Two
AFTER FOUR AND A HALF YEARS, I left Common Cause. It took me about another year of part-time work to find what I wanted: a job as press secretary for the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). The caucus was the first national organization dedicated exclusively to increasing women’s participation in the entire political sphere—as elected and appointed officials, as delegates to Republican and Democratic conventions, as federal and state judges, and as lobbyists, voters, and campaign organizers. Before the 1976 presidential race, the caucus met with Jimmy Carter and won support for proposals for appointing women to the cabinet and the Supreme Court. Thanks largely to the efforts of NWPC chairwoman Mildred “Millie” Jeffrey and NWPC Democratic Task Force chairwoman Joanne Howes, the party changed its rules to mandate “equal division” of delegates by gender at future Democratic conventions. That last groundbreaking decision meant that, starting in 1980, half the delegates at the Democratic National Convention would be women.
It was in this context that I began working for the NWPC, eventually as a press secretary, in pursuit of its extraordinarily ambitious primary objective: the ratification of a proposed amendment to the Constitution designed to guarantee equal rights for women—the Equal Rights Amendment. The mere fact that an amendment to the Constitution was necessary to guarantee equal rights to women was astonishing—but it was, and it had been since time immemorial.
Gradually, I learned that the women’s movement was a historic undertaking in its infancy. Like the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement, this was a struggle that would take decades. And, like those other social movements, the greatest breakthroughs usually came about as the result of hard work and ingenious strategic maneuvering.
Indeed, as scholars later revealed, savvy activists went to extraordinary lengths to hoodwink conservative legislators into serving the feminist cause. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most important pieces of legislation of the century, was a case in point. The impetus behind the bill, of course, was to ban racial discrimination as a means of honoring the memory of President Kennedy in the aftermath of his assassination. But while the bill was still being debated, Rep. Howard W. Smith (D-VA), the chairman of the Rules Committee, a staunch conservative and a steadfast opponent of civil rights legislation, proposed a one-word change to Title VII of the bill, the section that was initially written to prohibit discrimination against any individual with respect to compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment because of such individual’s race, color, religion, or national origin. Smith suggested that the word sex be added to the bill to “prevent discrimination against another minority group, the women.”
From today’s vantage point, Smith might appear to have been motivated by noble and progressive concerns. But at the time, his modification of the bill was widely seen as an attempt to kill the entire bill. That’s because in many circles the idea of equality for women was perceived as so ludicrous that no one could possibly vote for it. In fact, when Smith introduced the wording change, laughter broke out on the House floor.
This chapter of feminist history is exceptionally counterintuitive in that many women leaders, from Eleanor Roosevelt on down, actually opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and similar measures, because they feared such laws would jeopardize hard-won legislation that protected women in the workplace. Conversely, the biggest supporters of the ERA tended to be conservative anti-union businessmen in the South, because owners of textile mills, which employed large numbers of women, stood to benefit from fewer workplace regulations.
These strange crosscurrents brought together such unlikely bedfellows as Howard Smith and Rep. Martha Griffiths (D-MI). Smith, on the one hand, a segregationist who consistently backed legislation benefiting textile mills in his state, had supported the ERA for more than twenty years. Griffiths, on the other hand, came to the issue with straightforward feminist motives—and extraordinary political talents. A lawyer and judge before joining Congress, Griffiths was the first woman to serve on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. Sometimes known as the mother of the Equal Rights Amendment, she deployed, as The Guardian put it, an “implacable determination, a lawyer’s grasp of procedural niceties, and a tongue like a blacksmith’s rasp.”
During her ten-term career, Griffiths uncovered countless astonishing inequities in federal government policies and fought to rectify them again and again. Social Security, she discovered, would pay benefits to a dead man’s children—but not to a woman’s. Similarly, if a man survived his wife, he was exempt from paying taxes on her estate, but widows were not exempt when their husbands died. There were analogous inequities when it came to pension eligibility. Nor was Griffiths shy when it came to delivering withering attacks on her adversaries—as when she discovered that the airlines fired stewardesses if they got married, and hired only women who were young, attractive, and single. “What are you running,” she wrote in a letter to one airline’s chief executive, “an airline or a whorehouse?”
