The year Jean retired from BBDO, 1963, also saw the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book popularly credited with sparking “second-wave” feminism and the women’s liberation movement. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years,” Friedan opens her manifesto. “Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, . . . she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’” For those who like tidy narratives, the symbolism aligns. Jean earned her bread by selling American women domestic bliss and, failing that, salving the housewife’s misery through the compensatory pleasures of consumption. Friedan articulated the “problem that has no name,” giving women permission to voice the unhappiness they had for so long been told to keep quiet.1 That Jean should disappear into the proverbial sunset just as a new feminist day was dawning appears poetic justice.
Yet history isn’t always so neat. At the very same time as East Coast women’s lib was so spectacularly catching fire, a conservative counterfeminist movement in California and the Sunbelt was quietly gathering steam as well. When cowboy boot-wearing, red-baiting, libertarian Arizona senator Barry Goldwater stole the 1964 Republican presidential nomination away from the usual cast of moderate party insiders, it was women who had done the grassroots work to make it possible. Goldwater’s nomination marked a watershed moment for the Republican Party, presaging a shift away from its traditional anchor in genteel East Coast wealth and laissez-faire economics and toward its more populist, small-government, Bible-beating fringe.2
Jean’s free enterprise boosterism and appeals to sentimental domestic rhetoric would appear, at first glance, to make her a natural ally of the conservative Sunbelt housewives and their “folksy, nationalist, maternal style,” as Michelle Nickerson has characterized this emerging group of activists.3 Yet this was not the case. By the mid-1960s, Phyllis Schlafly had emerged as de facto head of the socially conservative wing of Republican Party women; in 1972, she called out the newly passed Equal Rights Amendment as an elitist plot to “destroy morality and the family.”4 During the same period, Jean accepted a position as vice president of the National Council of Women (NCW), a progressive national organization promoting women’s rights; by 1976, she was writing pro-ERA copy against Schlafly’s efforts to derail the amendment’s final ratification. “Who Says We Live in the Land of the Free? Not until You Vote for the ERA!” ran one slogan Jean generated for a poster or TV spot. “If you care about your family,” urges another tagline, “strengthen it with the ERA.”5 Where Schlafly led a revolt against the inclusion of a party plank opposing racial discrimination in voting and housing at the 1960 Republican National Convention, Jean wrote a 1965 article for the NCW’s monthly bulletin educating her readers on the realities of racial discrimination in housing, and how they could mobilize to prevent it in their communities.
How are we to understand Jean’s apparent renunciation of her earlier conservative, privatized, free-market politics and sentimental focus on the nuclear family? The answer lies in what Nancy Cott has called the “Janus-faced” legacy of American women’s political activism since the nineteenth century. On the one hand, nineteenth-century woman-centered reform movements pioneered a pro-statist political style that allowed women to enter the public sphere as defenders of maternal “family values.” Woman’s status as caretaker of all God’s children gave her permission to expand her maternal reach beyond the four walls of her home and into her larger community, in partnership with the state.6 At the same time, a parallel track of staunchly antistatist women activists decried a meddling federal government as the greatest threat to the sacred family circle, where such traditionally American “family values” as independence, local governance, and religious instruction were nurtured.7
Both groups of women activists claimed to be fulfilling their gendered role as guardians of virtue, upholding their maternal duty to protect and care for the American family. But the precise nature of these maternalist values—and how to achieve them politically—would remain a source of heated debate throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, with 52 percent of white women voting for Donald Trump in 2016—a candidate enthusiastically endorsed by a ninety-two-year-old Schlafly, who hailed him as America’s “last hope”—this bitter political divide continues to define contemporary American politics today.
