4

The Double Meaning of Equal Pay

The best interests of labor require the admission of women to full citizenship as a matter of justice to them and as a necessary step towards insuring and raising the scale of wages for all.

—American Federation of Labor resolution¹

As the Equal Pay Bill came up for its final votes in the spring of 1963, the two sides squared off once again. The bill, which would prohibit differential wages for women doing “equal work on jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions,” seemed destined to pass. Opponents, sensing defeat, sought to limit its scope and make it less intrusive. Advocates, fearing the opposition of business, compromised on key language and accepted an administrative apparatus that significantly narrowed the groups covered.² But the heart had gone out of the battle. Both sides understood what had only recently become apparent. As Congresswoman Katharine St. George, a New York State Republican and one of the bill’s major supporters, put it, opposing equal pay “would be like being against motherhood.” Norman Simler, staff member of the unenthusiastic President’s Council of Economic Advisers and himself an opponent, counseled that fighting the bill was like “opposing virtue.”³ This then was the victorious anticlimax of the long struggle to acknowledge that women were entitled to what the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor called the “rate for the job.”

Eighteen years after the bill was first introduced into the House and more than half a century after women’s and labor groups had adopted the fight for “equal pay for equal work”—a battle that rivaled in length that for suffrage itself—what had begun as an elusive quest became the law of the land. Hailed by the labor movement as “a landmark in the general movement on behalf of human rights,”⁴ the new law was greeted sourly by business interests. “Millions of women will get pay raises over the next years,” acknowledged one journal, “but countless others are in danger of losing their jobs.”⁵

But what, in fact, had happened? How was it that a bill so hard fought could suddenly be classified as a victory for virtue and traditional American values? Was it, as business feared and activists in the Women’s Bureau who had worked so hard for the bill hoped, a new milestone in the campaign for economic equality? Less than a year earlier, the Wall Street Journal had opened its report on the bill’s progress with marked cynicism. “The little-noticed march of American womanhood toward perhaps its greatest conquest since winning the right to vote forty-two years ago is arousing belated pangs of agony among spokesmen for the nation’s employers,” ran a first page article.⁶ How had the search for equal pay transformed itself from little more than wishful thinking to a milestone on the path to economic citizenship for women—the symbolic equivalent of motherhood and apple pie?

Some of the answers are to be found in the demographic shifts around the numbers and kinds of women drawn into wage work during the twentieth century. Some can be located in the economic effects of war and depression that altered perceptions of wage work and changed its meaning for men and women. But to fully understand the transformation requires an exploration of the changing meaning of the slogan itself. “Equal pay for equal work” is and has been deeply ambiguous. Its ambiguity captures mixed messages about gender and at the same time speaks to its shifting meanings over time. Thus, an exploration of the changing content of the phrase can help us to understand more than the relational nature of the wage. Because it speaks to perceptions of male and female relationships to work, it provides access to the subtle way gender is produced in the work force. As such, it offers us, as historians, a way of observing how gender is constructed.

Though some people trace the slogan back to the 1930s, it first became popular in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Then, women (frequently immigrants or rural migrants) were entering the labor force at an unprecedented rate, and innovative technology and managerial strategies encouraged experimentation with male and female workers. In a formal sense, its popularity paralleled its acceptance in Britain, where the Trades Union Congress adopted the idea in 1888.⁷ But even before that, it had appeared sporadically in trade union circles in the United States.⁸ It emerged in 1898 as a recommendation of a congressional commission on industry, and popped up in repeated declarations of the American Federation of Labor until in 1915 the prestigious Commission on Industrial Relations proposed that “public opinion and legislation recognize that women should receive the same compensation as men for the same service.”⁹ Not until the United States entered World War I, however, did it seem to carry very much emotional resonance. Then, to protect the jobs of men who had been called to fight, the War Department, the Women in Industry Service, and the War Labor Board all supported the principle of equal pay in jobs “ordinarily performed by men”; and the War Labor Board regularly and consistently applied the principle in disputes that came before it.¹⁰ In 1919 two states, Michigan and Montana, passed equal pay laws.

In the 1920s and after, equal pay became one of the few goals on which two opposing feminist groups could agree. The family-oriented Women’s Bureau (of the Department of Labor) and the more individualistic feminists of the National Woman’s Party joined in successfully supporting federal regulations that provided for equal pay in the civil service. And though they disagreed vehemently about the value of such protective labor legislation as the minimum wage for women only, they agreed that equal pay for equal work was a desirable goal.

What made this unnatural alliance possible was the double meaning contained in the slogan. Used by advocates of women’s rights, equal pay was a rallying cry that confronted women’s marginal status in the labor force. Its call for higher wages challenged the neoclassical paradigm that asserted that workers were paid according to the value of what they produced by pointing out that female workers were not paid by the same standards as men. It rejected the prevailing notion that women workers, unlike men, could be paid according to their needs, which were commonly assumed to be less than those of men. Instead, it embodied the demand for a wage appropriate to skill and independent of sex. It was also an expression of self-confidence and self-worth that belied the contemporary image of women workers as impermanent or unwilling to invest in their own training; and it offered a statement of female commitment to the labor force. It represented strength and individualism, sanctioning a definition of justice that treated women as individuals in their relationship to the work force.

But the slogan had another set of meanings as well. Used by the labor movement as well as by those who were family-oriented, it suggested exactly the opposite. It was a defensive reaction to the threat that employers might take advantage of the “cheap labor” of females to drive men out of the labor force. Thus, the slogan was filled with foreboding about women’s capacity to upset traditional social roles. Uttered as a battle cry in the war to protect men’s jobs, it could be read as the final defense of a sexually segregated work force: a fall-back position in the event that ideology, social pressure, and a tightly structured labor force failed to restrict women to their appropriate places. Under those circumstances, the insistence on equal pay could be counted on to discourage employers from hiring women. The phrase thus evoked traditional family roles and male prerogatives at work and in the home. It reflected a sense of justice located in a defense of family lives and the male provider role.

The capacity of the phrase to reflect both individual aspiration and family norms accounts both for its appeal as a slogan and for its failure as a political goal. In practice, proponents could and frequently did argue simultaneously for both meanings. This was not hard to do in a social context that honored the family and conceived it as the medium of support for women and children. Equal pay appeared to sustain family well-being by seeming to protect male jobs. At the same time, it offered the promise of higher income, if not opportunity, to the relatively few women who passed through the barriers to opportunity it sustained.

