Hearings, NA RG 86, Box 253, File: Singer Manufacturing Co., 7.

45. Wage Determination Hearings, NA RG 86, Box 252, File: Dowst Manufacturing Co., 6.

46. Typescript, “Equal Pay,” July 18, 1949, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1949.

47. Ibid., 3.

48. Ibid.

49. “Hearings before a Sub-committee of the Committee of Education and Labor on S1178,” U.S. Senate, Seventy-ninth Congress, First session, October 29, 30, 31, 1945, 12. (Hereinafter referred to as Equal Pay Hearings, 1945.)

50. Frances Whitlock to Miss Miller, August 22, 1945, NA RG 86, Box 389, File: Equal Pay, 1945.

51. The number increased to twenty-two by 1963. Bureau of National Affairs, Equal Pay for Equal Work, 31; the remaining states included California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, Arkansas, Colorado, and Oregon, in addition to Michigan and Montana, both of which had passed legislation in 1919.

52. A 1956 study of 510 union contracts found 195 (38 percent) included equal pay clauses. A 1961 study concluded that only 18 percent had such clauses. These were most prevalent in textile, electrical and nonelectrical machinery, food and transportation equipment. Bureau of National Affairs, Equal Pay for Equal Work, 5.

53. This history is chronicled in Harrison, On Account of Sex, chap. 3, 6.

54. Typescripts, “Equal Pay for Women Industrial Workers in the United States” and “Economic Desirability of Equal Pay,” in NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1942.

55. Helen Baker, typescripts of extracts from “Wage Rates and Wage Policies,” Women in War Industries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942), found in NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1943.

56. Frieda S. Miller to Mr. Sherman, Assistant Solicitor, July 20, 1945, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, July 1945.

57. Typescript, “Movement for Equal Pay Legislation in the United States,” March 17, 1949, NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1949.

58. Congressional Record, May 17, 1963, vol. 109, part 7, 8914.

59. George Addes to regional directors of the UAW, June 10, 1943, RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay, 1943.

60. Testimony of Lewis Schwellenbach, Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 5.

61. Testimony of Elizabeth Christman, “Hearings before Subcommittee no. 4 of the Committee on Education and Labor,” House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, Second session, February 9, 10, 11, and 13, 1948, 68. (Hereinafter referred to as Equal Pay Hearings, 1948.)

62. Testimony of Helen Moore, an employee of Fisher Body Co., member of local 602, UAW-CIO, Lansing, Mich., Equal Pay Hearings, 1948, 182; Testimony of Hartman Barber, General Representative, Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks, Equal Pay Hearings, 1948, 157.

63. Ibid., 213.

64. Testimony of Frieda Miller, Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 16.

65. Testimony of Lewis Schwellenbach, Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 5–6; and compare 131–32.

66. Christman, Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 106; see also testimony of Helen Gahagan Douglas, Equal Pay Hearings, 1948, 12; as well as the comment of Lewis Schwellenbach: “There is no sex differential in the food she buys or the rent she pays. There should be none in her pay envelope. I still believe in the truth of the old adage . . . that ‘the laborer is worthy of his hire’” (Equal Pay Hearings, 1948, 83). The comment was frequently echoed in the 1963 debates that led to the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. See, for example, the comments of Representative Sickles and Senators Hart and McDowell, in Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Eighty-eighth Congress, First session, “Legislative History of the Equal Pay Act of 1963,” 65, 55, and 70.

67. Statement of Helen Moore, an employee of Fisher Body Co.; member of Local 602, UAW-CIO, Lansing, Mich., Equal Pay Hearings, 1948, 183.

68. Maurice J. Tobin, “Equal Pay—Present Reality of Future Dream,” Report of the National Conference on Equal Pay, March 31 and April 1, 1952, Women’s Bureau, Bulletin no. 243 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952), 8.

69. Ibid.

70. Quoted in Bureau of National Affairs, Equal Pay for Equal Work, from the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Report on S1909, May 17, 1963, 101.

71. Testimony of Frieda Miller, Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 17.

72. Statement of the League of Women Shoppers, Inc., N.Y., Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 111.

73. Statement of Lewis G. Hines, Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 122; and see testimony of Frieda Miller, Equal Pay Hearings, 1948, 155.