Women activists were among the first in the country to call attention to the ills of urban industrialized society as structural rather than individual in nature, a product of bad institutions rather than bad souls. Recounting her experiences at Hull House in 1890s Chicago, Jane Addams lamented the “piteous dependence of the poor upon the good will” of wealthy private citizens in the days before municipal and state governments stepped up to alleviate poverty in the cities. She recalled the case of one immigrant cleaning woman whose daughters, having succumbed to the “vices” of Chicago, became unwed mothers struggling to secure financial support from absentee fathers. “She did not need charity, for she had an immense capacity for hard work,” Addams clarified. What she needed, instead, was “the aid of the State attorney’s office, enforcing the laws designed for the protection of such girls as her daughters.”8 Faith in private charity and the invisible hand of the market, Addams and other early social reformers intimated, was not a viable solution to modernity’s problems. Women would prove a major mobilizing force behind Progressive Era efforts to expand state-mandated protections for American families, inaugurating the modern “welfare state.”9
This model of a maternalist state was resisted, almost from the get-go, not only by men who feared a feminization of politics but by women who believed their political duty was to keep decision-making private, local, and family-based. If “classical” liberals and laissez-faire conservatives in the early decades of the twentieth century lobbied for small government, they did so largely from an economic standpoint: the federal government should refrain from interfering with personal property and the free-market mechanism. It was women who expanded the conservative platform to include vigorous opposition to a federal welfare state, which they regarded as an elitist, “globalist” plot to usurp private parental control over the nuclear family. The Bolshevik revolution and Red Scare panic it touched off on the home front worked to strengthen what Michelle M. Nickerson has termed American “housewife populism,” with its signature paranoid-style blend of “patriotic” antiradicalism and antistatism.10 One of this group’s first political victories came in 1924, when massive grassroots organizing by women helped defeat passage of a child labor amendment to the Constitution. The amendment, which would have granted Congress power to “limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age,” was condemned by conservative women’s groups as a ploy to “substitute national control . . . for local and parental control, [and] to bring about the nationalization of children.”11
Women proved their political usefulness to the Republican Party once again during the 1950s, when white suburban housewives and mothers mobilized to get Eisenhower elected in 1952. Postwar Republican women cheerfully took up their gendered position as secretaries and “housekeepers” for male Republican Party leaders by organizing grassroots fundraisers and letter-writing campaigns; running voter drives; manning polling stations; and, in one popular program with the cutesy title “Operation Coffee Cup,” hosting meet-and-greets in the comfort of their own homes where Republican candidates could chat with local voters. Moreover, under the leadership of Elizabeth Farrington as head of the National Federation of Republican Women between 1948 and 1952, it was women who began nudging the party as a whole to the right on social issues, urging their more moderate Republican brothers to adopt the traditionally feminine (and evangelical) political style of the “moral crusader” to attract new membership.12
So when, in his 1960 manifesto The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater decried the Welfare State as a dangerous “instrument of collectivization” poised to rule with an iron fist as tight as any “oriental despot,” conservative women had already been primed to heed the call.13 Against the backdrop of a nascent feminist movement, Republican men and women alike sought a way to attract women to their ranks. “The conservative feels that the family is the natural source and core of any good society,” pronounced political scientist Russell Kirk in his 1957 book The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Conservatism, and knows that “when the family decays, a dreary collectivism is sure to supplant it.” It is by virtue of their instinctive family-centeredness, Kirk asserts, that women can be called the truly “conservative sex.”14 And indeed, it was troops of cowboy-hatted and white-gloved “Goldwater Gals” that helped propel the outsider candidate to victory at the 1964 Republican National Convention.
It was into this charged political atmosphere that Jean stepped when she took her leave of Madison Avenue in 1963. Upon retiring she immediately took on an enormous slate of volunteer work, producing public relations copy and other literature for organizations as diverse as the Girl Scouts, the National Safety Council, the Fresh Air Fund, and her local Teaneck Community Chest. Some of Jean’s contributions to charity and other “uplift” organizations remained therapeutic and local in scope, still animated by a faith in the power of individuals to improve their characters and thus their material and spiritual fortunes. But other volunteer engagements, in particular her work for the NCW and Church Women United, committed her to a brand of large-scale domestic “community housekeeping” in the style of Jane Addams and the early women’s reform movements.
The NCW was founded in 1888 by suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Frances Willard to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, with the goal of establishing an umbrella organization to bring together the country’s multitude of women’s clubs. The NCW’s founding statement declared, “We the women of the United States, sincerely believing that . . . an organized movement of women will best conserve the highest good of the family and the State, do hereby band ourselves together in a confederation of workers committed to the overthrow of all forms of ignorance and injustice, and to the application of the Golden Rule to society, custom, and law.”15 When the Fourteenth Amendment failed to bring equality under the law to women as well as freed slaves, the post–Civil War women’s movement had doubled down on its effort to make their voices felt in the public sphere through the back channels of voluntary associations. It was at the heart of this same National Council of Women that, eighty years after its founding, Jean first began to question her faith in the power of private market behavior to bring about social change.