Because the language and the defense of “equal pay for equal work” captured a shifting and diverse set of gendered expectations, the slogan served a variety of purposes. It spoke to the individualistic and achievement-oriented aspirations of a minority of American women as it defended a socially sanctioned male privilege in the family and the labor force. As gendered expectations altered, and men and women began to see themselves as partners in the shared enterprise of self and family support, the meaning of the slogan changed as well, opening the door for a political effort that generated the support of a new generation of women. The slogan remained the same; the ambiguity within it shifted in ways that once again unified disparate groups around the interests of redefined gender expectations and encouraged them to see its goals as synonymous with American values. Thus, a look at the evolution of the rhetoric around equal pay for equal work tells us something about how the meanings and expectations of gender in relation to work finally translated into the politically successful struggle for the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

Until World War II, the vocabulary of most arguments for equal pay resisted the inclusion of individual rights. Framed by the Women’s Bureau and its precursors within the Department of Labor, the issue resonated with concern for family values. The initial rhetoric can be extracted from one of the earliest rationales, written several months after the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917. Olga Halsey, a supervisor in the Women’s Board of the Industrial Service Section of the Labor Department, sent her boss, Mary Van Kleeck, an outline of arguments intended to persuade the War Labor Policies Board to support the principle of equal pay for equal work. Halsey offered three reasons for adopting the goal. The first was male fear of job competition. Male workers, she argued, would neither help nor support women who were undercutting their wages. If provoked by lower wages for women, they might resort to unionization or strike to exclude them altogether. The second was to attract women to jobs they might otherwise avoid—a strategy that would give employers a wider field of labor from which to choose and enhance their chances of hiring better workers. And, finally, there was the elusive matter of justice. “Women putting forth the same effort and producing the same results should have the same pay,” Halsey argued. But the bold assertion of justice for women was immediately qualified by concern that, given the different interests of men and women in the workplace, justice for female wage earners not come at the expense of males. “It is hoped,” she added protectively, “that much of the substitution may be only temporary; the places now filled by women should be returned to the men at men’s present wages plus increases during the war period. If wages are cut or are maintained at their present level, regardless of the increased cost of living, as the result of employing women, it will be possible for the men to return only at a reduced wage.”¹¹

With many variations this set of arguments shaped the vortex around which swirled four decades of debate. Occupational segregation and the labor disruption that would attend its transgression, the need to maintain a competitive wage that respected tradition and yet did not close doors to women, and an apparently gender-neutral concept of justice—all these were at stake in “equal pay for equal work.” Beneath the issues, at the heart of the debate, lay a persistent (though vulnerable) fealty to the capacity of a gender-segregated labor market to bring order to both home and work life. As long as this remained true, justice for women was perceived and constructed so as to acknowledge the prior claim of men to certain jobs and to a standard of wages from which women were excluded.

The evolving content of the early debate demonstrates its close ties to the status quo. Fear of female competition with men dominated arguments for equal pay as they emerged among trade unionists in the early 1900s.¹² Because the argument incorporated a conception of males as family providers, it appeared to unify the interests of men and women, not divide them. Maintaining male wages in the face of competition from the cheap labor of women and protecting male jobs from the temptation to substitute cheaper female labor were not the selfish acts of one sex. They were the means of preserving traditional family life by enabling men to continue to provide for families. If, as the early twentieth century assumed, the male was still the provider, protection for men was synonymous with, not the opposite of, protection for women.

But the entry of large numbers of women into the labor force inevitably kept alive possibilities of justice based on women’s individual rights and revealed the latent opposition between an appeal to women’s family roles and their new places in the work force. In the single decade before 1900, the number of women earning wages increased by 66 percent.¹³ Labeling women’s competition “unfair,” trade unions readily acknowledged what had become explicit and demanded equal pay. Union workers, intoned one American Federationist article, “know that woman has entered upon the industrial field to stay.” Instead of protesting the inevitable, they should encourage women to organize “until they can secure the same wages as are paid to men for similar work performed.”¹⁴ The “cheap labor” of females was dangerous, argued suffragist Elizabeth Hauser. “When women organize and vote, they will get equal pay for equal work and they will no longer compete unfairly with men.” Though fewer women would be employed, she continued, “this will not be a hardship because the increase in man’s wages will give the family the larger income needed, without its being necessary for so many women to work outside the home.”¹⁵

These themes were magnified during the first World War when women seemed to be moving rapidly into jobs previously the exclusive province of males. The quest for equal pay for equal work took on new intensity, but fear that women might compete unfairly with men never completely eliminated a subversive appeal for justice for women. Equal pay for equal work would protect both men and women from wartime exploitation, wrote Florence Thorne. “When women refuse to work more cheaply than men, financial interests will not direct employers to substitute women for men but to choose from among both men and women upon a basis of value of service.”¹⁶

Pressure from trade unionists, male and female, contributed to a general consensus that male rates needed to be protected against the incursion of cheaper women. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics called for equal pay “as a matter of public health.” If women undercut “the standard wages of men,” they would reduce “the standards of living in the community,” the Bureau argued, and thus threaten the public well-being.¹⁷ Mary Van Kleeck described equal pay “as the very center of the present problem of labor in the war.” Organized men, she suggested, “have appeared unconscious of the influence of rates for women, who are their future competitors, upon their own rates.”¹⁸ Summarizing the attitude of the National Women’s Trade Union League, historian Elizabeth Payne concurs. The league, she argues, feared “that men’s wages would fall as a result of women entering the marketplace.” Underbidding men, thought Margaret Dreier Robins, for many years its president, could only lead women to “jeopardize their future home and potential motherhood.”¹⁹

Given widely shared assumptions that, whatever else it might do, equal pay for women would protect men’s jobs, it should not surprise us that as the slogan traveled through the postwar decades it reinforced, rather than undermined, traditional sex roles. The Women’s Bureau, a major force for keeping it alive, framed cogent reasons for preserving jobs for men and explicitly defended the desirable consequences of preserving male privilege intact. Most men’s jobs were not suitable for women. If women took them, they owed it to their families and to other women to protect the men to whom they rightfully belonged by demanding equal wages.

At the core of this sensibility lay an inseparable connection between occupational segregation along gendered lines and the wage system. A woman’s wage on men’s jobs threatened to undermine occupational segregation by encouraging employers to substitute women for men. The equal wage promised to sustain it by removing employers’ most tempting incentive to hire women. As the wage system helped to maintain a gender-segregated occupational structure, so a sexually segregated labor force maintained the integrity of the wage system by inhibiting comparisons of wages across gender lines. Such comparisons have historically rested on workers’ perceptions of appropriate models against which they could judge whether their wages were fair and equitable.²⁰ For men those comparisons are said to reflect not only “the value of the job” but the relationship of jobs to each other. Equitable wages constitute one source of a worker’s pride and dignity in his job. But women’s wages have traditionally been justified in terms of the needs of the worker. They have assumed the bare cost of subsistence, not the value of the job, as the appropriate measure of a woman’s worth. A gender-segregated labor force encouraged women to compare their wages to those of other women—a process that tended to limit aspirations for higher wages to what appeared possible.