When it came to the Civil Rights Act, Griffith saw a historic opportunity and had no qualms about seizing it by forging an alliance with a segregationist congressman from the South. “She thought once the word sex was in, nobody would take it out,” said Judy Lichtman, a civil rights lawyer who came to the Women’s Legal Defense Fund in 1974 and helped pass related legislation over the next forty years. “So, she intentionally made alliances with these Neanderthals who wanted to undermine the Civil Rights Act.”
Rather than introduce the amendment herself, Griffith decided to let Howard Smith carry the ball. From his point of view, it was a no-lose proposition. If the word sex torpedoed the historic bill, Smith would look like a hero to his racist constituents. If it passed, that would endear him to the textile-mill owners in Virginia.
When Smith brought the bill before the House, as Louis Menand pointed out in The New Yorker in 2014, he did so as if the whole issue were a joke, reading a letter from a constituent calling for the government to attend to the “right” of unmarried women to find a husband. That elicited laughter. Then, liberal supporters of the Civil Rights Act spoke out against the “sex” addition because they regarded it “as either a prank intended to expose the limits of liberal egalitarianism or a poison pill that would make the bill more difficult to pass.” Emanuel Celler (D-NY), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a strong proponent of the Civil Rights Act, was less than enthusiastic about including “sex” as a protected category. He knew all about equal rights for women, he claimed, because, after forty-nine years of marriage, he always got the last two words: “Yes, dear.”
The jokes continued unabated, demonstrating that even in these august chambers women were seen as nothing more than second-class citizens. At last, Griffith finally took the floor and prevailed, and the addition of the word sex to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act became a legislative landmark in the history of women’s rights.
IMPLEMENTING THIS NEW BAN against gender discrimination, however, led to yet more battles. Title VII was one of the most demanding components of the Civil Rights Act, and it necessitated the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, whose chairman, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., argued that the prohibition of sex discrimination was not to be taken as seriously as the outlawing of racial discrimination.
Over time, however, the law proved to be a momentous breakthrough, because it provided a powerful basis for litigation against employers who discriminated against women. “It had an enormous impact,” said Judy Lichtman. “For the first time, it gave women the legal right not to be discriminated against in the workplace. As a result, employers changed their behavior. Women who were discriminated against brought lawsuits. One administration after another began to promulgate laws that prohibited discrimination. Classified ads in newspapers for employment could no longer be segregated by sex. Women’s economic opportunities were vastly changed and enhanced by Title VII. It was absolutely huge.”
VITAL AS TITLE VII WAS, it focused narrowly on employment, and the Equal Rights Amendment was the logical next step to provide a far broader range of protection to women’s rights. Both houses of Congress passed the amendment in 1972, but constitutional amendments have to be ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures in the United States. Getting thirty-eight state legislatures to sign off would not be easy. When the National Women’s Political Caucus convinced President Carter to support the ERA, the women’s movement had begun to move from engaging in mere policy discussions to joining forces with political power.
At the time, I had just turned thirty and was still finding my professional sea legs. But I felt inspired thanks to the chair of the NWPC, a diminutive, disheveled, and dynamic powerhouse of a woman who became my role model.
In an era in which antiwar leaders, counterculture gurus, and rock stars vied for their fifteen minutes of fame, Millie Jeffrey, then in her mid-sixties, was the real deal, a creature of history who was deeply committed to building institutions that would endure, to creating lasting social change that would stand for generations. Just four feet eleven inches tall, Millie had decades of experience building bridges between the civil rights movement and the labor movement. Above all, she was committed to equal rights for workers, for minorities, and for women.*
In the thirties and forties, Millie had been a labor organizer with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the United Auto Workers, where she won access to its inner chambers thanks to her close relationship with its president, Walter Reuther, the great hero of the American labor movement. In the fifties and sixties, she had become an activist in the civil rights movement, registering voters in Mississippi and marching with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. First in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign, and later in Bobby Kennedy’s ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign, which ended with his assassination, she was, as always, a builder of bridges. It was Millie who convinced Reuther to join the civil rights marches in the South, thereby cementing a vital alliance between the civil rights movement and organized labor. Likewise, it was Millie who persuaded Michigan civil rights leaders to pose with Sen. John F. Kennedy on the steps of his Georgetown home, thus orchestrating a political triumph for the fledgling presidential candidate.
When it came to the NWPC, Millie’s diminutive physical stature belied the immense impact she had there, imbuing our work with a moral force and a sense of history. As for work ethic, it seemed that Millie was always in the office. As I later found out, the reason for her constant presence, sadly, was that Millie had only a meager union pension, and she couldn’t afford an apartment. She actually lived at the office, sleeping on the floor. (As soon as the staff realized that, Millie became a frequent overnight guest in many a household.)