American women in the postwar era married younger and had more children more quickly than the preceding generation, a domesticating trend that was paradoxically matched by an upsurge in the number of women combining child rearing with employment: by 1960, more than 40 percent of women with children between the ages of six and eighteen worked for pay. Jean had spent the midpart of her career documenting (and helping her clients to target) this increasingly common “two-job woman.” As part of an attempt to understand the momentous demographic shifts that had been taking place over the previous two decades, in 1961 President John F. Kennedy created the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women to study—with the goal of improving—the legal, civic, economic, and social status of American women.
From start to finish, the language framing the commission and its mandate revealed uncertainty about how to classify America’s modern woman. Chairwoman Eleanor Roosevelt’s inaugural address lauded the commission’s mission statement, its commitment to seeing “many of the remaining outmoded barriers to women’s aspirations . . . disappear,” and closed with the ambiguous hope that in the near future, “all Americans will have a better chance to develop their individual capacities to earn a good livelihood and to strengthen family life.” The commission’s final report, released on October 11, 1963, reaffirmed the demographic trend by which more and more wives and mothers were entering the workforce and, accordingly, put forth policy recommendations designed to help women better balance their dual roles as homemakers and workers. These included recommendations for equal pay for equal work, publicly funded day care, and paid maternity leave.
Still, the language of the report was marked by ideological tensions: it wavered between calls to recognize women as equal participants in the economic and professional life of the nation, and reassuring the audience that this would not entail the neglect of their traditional homemaking duties. The first section of the report, “Education and Counseling,” called for an expansion of job opportunities and job counseling for women. Yet a brief heading at the end of the section labeled “Preparation for Family Life” rushed to reassure readers that, “widening the choices for women beyond their doorstep does not imply neglect of the education for responsibilities in the house.” Rather, “at various stages” during their lives, girls of all economic backgrounds should receive instruction in respect to “physical and mental health, child care and development, human relations within the family.”16
Jean was intrigued by the commission’s findings (she would go on to be named editor for New York State’s own “Status of Women” report), and borrowed part of its name for a talk she gave to women at Teaneck Presbyterian Church in the spring of 1964: “The Status of Women—and YOU.” Jean said that America had “come to a stock-taking time,” “pulling out a lot of things we used to take for granted and taking a fresh, hard look at them.” She encouraged her listeners to read the commission’s report—it was published as a mass market paperback—and other proto-feminist rumblings as well. On her list: Mary Beard’s 1946 Woman as a Force in History and, surprisingly, “that recent and bothersome and sometimes too true book The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan.”17
Overall, Jean’s 1964 speech, just a year after her retirement, is an odd document. In it she continues to rely on the facile, universalizing, “consensus-building” jargon that had worked so well for her in her advertising endeavors. She encouraged her audience to recognize that, despite all that had changed for women since their mothers’ generation, women of all types and times remained unwaveringly family-centered. After asking her audience to jot down “the thing [they] are most worried about,” Jean joked that she didn’t need a crystal ball to intuit that, “your biggest single worry, I am very sure, is very, very personal”—“your health, your family’s health, your children.” Thus had it ever been and would continue to be, Jean assured them. She even milked her audience for something akin to nostalgia for an older social order, evoking the collapse of the extended family network and the working woman’s increased burden as a result. “The life of the average woman today is full of problems . . . her mother never knew,” Jean lectured. “We have lost that close-knit family under one roof,” a time when “one could always borrow an aunt or a grandmother to keep an eye on the baby.” The result, Jean lamented, is that as recently as 1958, more than 400,000 children under the age of twelve “were completely unsupervised while their mothers worked full time.” (Jean herself, of course, had not had this problem.)
And yet the speech just as quickly pivoted from such universalizing sentiment to a call for political engagement. “You and I can be shocked” by the statistic concerning unsupervised children, Jean temporized, and “I think we should be.” But she insisted such shock was pointless unless it prompted public action, to “help the three million women who are sole breadwinners for children under six.” Alongside her habitual sentimentalizing rhetoric (“That we keep surprising ourselves, that we keep reaching,” Jean the positive thinker concluded, “is the Status of Women I really care about”), Jean issued a call to her audience of (largely) conservative churchwomen to “get involved” in militating for such crucial women’s issues as greater access to public office, state-funded childcare, and equal pay for equal work.18
Three months after Jean delivered this speech, the cause of women’s civil rights was given a sudden and wholly unexpected boost with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Included in the bill was a last-minute provision, inserted by Republican senator Robert Byrd, adding “sex” to the categories protected against discrimination. Commentators have wrangled ever since over whether the amendment was intended as a joke (either at the expense of African Americans or women) or serious. Either way, women were quick to jump at the opportunity to see it enforced. And, surprisingly, among these women was Jean Wade Rindlaub.