Although equal pay seemed to be making a work-related demand, the rhetoric surrounding it was rooted in an understanding of social roles that assigned high wages and good jobs to the men who supported families. The slogan respected job segregation and limited wage comparisons by suggesting that segregated work could not and should not earn male pay. It supported the notion that comparing female to male pay was appropriate only for those women who were in fact performing the same jobs as men, and thus made it possible to retain one’s self-respect at the lower wage typical of women’s jobs. When occupational segregation broke down, even temporarily, as it did, for example, during World War I, inevitable wage tensions resulted. The Women in Industry Service noted that women who had formerly been satisfied with much lower wages protested when they discovered they earned less than men doing the same jobs. The service recorded the “discontent and ill feeling . . . which resulted in careless work” that was characteristic of women with “good habits of work” who were taken on at twenty cents an hour only to discover that “young boys with no training at all” were hired in at thirty-one cents an hour.²¹ As long as it was sustained by occupational segregation, equal pay for equal work restricted comparisons between men and women workers by implying that those who did not work alongside men could not expect to compare themselves to them.

In the face of the closely knit understanding of gendered jobs and wages, any efforts by the Women’s Bureau to act on the image of individual rights implicit in the call for equal pay for equal work fell by the wayside. During the 1930s, for example, the Women’s Bureau simultaneously urged “a rate for the job” and supported minimum wage laws that covered only women. The first position assumed a wage paid for the value of the work performed. The second rested on an assessment of women’s needs—a position that was justified by the sex of the worker. These seemingly contradictory positions can be reconciled only if we accept that to the women who staffed the bureau as to many female activists, the wage was understood as provision for a family, rather than as the reward of achievement on the job. It thus led the Women’s Bureau to accept a language that referred freely to “men’s jobs.” The reality of a gender-divided work force reduced the contradiction from a practical reality to a theoretical possibility. Since occupational segregation in practice vitiated comparisons across gender lines, the minimum wage offered a practical alternative to those consigned by the division of labor to low-paying jobs by offering them some protection. At the same time, the fight for equal pay permitted comparisons of wages in the relatively few jobs held by men and women.

If the practical meaning of equal pay for equal work was diffused by its respect for gender segregation in jobs, the family orientation that was its focal point never went entirely uncontested. Agents of the Women’s Bureau euphemistically but not inaccurately referred to the alternative meaning posed by the slogan as “educational.” Stifled but never wholly eliminated by the equal pay slogan, the message of a potential independence offered sporadic encouragement to violate traditional sex roles and to seek monetary rewards. Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, recognized the phenomenon: “Women who by their own labor earn wages sufficient to support them independently have the power to choose and direct their own lives. They are free from the galling dependence and deference that invariably accompany a condition of either total or partial dependence upon others for the necessities of life.”²² The consequences of such independence could not be measured. Equal pay, claimed a stalwart female unionist, could be described as “in furtherance of the highest ideals of womanhood. It expresses self-respect, conscious of ability to render service, jealously guarding dignity against undervaluation in the eyes of others.”²³ The labor movement called on these definitions in the 1930s to sustain support for equal pay under the seniority provisions in its newly negotiated collective bargaining contracts. Not to include women and people of color in these provisions would violate the principle of job entitlement that lay at the heart of seniority systems. To include these groups, however, was to acknowledge their individual rights to jobs without regard to their location in the family or to family need—a particular problem in view of the general attitude of many male workers to women.²⁴ Caught in a bind, trade union leaders found themselves defending equal pay on the principle of every worker’s right to a job while their members took the opposite position. One South Bend, Indiana, auto body worker suggested that employers should be made to “pay the same wages that they pay for men, and they would not have any women working on the job.”²⁵

Similarly, the argument that derived from individual rights continued to inform the National Women’s Party’s efforts to achieve equal pay. In the worst years of the depression, it urged General Hugh Johnson, head of the National Recovery Administration, to adopt “a general policy for the NRA which will give women an equal opportunity for self-support.”²⁶ In the same period, the Women’s Bureau sought the same end, “a rate for the job,” and persuaded the NRA to include equal pay provisions in three-quarters of its industrial codes on the grounds that they would reduce employer incentive to substitute women for men.²⁷ These exceptions notwithstanding, the argument for equal pay remained firmly rooted in the needs of family life.

The subverted or hidden argument emerged during and immediately after the second World War when the drive for equal pay joined forces with a powerful new sense of rectitude. Its stimulus came from three sources: a breakdown of occupational segregation during the war years; a new ideology of consumerism and prosperity rooted in the experience of depression and in popular interpretations of Keynesian economics that legitimated women’s desire for income; and a political climate that connected higher standards of living to America’s place in the world. These developments encouraged a new emphasis on individual rights consistent with the long-suppressed meaning of equal pay.

Students of the second World War have frequently pointed out that employers and male workers strove to limit occupational mobility for women.²⁸ While this is undoubtedly the case, still enough temporary replacements were made to create new opportunities for comparing male and female wages. To women workers, many of them veterans of the work force, new only to men’s jobs, the wartime situation exposed long-buried arguments for individual rights to fairness and justice. From the grass roots, it seemed, women rejected the notion that male needs constituted a compelling reason for higher pay and simultaneously asserted the validity of women’s demands. “In our system,” complained a Racine, Wisconsin, schoolteacher to Bertha Nienburg, associate director of the Women’s Bureau, “single men receive two hundred dollars more annually than the women and married men receive five hundred more.”²⁹ And a cleaning lady making thirty-four and one-half cents an hour fumed, “The men janitors here doing the same work without the matron responsibilities are receiving 62 and 72 [cents] per hour.”³⁰ Nor were direct comparisons lacking. A female welder protested to Frances Perkins that the women in her plant had to “put up a scrap” for every wage increase they had received: I started that, she said, “because I learned that a man welder sitting across from me was getting 90c. per hour.” He, she noted, was “an inexperienced welder just starting on production.” The women welders were then brought up to the male level, but at the time of their next scheduled increase, they were turned down “even tho we are more experienced, and are putting out more production. More in fact than the men who formerly held the job at a higher rate of pay.” She “had been working for a number of months and was earning 80c. per hour.”³¹