THE MOST IMPORTANT WAY in which the NWPC differed from EMILY’s List today was quite fundamental: it was bipartisan. That was possible because, in those long-ago days before the Reagan era, many moderate Republicans—who have since gone the way of the dinosaur—were pro-choice and for the ERA, positions that would not fly in today’s ultraconservative GOP. The caucus was comprised of women who were not merely paying lip service to feminist ideals. Margaret Heckler, the longtime “Rockefeller Republican” congresswoman from Massachusetts, was a strong supporter of equality for women in Social Security and tax laws, and a powerful proponent and cosponsor of the ERA. Likewise, Republican senator Nancy Kassebaum (R-KS) championed issues such as reproductive health, child care, and the ERA. Most importantly, both parties had task forces working together on the ERA, appointments, and other issues.
Such bipartisanship notwithstanding, by the late seventies, the ERA had been losing momentum. In 1973, just after the amendment had passed both houses of Congress, thirty out of the thirty-eight states necessary had ratified it. But that same year, the passage of Roe v. Wade had ignited the forces of the right, and ratification slowed to a crawl. In 1974, three states more ratified the ERA; the following year, just one. In 1976, there were none. In 1977, Indiana became the thirty-fifth state to ratify, but passage was three states short. Because the seven-year time limit was running out, the caucus began a lobbying effort to extend the ratification time.
The ERA had run head-on into a right-wing constitutional lawyer and leader of the New Right named Phyllis Schlafly, whose STOP ERA campaign led the way against ratification. As author Tanya Melich has pointed out in The Republican War Against Women, “Schlafly herself fit the feminist model of a self-assured woman with a cause, who speaks out and organizes for what she believes regardless of traditional constraints.” A high-powered political figure who spurned homemaking for a career, she demanded that other women forgo their professional ambitions and instead hew closely to the role of stay-at-home moms. “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society,” wrote Schlafly. “Women’s libbers are trying to make wives and mothers unhappy with their career, make them feel they are ‘second-class citizens’ and ‘abject slaves.’”
Thanks to Schlafly, themes of homemaking, motherhood, and “family values” became potent weapons in the Republican arsenal for decades to come. Fear of women’s liberation became a powerful force. Misogyny was celebrated. Schlafly argued—wrongly—that the ERA would eliminate gender privileges enjoyed by women, including “dependent wife” benefits under Social Security and exemption from the military draft. One Schlafly ally cautioned that “the ERA would mean the end of femininity.” Others asserted that privacy rights would be overturned, that women could no longer be supported by their husbands, and that the ERA would lead to the horrifying prospect of unisex toilets.
Ultimately, Republicans equated the women’s movement with the civil rights movement and rolled out talking points analogous to the race-baiting tactics of the GOP’s Southern strategy. One Republican woman said, “Forced busing, forced mixing, forced hiring. Now forced women. No thank you.” In North Carolina, another beseeched local officials not to “desexegrate us.”
As the 1979 deadline for ratification approached, the NWPC worked with the League of Women Voters, NOW, and many other organizations to pressure Congress to extend the deadline. In July 1978, NOW organized a march of one hundred thousand supporters in Washington, and Congress responded by extending the deadline to 1982.
But the tide of conservatism was rising. Millions of southerners saw the ERA as an assault by big government on all they held dear—their families, their homes, motherhood, and traditional relationships between husbands and wives. The moderate Republican women who were in NWPC may not have known it yet, but they were an endangered species. The Reagan era was nigh. The upshot was that the ERA never passed the state legislature in key states such as Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. In the end, it never became law.
EVEN THOUGH IT LOST the battle for the ERA, the NWPC had made significant strides in what was to be a much longer war. “It [the ERA effort] was important because it taught us how to do politics,” said Betsy Crone, who handled direct mail for the caucus. “It was a process we had to go through. We were inventing this movement, step by step, bit by bit. Each project we tackled helped us reach out to women all across the country.”
A new dynamic was at work, an organic process through which women were becoming politicized and were finally addressing their own interests. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm ran for president in the Democratic primaries. In 1973, Roe v. Wade was decided. In 1975 came the International Women’s Year, followed by the United Nation’s Decade for Women in 1976. Also in 1976, Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) became the first African American woman to give the keynote address—and a memorable one, at that—at the Democratic National Convention.