74. Testimony of Frieda Miller, Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 17.

75. Testimony of Lewis Schwellenbach, Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 6.

76. Tobin, “Equal Pay,” 9.

77. Testimony of Lewis Schwellenbach, Equal Pay Hearings, 1948, 77–78. Schwellenbach continued: “At a time when the mobility of labor is not so important in maintaining a healthy economy, and when full production is so essential in keeping the forces of inflation under control, I believe it is a duty of the Federal Government to take sound action to remove such deterrents to our economic health.” And see also Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 110.

78. “Legislative History of the Equal Pay Act,” 33–34; see also the comments of Rep. Ralph J. Rivers of Alaska, 63.

79. Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 7.

80. “Legislative History of the Equal Pay Act,” 29.

81. National Conference on Equal Pay, “Report of Committee on Findings,” NA RG 86, Box 385, File: Equal Pay Hearings, 1952, p. 2.

82. “Legislative History of the Equal Pay Act,” 29, 63.

83. Equal Pay Hearings, 1945, 11.

84. Arthur S. Fleming, “Keynote Address,” Report of the National Conference on Equal Pay, March 31 and April 1, 1952, Women’s Bureau, Bulletin no. 243 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1952), 13.

85. Arthur S. Fleming, “Equal Pay for Equal Work Is Simple Justice,” Good Housekeeping, November 1962, 54.

86. “Legislative History of the Equal Pay Act,” 63; Congressional Record, May 23, 1963, vol. 109, part 7, 8692.

87. Testimony of Chase Going Woodhouse, Equal Pay Hearings, vol. 109, p. 7, 1945, 154.

88. Comments of Sen. McDowell, Congressional Record, May 23, 1963, 8752; “Legislative History of the Equal Pay Act,” 70.

89. Quoted in the Bureau of National Affairs, Equal Pay for Equal Work, 109, from Congressional Record, May 22, 1963, 8683, 8684.

90. William Schnitzler, “Why Less Pay for Women Workers?” The Bakers and Confectioners Journal, 65 (March 1950), 12.

91. Testimony of William Miller, quoted in Bureau of National Affairs, Equal Pay for Equal Work, 54.

92. Equal Pay Hearings, 1948, 67.

93. Pennsylvania Salt Company, May 22, 1947, in NA RG 86, Box 251, File: Wage Determination—White Collar.

94. Testimony of William Miller in Bureau of National Affairs, “Legislative History of the Equal Pay Act,” 54. This position is explored in Dickinson, “Men’s and Women’s Wages in the United States,” 714–15.

95. Ibid., 56–59.

96. “Legislative History of the Equal Pay Act,” 51.

97. Tobin, “Equal Pay,” 7.

98. National Manpower Council, Womanpower (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 345.

99. All sides seem to have understood this. Note that as early as 1952, the National Conference on Equal Pay concluded that “attainment of equal pay would be a very limited victory unless women also obtain equal job opportunities” (21). See also Esther Peterson’s comment on the issue in Harrison, On Account of Sex, 100.

5. The Just Price, the Free Market, and the Value of Women

This chapter originated as the keynote address to the seventh Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 1987. It is reprinted from Feminist Studies, 14, no. 2 (Summer 1988), 235–50, by permission of the publisher, Feminist Studies, Inc., c/o Women’s Studies Program, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, 20742.

1. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 74.

2. Brief of the American Civil Liberties Union et al., amici curiae, 85-494, U.S. Supreme Court, 12–14; and Brief of Equal Rights Advocates et al., amici curiae, in California Federal Savings and Loan Association v. Mark Guerra, No. 85-494, U.S. Supreme Court, 7–9.

3. In U.S. Steelworkers v. Weber, 443 U.S. 193 (1979), the Supreme Court sustained a voluntary and temporary affirmative action plan to redress past grievances suffered by a specific group. Quotations are from the decision as it appeared in the Daily Labor Report, March 20, 1987, D 16.

4. “Comparable Worth: An Interview with Heidi Hartmann and June O’Neill,” New Perspectives, 17 (September 1985), 29.

5. Donald J. Treiman and Heidi Hartmann, eds., Women, Work, and Wages: Equal Pay for Jobs of Equal Value (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1981), 28.