As wartime conditions allowed women to breach time-honored barriers to occupational segregation, the gendered content of the wage relation began to undergo clear, if inconsistent, changes. A Dayton, Ohio, Frigidaire worker wrote FDR that she would try to explain why she believed the women in her plant ought to have equal pay. “The men and women’s jobs are nearly identical,” she wrote. “We girls can hold down any job that a man can we have done, most of them are doing it now [sic].”³² This recognition encouraged a broader set of comparisons, which seem to have been closely related to a redefinition of female needs and to an effort to redefine an appropriate wage. Nora Galloway, a South Bend, Indiana, widow with two children to support who worked as a tool checker, wrote to FDR “to find out what you think of all these women working in defence plants doing mens work and only receiving childrens pay.” Citing her family responsibilities, she suggested that she was angry enough to switch jobs for more pay. “I think I should have the same money an hour as Studebakers factory pays or I going to quit where I am and go to Studebakers where they pay women 70c an hour to start and after your there a while you get $1.05 an hour.” Lest she be accused of being unpatriotic, she quickly added a second reason for moving. At her present wage, she wrote, she could not buy enough defense bonds; if she went where she “could get more money and buy more bonds,” not only would this contribute to the war effort, but she would “have something when the war is over. I am,” she concluded with a burst of passion, “just as good to have it as any one. . . . Their men make as much as $15.00 a day in two days these men get more than I get for 6 days and I have a family to support and rent to pay.”³³

The pressure for justice required a rationale that contradicted those prevalent in earlier notions of equal pay. Women claimed that female needs were not different from those of men in any way that mattered. “I for one have been wondering for some time why a woman’s salary in most all cases are so much lower than men,” wrote Ethel Lee of Covington, Kentucky, to Mary Anderson. In an argument that prefigured one of the important issues of the postwar debate, she noted, “for entertainment, eats, rent, there is no difference . . . the divorce cases are rising all the time. Who can depend on a man for support?”³⁴

Implicit in these letters are the dangers of breaking down occupational segregation. They open the possibility of comparisons with male workers that had previously been out of the realm of possibility. But more importantly, these comparisons threaten the meaning of justice that is located in custom and tradition and the image of the male as provider. As women discovered that their experience negated old rationalizations for protecting male workers, they looked toward a new definition of fairness to their families and to themselves. In the war years the rhetoric that supported differential pay scales began to seem increasingly absurd. The employer who told the Women’s Bureau interviewer, “Let’s face it . . . we hire women because they are cheaper,” was only articulating free market principles, but to the interviewer his answer seemed patently unjust. In the wake of depression and war, the discrepancy between the notion that the lesser financial responsibilities of women justified pay differentials and the tremendous demands for support on most wage-earning women could no longer be sustained. “Needs-based” arguments became the subject of ridicule.

At the same time, economic analysts noted that the new comparisons posed a problem. Equalizing pay rates for male and female factory workers doing the same or comparable jobs raised the wages of some women and thus violated what was euphemistically called the “custom of the industry” or traditional notions of wage differentials between men and women. Since these rates reflected women’s social roles and incorporated gendered meanings, altering them would inevitably disturb the equilibrium that tied wages to prevailing understandings of gender relations.

Several strategies emerged to combat this danger. As it stepped up pressure for equal pay, the Women’s Bureau continued to argue for saving men’s jobs for the long term. Mary Anderson described her own experiences at juggling the issues this way: To convince union men that equal pay was in their own interests, she wrote,

I appealed to their selfishness in terms of preserving their own jobs. . . . I said, “You in the union are now very strong; you have a tremendous membership; you have lots of money from dues; you can do now what you can’t do later when the war is over and jobs become scarce; . . . There will be competition for jobs; then the employer will hire the cheapest workers, and while I am interested in women getting work because they have to live just as much as anybody else, at the same time I am not interested in women being exploited and used to lower the standard of living.” I then said you can forestall that now if you get into your union contracts the principle of the same wages for women as for men.³⁵

The War Labor Policies Board tried to combat the disequilibrium by permitting but not insisting on raises for women doing the same or “comparable” jobs as men while adamantly refusing to consider wage raises for women who worked in jobs that historically paid less than those of men. Thus, the board’s General Order no. 16 permitted, but did not require, employers to “equalize the wage or salary rates paid to females with the rates paid to males for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operations.” At the same time, it contended that the rates of women in job classifications “to which only women have been assigned in the past . . . are presumed to be correct.”³⁶

Some employers abetted this effort by trying to keep rates for women deliberately lower than those of men. One personnel manager explained that in order to keep the rates of female factory workers “somewhat in line with other women’s rates,” his company set women’s starting rates five cents per hour lower than those of men.³⁷ A radio manufacturing company wanted the same differential in order “to maintain a dual wage structure on the grounds of traditional differences which had always existed between men’s and women’s rates.”³⁸ When such rates were challenged by male workers for undermining the male wage scale and by women for reasons of fairness, they released a flood of complaints that encouraged comparisons among wage rates in general.

The potential danger in all of these defenses against increasing women’s pay in women’s jobs lay in the questions they raised about the justice of differential pay for any job that had been assigned according to sex. “Any equalizing of rates of pay for women on factory jobs,” noted one economic analyst, “has to be considered in relation to the office.” Some companies, he suggested, should “consider the ultimate establishment of a single series of rate ranges for both factory and office jobs, with the same starting rates in both cases—one scale that is universal for men or women, shop or office, grade for grade.” Failure to confront the issue of differential rates squarely, he warned, would have dire results. “Necessity will compel the white collar workers to turn to outside agencies for the consideration they deserve.”³⁹

This argument, then referred to as equitable pay, we would now call comparable worth. A University of Michigan economist summed up the difference this way: “The slogans ‘equal pay for equal work’ and ‘the rate for the job’ both express too narrowly the real objective of equality of economic opportunity between the sexes, for they concentrate attention too exclusively on the rather few occupations which are common to both sexes in peacetime, or in which women replace men during wartime.” He proposed a program of job evaluation that would attempt “to make proper allowance for all compensable factors, to the end that wage rates shall be equitable, not merely within but as between all occupations.”⁴⁰