The NWPC didn’t let up. Jimmy Carter had established the Committee of 51.3 Percent as part of his promise to find qualified women appointees, but the caucus made certain he honored his commitment. Even before he took office, Rep. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) chastised the president-elect for relying too heavily on the “old boys’ network.” Then, as soon as he moved into the White House, the caucus, NOW, and the American Association of University Women lobbied President Carter for cabinet and subcabinet-level appointments for women in the administration, particularly in the departments of interior, labor, and health, education, and welfare.
These strategies paid off. A week after the caucus sent a Mailgram in support of Juanita Kreps, President Carter appointed her secretary of commerce. Patricia Roberts Harris became secretary of housing and urban development and, as such, was the first African American woman to hold a cabinet post. Soon, the number of women named to appointed positions in her department increased to 49 percent. In the judiciary, Carter appointed no fewer than forty women judges to federal courts—five times as many as all his predecessors combined.
The NWPC pushed for enforcement of federal statutes prohibiting discrimination against women. As general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued one landmark case after another on behalf of women’s rights before the United States Supreme Court. We created new fund-raising networks. We organized.
At the same time, Millie Jeffrey continued to press for “equal division” of delegates at the Democratic Convention—meaning that 50 percent of them would be women. Historically, African American civil rights activists had feared that gains for women were likely to come at their expense. To head off such concerns, in 1978, Millie met with Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, the African American representative from Los Angeles. “We had to show that we were not just taking care of ourselves, that we were worrying about other people’s interests,” said Betsy Crone. “Yvonne Burke was key to getting African American women to see that this was a good thing for them as well.”
This was political coalition building at its best. As a result, that year the Democratic Party changed its rules so that women would make up half the convention delegates at the 1980 convention and all subsequent conventions. This meant an enduring institutional change in the Democratic Party. “The ‘equal division’ rule had a profound impact on the party,” said Joanne Howes, who was head of the NWPC Democratic Task Force and worked for Barbara Mikulski in Congress. “It gave women another entry point into politics.” And it created a foundation so that women could win higher positions in years to come.
Millie had developed a cadre of deeply committed and sophisticated women activists who were acquiring genuine political skills and experience. Joanne Howes had cut her teeth working for the George McGovern campaign in 1972 before going to the NWPC and lobbying for the ERA. Betsy Crone had interned in the Senate while in college, working for Sen. Joe Tydings (D-MD) and then learning political fund-raising in the late seventies at the feet of Matt Reese, a pioneer of political consulting who was among the first to combine demographic data, polling, and computers to identify voter blocs for whom specific issues were crucial. Working with Reese, who had a number of women politicians as clients, Betsy learned firsthand just how difficult it was to do fund-raising for women politicians.
In addition to Betsy and Joanne, there was Lael Stegall, the NWPC development director; Judy Lichtman, who was executive director of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund (now known as the National Partnership for Women and Families); and Marie Bass, who was the campaign director of ERAmerica, a coalition of groups working to pass the ERA.
And then there were the candidates. Mikulski herself was part of a new generation of smart, ambitious young women all over the country who were emerging as rising young stars in politics. The great-granddaughter of Polish immigrants, Mikulski had made a name for herself in the seventies as activist social worker who successfully fought plans to build a sixteen-lane highway through the Fell’s Point and Canton neighborhoods of Baltimore. In 1976, she was rewarded with a landslide victory that sent her to Congress.
Similarly, Ann Richards was the beautiful, charismatic founding member of the Texas Women’s Political Caucus who had been elected Travis County commissioner and was clearly destined for bigger things. In California, an up-and-coming young woman named Nancy Pelosi, the daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., a former congressman and mayor of Baltimore, had, after raising five children, given in to the political blood in her veins, and become chair of the Democratic Party in Northern California. In the House were women like Pat Schroeder (D-CO), Bella Abzug (D-NY), Shirley Chisholm (D-NY), and Martha Griffiths (D-MI).
And, lest I forget, after her stint on the House Judiciary Committee, Hillary Rodham had moved to Arkansas and married Bill Clinton. Yet while he climbed the political ladder, being elected first attorney general and then governor of Arkansas, Hillary did anything but abandon her career, cofounding Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, becoming the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation, in 1978, and becoming the first female partner at the Rose Law Firm, the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi.
These were just some of the women who pioneered the movement that redressed gender inequality—and they were going places.