6. Ibid., ix.

7. Barbara R. Bergmann, “Pay Equity—Surprising Answers to Hard Questions,” Challenge, 30 (May/June 1987), 47. See also Helen Remick, ed., Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination: Technical Possibilities and Political Realities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), for essays that are generally favorable to comparable worth.

8. Michael Levin, “Comparable Worth: The Feminist Road to Socialism,” Commentary, 79 (September 1984), 13–19. See also E. Robert Livernash, ed., Comparable Worth: Issues and Alternatives (Washington, D.C.: Equal Employment Advisory Council, 1984), for essays that are generally opposed to comparable worth.

9. Raymond de Roover, “The Concept of the Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy,” in James Gherity, ed., Economic Thought: A Historical Anthology (New York: Random House, 1969), 23.

10. John Dunlop, “Wage Contours,” in Michael Piore, ed., Unemployment and Inflation: Institutional and Structural Views (White Plains, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1979), 66. Elaine Sorenson, “Equal Pay for Comparable Worth: A Policy for Eliminating the Undervaluation of Women’s Work,” Journal of Economic Issues, 18 (June 1984), 465–72, provides a convenient summary of some of these arguments.

11. Arthur M. Ross, Trade Union Wage Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), 49. See also Robert Solow, “Theories of Unemployment,” American Economic Review, 70 (March 1980), 1–11.

12. Ross, Trade Union Wage Policy, 50–51 (emphasis mine).

13. Michael J. Piore, “Unemployment and Inflation: An Alternative View,” in Piore, Unemployment and Inflation, 6. And see Peter Doeringer and Michael Piore, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1971).

14. Eileen Power, Medieval Women (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 60.

15. William Bielby and James Baron, “Undoing Discrimination: Job Integration and Comparable Worth,” in Christine Bose and Glenna Spitz, eds., Ingredients for Women’s Employment Policy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 218.

16. “Corporate Women: They’re about to Break through to the Top,” Business Week, June 22, 1987, 74.

17. Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York: Knopf, 1962), 105–6.

18. Quoted in Mary Heen, “A Review of Federal Court Decisions under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” in Remick, Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination, 217.

19. See Ruth Milkman, “Women’s History Goes to Trial,” Feminist Studies, 12 (Summer 1986), 375–400; and Alice Kessler-Harris, “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears, Roebuck and Company: A Personal Account,” Radical History Review, 35 (April 1986), 57–79.

20. Judith Long Laws, “Work Aspirations of Women: False Leads and New Starts,” in Martha Blaxall and Barbara Reagan, eds., Women and the Workplace: The Implications of Occupational Segregation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 33–49.

21. Carole Turbin, “Reconceptualizing Family, Work and Labor Organizing: Working Women in Troy, 1860–90,” Review of Radical Political Economy, 16 (Spring 1984), 1–16; Mary Blewett, Men, Women, Work and Gender (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

22. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), 99.

23. Lillian Breslow Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class Family (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 176.

24. Brigitte Berger and Peter L. Berger, The War over the Family: Capturing the Middle Ground (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, Doubleday, 1983), 205.

6. A Woman’s Wage, Redux

Special thanks to Anndell Quintero for compiling the data used in this chapter.

1. Consider the controversy around the 1966 Moynihan Report, which held Black women who supported their families responsible for constructing a matriarchy. See Lee Rainwater and William Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967).

2. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963); Paul McCaffrey, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice (New York: Chelsea House, 2010).

3. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford, 2001), chap. 5; Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

4. U.S. Department of Labor, Women in the Labor Force: A Databook (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010), 18, 19.

5. Ibid., 76. In 1970 one-third of married-couple families relied on husband-only incomes. By 1980 the number had dropped down to a little more than a quarter. It would continue to decrease into the 1990s, hitting a low of 16.2 percent in 1994 before beginning very slowly to rise again.

6. Ibid., 77. Women’s contributions to family incomes remained at 26 percent in the 1970s.

7. This history can be found in Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity, chap. 6.

8. 400 U.S. 542 (1971).

9. Pittsburgh Press v. Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations, 413 U.S. 376 (1973).

10. Corning Glass Works v. Brennan, 417 U.S. 188 (1974).

11. Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484 (1974).

12. Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Donald Critchlow and Cynthia Stecheki, “The Equal Rights Amendment Reconsidered: Politics, Policy, and Social Mobilization in a Democracy,” Journal of Policy History, 20, no. 1 (2008), 157–60.

13. U.S. Department of Labor, Women in the Labor Force, 19.

14. Ariane Hegewisch, Claudia Williams, and Amber Henderson, The Gender Wage Gap: 2010, Fact Sheet, Institute for Women’s Policy Research (April 2011), 3.

15. Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005); Felicia Ann Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

16. This story is best told by Patricia Seith, “Congressional Power to Effect Sex Equality,” Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, 36 (Spring 2013), 1–88. The Congresswomen’s Caucus later changed its name to the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues.

17. Seith, “Congressional Power to Effect Sex Equality,” 8–9.

18. Chappell, The War on Welfare, 199.

19. Arguably, the rise in cases of domestic violence brought to the attention of the police and the courts is a consequence of this.

20. Joshua Angrist and William N. Evans, “Children and Their Parents’ Labor Supply: Evidence from Exogenous Variation in Family Size,” American Economic Review, 88 (June 1998), 450–455.

21. http://now.msn.com/marissa-mayer-yahoo-ceo-has-at-work-nursery-for-her-baby.

22. Jane Waldfogel, “Understanding the Family Gap in Pay for Women with Children,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12 (Winter 1998), 137–56.

23. Shelley J. Correll, Stephen Bernard, and In Paik, “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?” American Journal of Sociology, 112 (March 2007), 1297–339; Stephanie Coontz, “Progress at Work, but Mothers Still Pay a Price,” New York Times Sunday Review, June 9, 2013.

24. Anne Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 99; and see Joan Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do about It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

25. Top CEOs of Fortune 500 companies included only twelve women in 2009 and twenty-one in 2013. For 2009, see www4.gsb.columbia.edu/publicoffering/post/73873/Female+Leadership+Brings+Strong+Performance?&layout=cbs_print&top.region=main. For 2013, see www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-fortune-1000.

26. Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “Wage Gap Persists in Most Occupations, Sales Jobs Worst Paying for Women,” press release, April 9, 2013.

27. Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “Maternity, Paternity, and Adoption Leave in the United States,” Briefing Paper #A143, May 2013.

28. The term was apparently coined by Joan Williams. See WorkLife Law’s Guide to Family Responsibilities Discrimination (San Francisco: Hastings College of the Law, 2006); Mary Still, “Litigating the Maternal Wall: U.S. Lawsuits Charging Discrimination against Workers with Family Responsibilities,” The Diversity Factor, (Summer 2007), 30–35.

29. Williams, Worklife Law’s Guide to Family Responsibilities Discrimination, 77.

30. Richard H. Thaler, “Breadwinning Wives and Nervous Husbands,” New York Times, June 2, 2013.

31. Erick Erickson on the Lou Dobbs Tonight show, quoted in http://hollywoodreporter.com/news/fox-news-megyn-kelly-spars-561250.

32. Joan Williams et al., “Opt Out” or Pushed Out: How the Press Covers Work/Family Conflict: The Untold Story of Why Women Leave the Workforce (San Francisco: Hastings College of the Law, 2006).

33. For one exception, see Stephanie Armour, “Some Moms Quit as Offices Scrap Family-Friendliness,” USA Today, May 4, 2004.

34. Williams, “Opt Out” or Pushed Out, 2–18.

35. Jodi Kantor and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers,” New York Times, December 8, 2013.

36. Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 314.

37. Between 2000 and 2010, incomes in the bottom 20 percent of the labor force declined; those in the top 10 percent soared. Congressional Budget Office, “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income,” October 2011, ix–x.

38. U.S. Department of Labor, Women in the Labor Force, 4–5, 52.

39. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013), 9–10.

40. Wendy Wang, Kim Parker, and Paul Taylor, “Bread Winner Moms,” Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends, May 29, 2013. The report continues: “About three-quarters of adults (74 percent) say the increasing number of women working for pay has made it harder for parents to raise children, and half say that it has made marriages harder to succeed. At the same time, two-thirds say it has made it easier for families to live comfortably.”