In July 1945 the Women’s Bureau decided to explore this position. A consequence of an evolving shift in its equal pay rationale, the choice reflected its efforts to develop a “long-term program of full employment opportunity” and to make a case for “a rate of wages corresponding to the actual value of the job . . . or the process . . . perform[ed] in the industry.” The equal pay principle, the memo argued, had two parts. It required “the payment to women of the same rate as men where they are employed on processes that are the same, or substantially comparable,” to those currently or previously employing men. “But more than this,” bureau officials emphasized, “it necessitates a review of rates in jobs that ordinarily are or customarily have been performed by women.” Here was an effort not to move women into men’s jobs but to sever the connection between wage and gender segregation in the job market. The memo insisted on the need for “consistent technical appraisals of the actual value of specific jobs done by workers.” The absence of such efforts, it indicated, in language that previewed that of the 1980s, “has led to the payment of women at rates below those fixed for male common labor even in operations that involve a considerable degree of skill, dexterity, speed and care. In such a situation, there can be no question that women are being paid a substandard wage in relation to their performance and their value to the industry just as surely as when the wage paid them is less than their living costs.” Until recently, the memo noted, correcting these inequities “involved chiefly a matter of justice to a body of workers paid less than the rate to which the job entitles them.” But now, it added, drawing on rationales that came from the Keynesian revolution, “it is an essential part” of the country’s objective “of securing a high level of employment and increasingly high standards of living for the whole people.”⁴¹

The Women’s Bureau was apparently serious in its efforts to explore the possibility of eliminating the weight of “custom and tradition” in setting women’s wages. Anderson herself commented shortly after the war that the slogan “equal pay for equal work” was misleading. “What women workers really want is ‘the rate for the job’ regardless of sex. In many instances women’s work is just as skilled as men’s even though not equal or identical with men’s.” Thus, she continued, she supported the wording of the bill currently before Congress that prohibited any employer from paying differential wages to men and women doing “work of comparable quality and quantity.”⁴² Though ambiguous about how far she would be willing to take the comparable work principle, Anderson supported efforts of the bureau to explore the limits of equal pay by conducting a series of investigations and hearings on industrial wage-determination studies in 1946 and 1947. Partly in response to the War Labor Board’s demand for some rationale for raising wages during the war, such studies had proliferated. Their aim was to assess the relative quantities of skill, effort, and responsibility located in particular jobs and then compare them with each other. The Women’s Bureau, seeking an objective measure of what women’s jobs were worth, now attempted to assess their impact by reviewing the studies of dozens of employers. Their conclusions, which appear not to have been published in bulletin form, were mixed.

While theoretically, evaluation of job content ought to lead to pay scales that removed the sex of the worker as a factor and therefore to an increase in women’s rates, in practice eliminating gender proved more difficult. Because the ratings involved a level of subjective judgment about the value of job content, the ratings themselves reflected the biases of those who developed them; and therefore, gender bias was built into ratings systems. Frequently, evaluation schemes and point weights were adopted by management alone; but even when unions participated, there was little guarantee that the weights would be gender neutral. Typically, work that required speed, dexterity, and the ability to tolerate boredom weighed less than heavy, dirty, and outside tasks. A Chicago mail-order house defended its rate differentials by arguing that “men’s work is generally heavier and also that men can usually get and expect to get higher rates.” Like the company, union representatives saw little wrong with this argument. In this case, “a differential was thought justified because generally the men’s work is more demanding physically and also the family and social responsibilities of men” needed to be taken into account.⁴³

A second factor influencing rating systems was that, in deference to custom, tradition, and the market, employers continued to insist on separate pay schedules for men and women and particularly on separate scales for progression and merit raises. The Singer Manufacturing Company proposed “a bi-lateral wage line maintaining the historic differentials between men’s and women’s jobs.”⁴⁴ The Dowst Manufacturing Company in Chicago offered women a flat rate of sixty cents an hour that did not increase no matter how competent the worker became. Men, in contrast, could earn merit increases that raised their pay from a starting rate of seventy-five cents to ninety cents an hour.⁴⁵ Finally, even where a rating system seemed fair on its face, employers relied on sex segregation to maintain wage differentials. Repeatedly, the Women’s Bureau noted that the issue of comparable wages never emerged because women were simply not employed in many jobs.

But in the end it was not these internal problems that scuttled the incipient campaign for comparable worth. Rather, it was that equal pay, unlike comparable worth, sustained a major thrust of the postwar economy—to increase consumption by enhancing productivity. The nation had emerged from the Great Depression and the war committed to Keynesian principles of economic growth as the key to national well-being. Higher standards of living could, it was widely thought, be attained by a self-reinforcing cycle of enhanced productivity and incentives to consume. These precepts demanded the participation of women as workers and as consumers.

Equal pay supported these goals in two ways: it encouraged women to earn wages that would contribute to higher standards of living; yet it promised to reduce friction in the workplace by maintaining the occupational segregation that would continue the traditional relation between male and female wages. As the Women’s Bureau itself pointed out, “If equal pay is required for the same work, then it follows that differentials in pay are justified because of differences in job content. Such wage differences—under the equal pay principle—are equitable, morally justified, and, under equal pay law, may acquire legal sanction.”⁴⁶ That raised the question of the extent to which job content should determine wages. In a period when rapid technological change threatened to deskill some jobs, making them available to women, the notion of equal pay protected the fiction that certain jobs were “men’s jobs” and required greater rewards. Accepting equal pay for the relatively few jobs in which men and women were employed implicitly placed the Women’s Bureau sanction of differential pay on those in which only women worked. But it confronted the Women’s Bureau with several hard questions: “Is there any danger that the lower differentials established for women workers which receive the sanction of law will have long run adverse effects on women’s rates? Will precedents be more firmly established which will be difficult to cope with?” And would such precedents ultimately benefit “the employer who maintained lower differentials for women?”⁴⁷ Equal pay protected the family and the high level of consumption, guaranteed by high male wages. Its cost was occupational segregation and female inequality.

Job content analysis, on the other hand, assumed a wage structure independent of the sex of the worker. It offered to overcome traditional or customary wage rates that were rooted in prejudices about male and female sex roles but made no claims to tie the structure of wages to notions of male family responsibility. Indeed, it was widely seen as a “bloodless” way of reducing rates on the basis of reduced skills. Gender justice thus seemed to negate the possibility of an appropriate family standard of living. Reluctantly, Women’s Bureau analysts came to the position that there might well be “a conflict between the application of the job content principle and the broader social philosophy of the living wage.” What, they asked, would be the ultimate consequence for women of a policy in which “maintaining as high a standard of living as the economy can afford seems to be the immediate and long run objective?”⁴⁸

As the argument played itself out, it looked as if only a sacrifice of gender equality could maintain the high wages necessary for continuing prosperity. It could be understood as in the national self-interest. It was easy to sell. Yet the sacrifice does not seem to have been easily made. Frieda Miller, then director of the Women’s Bureau, began her testimony for the 1945 bill with a short prelude. “It is common knowledge,” she said, “that wage rates have always been lower in the major woman-employing industries, such as textiles, retail trade, laundries, and other service industries. I pass over these without comment.”⁴⁹

The bill introduced by Claude Pepper and Wayne Morse at the urging of the Women’s Bureau in 1945 reflected these changes. Its preamble argued that inequitable compensation based on sex was an unfair wage practice that could lead to labor disputes; depress “wages and living standards of employees, male and female”; interfere with and prevent “the maintenance of an adequate standard of living” among workers and their families, especially on the families of “deceased or disabled veterans”; prevent the maximum utilization “of our available labor resources and plant capacity essential for full production, in war and peace”; and endanger the national security and the general welfare. The new rhetoric around equal pay did not abandon the notion that women competed with men for jobs and wages, so much as it subsumed issues of wages and job competition into national well-being, and altered the character of the argument.

In support of this rationale, the Women’s Bureau pulled out the stops in its efforts to get an equal pay bill passed. It created a National Equal Pay Commission headed by Mary Anderson. Under cover of the commission, the bureau planned a media campaign to publicize the movement for equal pay. It sent out upwards of sixty letters to popular magazines, to the house organs of major women’s groups, and to labor union papers, offering them articles on equal pay or material they could use to write their own.⁵⁰ A handful of popular magazines accepted the offer, and a sturdy two dozen union journals agreed to run articles. The bureau pressed Congress for action on equal pay and managed to get hearings in 1945, 1948, and 1950. This effort was followed in 1952 by a National Conference on Equal Pay, out of which grew a new National Committee on Equal Pay.

Clearly, equal pay was on the agenda in a way it had never been. Beginning in 1943, one state after another passed equal pay laws. First Washington in 1943, then Illinois and New York in 1944. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania followed in successive years. By the end of 1955, sixteen states and Alaska had equal pay laws on the books.⁵¹ Both major party platforms supported equal pay in 1948 and sporadically thereafter. Between 1945 and 1950, equal pay bills were introduced and hearings held in every session of Congress. In the 1950s none of the seventy-two bills introduced into Congress got a hearing. Still, the issue did not subside. President Eisenhower included support of an equal pay act in his state of the union address in 1956. Trade unions continued to include equal pay provisions in their collective bargaining agreements.⁵² More than a decade of discussion and exploration preceded the final push for passage in 1962.⁵³

The political appeal of arguments for equal pay that rested on continuing economic growth derived a larger justification from the new place of the United States in the world. High standards of living would help to justify America’s claim to world leadership and legitimize its fight against communism. The context helped to link the individual rights piece of the equal pay argument to the Keynesian revolution. The link emerged during the war years. Women who were discriminated against in the labor force “cannot be expected to exhibit the necessary morale” to sustain high levels of production, suggested one rationale. And, as if in afterthought, “It is also important to the morale of men on the job as well as those leaving for military duty to be confident that existing wage structures will not be undermined in their absence.”⁵⁴ These references to the morale of producers merged into incentives to pull increasing numbers of women into the labor force. Even employers who preferred to pay women less in deference to custom conceded that the elimination of wage differentials was “an important factor in getting more women into the labor market.”⁵⁵ In the postwar years, the continuing demands of production increasingly pulled women into the labor force. The argument that women’s morale as producers required equal pay merged into the effort to deploy human resources in effective support of the national goal of prosperity. Equal pay became a positive force for the high productivity of workers, male and female, and one engine of a consumer-driven economy.

The transformation required renegotiating the meaning of the wage. The living wage and the minimum wage for women had incorporated sharply differentiated conceptions of the needs of male and female workers. The living wage called up images of wage-earning men who were married and supported families. It assumed dependent women to whom the obligation to prevent starvation was merely a byproduct. In the competition for jobs and wages, the male’s historic prerogatives were sustained by the moral claims of the family. The minimum wage can, in some sense, be said to have been designed to pick up the residual women without families. It rested on definitions of women’s needs, apart from family, and conceptions that women were entitled only to what they “absolutely required” for health and decency. In sharp contrast, the postwar articulation of equal wages rested on a conception of consumption that, though directly benefiting an individual family, benefited the nation’s families and ultimately, by increasing national well-being, strengthened democracy. “Conscious efforts to employ human and economic resources fully would result in a higher national standard of living,” one Women’s Bureau memo noted.⁵⁶ Drawing on the lessons of the depression, analysts agreed that if women were paid more they would spend more. “Equal pay will tend to increase effective consumer demand, thus aiding efforts to achieve full employment.”⁵⁷ The new idiom removed the discussion of equal pay from the self-interest of the job holder to the realm of family well-being. It assumed that women, like men, were family providers, and sought equal pay in order to incorporate women into a shared struggle for the survival of democracy. The language of citizenship had become the sanction of equal pay. “There perhaps was a time in the country’s history when a man, because of his commanding position as the head of the family and breadwinner, was entitled to more compensation than the single woman,” said the bill’s Senate sponsor, Pat McNamara. “But in modern-day America, women’s role as a provider, for not only herself but her family, has become an essential role.”⁵⁸ To this rationale George Addes, international secretary-treasurer of the UAWCIO, added the clincher. Equal pay for equal work, he noted, was “one of the equal rights in the promise of American democracy regardless of color, race, sex, religion or national origin.”⁵⁹ Equal pay had shed its oppositional content to appear instead in a patriotic garb.

The message formulated in the early postwar years remained consistent throughout the period. Equal pay was a matter of simple justice, and it was in the national interest to implement it. It drew on expanded notions of American democracy encouraged first by the war itself and then by the cold war. And it integrated the economic lessons of the depression and expectations for high standards of living with myths of American homogeneity and strength in the face of the cold war. Images of ambitious women disappeared, as did threats to occupational segregation. Instead, a combination of moral suasion and economic self-interest held the day.

But the core argument, echoed and reechoed by witnesses for the bill, derived from efforts to redefine justice for women as a function of their individual rights rather than of family responsibilities, while suppressing the notion that individual rights could open the door to ambition. In the prewar language of equal pay, women had been creatures of the family for whom equal pay implied an antimale provider and therefore anti-family stance. To protect male jobs required suppressing whatever elements of individual self-realization existed in equal pay, in favor of loyalty to the family. But the twin experiences of depression and war, which placed the individual efforts of women in the service of families, altered this perspective. Equal pay now meant the capacity to help the family and the nation. The implicit possibility of achieving personal goals was suppressed. The core of the new sense of justice was a powerful conflation of individual rights, family responsibilities, and consumer needs that enabled the idea of equal pay to overcome free market principles.

Testimony for equal pay, repeated through several sets of hearings, drew on notions of fairness and justice that had entered into the dialogue during the war. The hearings for the 1945 bill located them in women’s wartime contributions, which, according to Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach, amply supported the case for justice. The proposed legislation was desirable “as a matter of fairness.”⁶⁰ The preamble to the bill noted that the disabilities and deaths of veterans left many wives and widows vulnerable. At the 1948 hearings the notion of simple justice was echoed so frequently as to appear self-evident and to need no defense. Elizabeth Christman, testifying for the Women’s Trade Union League, insisted that “equal pay is a matter of simple justice.”⁶¹ A union representative suggested that equal pay was “a matter of simple justice to the women of our country.”⁶² Joseph Beirne, president of the Communications Workers of America, echoed the sentiment. The women pressing for equal pay were not “attempting to achieve some vague or lofty ideal,” he testified. Rather, they were seeking a “simple principle of fundamental justice.”⁶³ From that point on, the cloak of justice masked the retreat from the marketplace that the principle of equal pay reflected.

Frieda Miller, then head of the Women’s Bureau, began her testimony with an eloquent plea to the subcommittee to reject notions that either men or women were paid on the basis of their needs. “A differential wage rate paid workers in accordance with the size of their families,” she noted, had been rejected by economists because it “undermines the accepted principle of ‘the rate for the job’ and would provide an incentive for employers to engage unmarried workers in preference to those with families.”⁶⁴ Others were more explicit. “The principle of a ‘family wage’ has never become established in this country as a basis for compensation. A single man is paid as much as a married man for doing the same job. Pay is for work done, rather than for the number of dependents of the worker,” testified Secretary of Labor Schwellenbach.⁶⁵ No sex differential applied, suggested other witnesses, “when women spend the money they earn. Grocery stores do not have double standard price tags, one for men customers, one for women. A loaf of bread is just a loaf of bread and sells for so much. It makes no difference whether a woman pays for it or a man. . . . There are no male or female tax rates.”⁶⁶ As one female union member put it, “It is only a matter of simple justice that we ask for. We are entitled to the price for the work which we do.”⁶⁷ If equal pay was for work done, then it followed that equal pay was neither more nor less than fair pay. “The principle of ‘equal pay for equal work,’” said Maurice Tobin in his first annual report as secretary of labor, “is as basic to the American way of life as are the guarantees of free speech, free thought, free press, free assembly, and free association.”⁶⁸

By the time the Women’s Bureau convened its National Conference on Equal Pay in 1952, failure to participate in the rhetoric of justice had become a matter for rebuke. Secretary of Labor Tobin castigated differential pay as “a practice neither fair nor logical. It arises from a state of mind, a bad business habit, a cultural pattern that will ultimately be eradicated.”⁶⁹ This moral stance characterized the struggle up to the end. In 1963 Senator Pat McNamara, chairman of the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, berated those who shared the “ancient but outmoded belief that a man, because of his role in society, should be paid more than a woman even though his duties are the same.”⁷⁰

The capstone was that everyone, except perhaps for some unscrupulous employers, could be expected to benefit from a law that rejected outmoded beliefs and insisted on justice. Equal pay, argued Frieda Miller and others, “will promote the general welfare by protecting wage levels and thereby sustain consumer purchasing power and family living standards.”⁷¹ Having learned the lessons of the depression well, advocates of equal pay applied them diligently to their cause. “Should women’s wages for comparable work be less than men’s,” argued the League of Women Shoppers, drawing on an old argument, “it is inevitable that women as a cheaper labor market will be used to replace men or that men’s wages will be reduced to the women’s level.” But then came the punch line: “The downward spiral commences with reduced purchasing power for the consumer, decreased production and employment.”⁷² As the AFL put it, “To pay women less than men is to tear down the American standard of life.”⁷³

By contrast, wage discrimination was positively un-American. It would result, argued Frieda Miller, in “lower levels of earnings for all” and end ultimately in “reduced purchasing power and standards of living.” But Miller continued with a forceful warning: “In consideration of our national objective of high living standards and full employment, I submit that we cannot afford to risk the threat to general wage levels that unequal pay to women involves.”⁷⁴ Lewis Schwellenbach agreed that “low wage standards decrease the national purchasing power” while equal pay would serve to “counteract influences that depress wage levels.”⁷⁵ His successor, Maurice Tobin, used harsher language. “Undercutting the wage scale by one or another group in society jeopardizes that most desirable of all social goals—an adequate standard of living for the family. Equal pay is essential to a healthy economy.”⁷⁶

Unequal pay would not only depress standards of living; it would, it was thought, contribute to a host of other evils in the labor force. It would, for example, prevent the maximum utilization of the labor supply by discouraging employment and inhibiting labor mobility. Schwellenbach put it this way: “Sex differentials in wage rates are a serious brake upon the best use of our labor resources and to that extent inhibit full production.” Discriminatory wages, he suggested, created a “frozen labor market” from which industry would suffer because workers would be unable to move freely from job to job as situations demanded.⁷⁷ In February 1963 John Kennedy’s secretary of labor, Willard Wirtz, made the same argument. Transmitting the bill to Lyndon Baines Johnson, then president of the Senate, he argued that “among other compelling reasons for its enactment is the necessity to utilize fully the skills of women in our labor force.”⁷⁸ Moreover, sex differentials would produce resentment among women workers. Recalling the wartime experience, Senator Wayne Morse commented on how “in the early stages of the war, failure to pay equal wages for equal work resulted in a great deal of labor unrest.”⁷⁹ The comment was echoed in 1963 by Senator Pat McNamara of Michigan, who feared the effect of poor morale among workers who were not fairly paid.⁸⁰

Under these circumstances adopting equal pay, as the Conference on Equal Pay concluded in 1952, would yield “better personnel relationships and practices.” It was simply a “good business principle.”⁸¹ Failing to adopt it, as Senator McNamara put it in the 1963 debates, “not only creates a severe hardship for the non-discriminating employer,” but, as Representative Ralph Rivers concurred, contributes to the “process of allowing unscrupulous employers to gain a competitive advantage.”⁸² These arguments echoed those of Senator Morse nearly twenty years earlier. Differential rates might be to the short-term competitive advantages of some employers, he had said then, but the plea for competitive rates ought not to permit them to “hold on to discriminatory practices.”⁸³

Into these arguments proponents integrated the rhetoric of the cold war. An undercurrent of the campaign in the 1950s was the degree to which more efficient production would help fight communism by encouraging preparedness. The Women’s Bureau’s choice of Arthur Fleming to keynote its 1952 conference on equal pay could not have been an accident. Fleming was then the Labor Department’s manpower chief in the Office of Defense Mobilization. He rose to the occasion. “Whenever we refuse to put into operation this concept of equal pay for equal work,” he argued, “we are just refusing to face the manpower aspects of our defense mobilization program in an intelligent and realistic manner.”⁸⁴ Fleming, who became Eisenhower’s secretary of health, education, and welfare and then a contributing editor of Good Housekeeping, continued the argument into the 1960s. Women who participated in “the crusade for militant programs” such as equal pay, he concluded a 1962 Good Housekeeping article, would “have the satisfaction of knowing they are helping to make available to the nation human resources that will be desperately needed in the challenging years to come.”⁸⁵ Claude Pepper, veteran of many equal pay battles, supported the 1963 Equal Pay Act with a stereotypical cold war warning: “Khrushchev has predicted that by 1970, Russia will overtake this country economically. We need all the incentive that we can provide to the labor force of this Nation to keep America superior in economic power and progress in the free world today.”⁸⁶

Questions of national image vied with those of production for victory in the cold war battle. Higher standards of living would illustrate the superiority of the American economic system to that of the communist world. The issue merged as early as 1945 and persisted. “Today when tolerance and justice are so needed to help set the world on the road to peace we in the United States who must take the lead in winning peace for all time, cannot afford to permit discrimination.”⁸⁷ In a dramatic escalation of rhetoric that matched the escalation of the cold war itself, proponents of the 1963 act insisted that “the principle of equal pay . . . is fundamental to the American free enterprise system.”⁸⁸ As he brought the bill to the floor of the House, Representative Adam Clayton Powell, chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, participated in the flourish: “The payment of wages on a basis other than that of the job performed is not only harmful to the individual worker and our economy, but also to our Nation’s image abroad.”⁸⁹

In short, proponents of equal pay adopted a rhetoric that fit the mood of the period. “Fighting for those rights,” as one union journal summed up the struggle, was “the democratic thing to do. It also is the smart thing to do—smart for male workers, who will be protecting their own wage level; smart for employers who will be protecting themselves against unfair tactics of competitors who try to produce cheap products with cheap labor; and smart for consumers who will be protecting themselves and the economy from unscrupulous schemers who have no regard for quality of products.”⁹⁰

Against the weight of such patriotic rhetoric, employers and economists who fell back on old arguments could not prevail. Women, went the old arguments, deserved to be paid less because they invested less in the labor market. Their attachment to the home and their responsibilities for families justified a lower wage. Women, claimed business representatives, simply cost more to employ. They were not opposed to equal pay in principle, argued business representatives, but legislators needed to take account of the additional costs of women as workers. According to employers, these costs included women’s more frequent absenteeism, their high turnover, the longer training period required to prepare them for jobs, and the closer levels of supervision required.⁹¹ They also included the costs of such state-mandated amenities as minimal numbers of toilets, appropriate lunchrooms, and regulations governing shorter hours and rest periods.

Opponents argued that paying women equally would force employers to give up the possibility of investing in male permanency.⁹² The argument revealed something of the social expectations that constituted part of the hidden content of the male wage. Men, but not women, were worth cultivating for something called versatility or their future benefit to the company. While the principle of equal pay embodied a rate of wages corresponding to actual performance, personnel directors frankly declared that a man “may be paid more because the company is training him for a responsible position and wants to be sure to keep him with the company either until training is completed or the position opens.”⁹³ The Equal Pay Bill, which would prohibit companies from paying men extra during a holding period, threatened to deprive industry of this valuable source of labor. As a result, commented one company president, young men who had been hired as secretaries might lose that option. We always knew, he commented, “that there was a possible potential of their rising to more important jobs, supervising a large number of men. If this law is passed, we will hire women for all secretarial positions and be deprived of this avenue of advancement.”⁹⁴

Such costs could be concretely measured, suggested business representatives. One witness estimated the additional costs of female workers at anywhere from twenty-one to thirty cents an hour. The number was compiled by calculating the price of amenities that women required. The cost of extra female facilities, one manufacturer estimated, was one-tenth of a cent per hour. Extra rest periods came to ten cents per hour.⁹⁵ These costs, argued Senator Paul Findley who championed the cause, were attributable to “the indisputable fact that women are more prone to homemaking and motherhood than men.” But Findley failed to persuade other legislators to amend the bill to allow employers to take those costs into account, because otherwise “employers will tend to cut back on female employment.”⁹⁶

These arguments, which expressed covert beliefs that women’s home roles still took precedence over their work lives, could not overcome the powerful ideology of justice for individual American citizens. By the mid 1950s ultimate passage seemed certain. As Secretary of Labor Maurice Tobin commented at the 1952 Equal Pay Conference, “Ask the average businessman, the laboring man, and the public servant whether he believes in equal pay, and you will get virtually unanimous agreement. They are for it just as they are against sin.”⁹⁷ Observers in the mid 1950s concluded that “sentiment in favor of equal pay is overwhelming.”⁹⁸

Tracing the language around the Equal Pay Bill reveals the dramatic roles played by its rhetorical content over the course of half a century. Depicted at first as a means of stifling job competition, it became a way of building the economy; shunned as a device to encourage individual ambition, it came to embody individual contributions to national well-being. Feared as a challenge to traditional gender roles, equal pay emerged as a way of enabling women to fulfill their family responsibilities; lauded as protection for men, it became a symbol of citizenship for women. As there was ambiguity in its early formulations and goals, so there remained ambiguity in its content even as it was passed into law. But the ambiguity was an essential ingredient in unifying diverse interests. Within its framework, the unresolved issue of occupational segregation remained hanging. And the ambiguity accounts as well for the fact that, in 1963, as the act was being debated on the House floor, it was gutted of language that required equal pay for “work of comparable quantity and quality” and that offered at least a restrained threat to labor market segregation.⁹⁹ This language, which had prevailed from World War II on, appeared in all legislative attempts to pass an equal pay bill until in the final debate it was removed from the legislation at the suggestion of one of its sponsors, Katharine St. George. Still, if the Equal Pay Act avoided challenges to this fundamental source of inequality in women’s pay, it provided a rhetoric that fuelled a continuing struggle. The discourse expanded notions of justice, encouraging perceptions of male/female equality that had previously been invisible. Its limits and its achievements can be understood in terms of the hopes and fears that remained incarcerated in the term. Thus, it constitutes a case study of how close examination of rhetoric can help us understand some of the hidden dynamics of the political process.