As we have seen, throughout the 1940s and ’50s Jean consistently emphasized that professional women should “shut up”; assume disparities in pay or promotions were due to poor performance, not gender bias; and laugh off—or get real about—sexual advances (“Are you sure he tried to make a pass at you?”). This stance reached its apogee in her 1955 speech at Westover School, the all-girl boarding school in Connecticut where her daughter, Anne, was a high school student. Entitled “Is There Any Room for Women in the Executive Suite?” the talk largely answered in the affirmative—but was threaded with Jean’s usual wariness of women who sounded the call for inclusion too shrilly or who sought a career for narrow, selfish reasons. She began by acknowledging that a “visiting anthropologist . . . from Mars” come to assess the ratio of women to men in executive positions on Earth would, indeed, find an imbalance. But the responsibility for this disparity, Jean insisted, fell pretty squarely on women’s shoulders. An entire class of women “who want to stay in a low-pressure job”—who see a job as no more than a stepping-stone until a marriage proposal or a baby comes along—skew all the statistics, she explained. Were our hypothetical anthropologist to bracket this mass of what she dubbed “mark-time women,” he “might find women doing better.”19
But one decade later, Jean’s thinking on women’s rights in the workplace had undergone a complete reversal. Her archive contains drafts of an article dated November 1965 lauding the inclusion of women in the new civil rights bill. A slightly amended version of this draft, “You Can Help Change the Climate for Women,” was published in the February 1966 issue of Radcliffe College’s alumnae bulletin. “The sudden and surprising inclusion of sex in Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act gives organized (and even disorganized) women an opportunity and an obligation to break down walls that have kept women second-class citizens,” Jean opened her editorial. The obligation was real and pressing: “men have already appeared before the House Labor Committee suggesting the repeal” of the sex provision, making it imperative that women “act now if they are to preserve the long-overdue legal rights and privileges that are now within their grasp.”20
“What can one woman do?” Jean queried—before listing ways women could make their voices heard. First up: “Write a letter of protest to every newspaper in your home town and your business town,” objecting “strenuously but politely to the illegal method of classification by sex.” Newspaper job listings had found a “tidy way to evade the law,” continuing to advertise positions by gender with the disclaimer that such presorting offered greater “convenience” to job seekers. “Qualified female job-seekers should apply for positions listed “Help Wanted: Men” anyway, Jean counseled; “if you find any evidence that you are not being considered for the job because of your sex,” report it to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Ditto for women who were already employed: they must make an honest assessment of all the ways their professions treat women differently from men—from separate seniority rules, to men-only executive dining rooms, to exclusion of women from management training tracks—and protest. All of these things counted as discrimination, Jean schooled her readers, “cause for complaint and, if necessary, for legal procedure.”21
By 1965, Jean had pivoted from warning women that workplace troubles were mostly of their own making to educating them on how to recognize discrimination and to call it out—with a lawsuit, if necessary. What had changed? The Radcliffe Quarterly article and its drafts give us a clue. After graduating from Westover in 1956, Jean’s daughter Anne had matriculated at Radcliffe College. She married midway through college, in 1958, and began a family. Not content to be a stay-at-home mother, however, by 1966 Anne was enrolled as a PhD candidate in Harvard’s Department of Linguistics. Jean’s archive includes a report Anne compiled in response to a sociological study that attempted to tabulate “what needs doing in a household,” as well as “who is presently doing these tasks and in how much time and at what cost to the homemaker.” The authors of the study contended that, in a culture where women were increasingly asked to “perform two roles,” “society must find ways to reduce the cost to the homemaker and to society.” Anne heartily endorsed the report’s mission: “As a full-time graduate student with two young children,” she opened her remarks, “I couldn’t agree more.”22 In contrast to Jean, who had been able to rely on her aunt to take over the major tasks of childcare while she worked, Anne had no such help in managing her double duty.
Jean closed her Radcliffe Quarterly article by recounting a recent conversation with “a Radcliffe mother.” “‘I realized that I had been living with the fact of second-class citizenship all my life,’” the mother admitted. “‘I had been rather proud that I was not one of those women who get up on a soapbox and fight for the whole female sex. I had been rather pleased that I could hold my own in man’s world.’” And then, all of a sudden, she realized this wasn’t good enough for her daughter and that she was “ready to fight for more . . . for her.”23 Earlier drafts of the article, however, record slight variations. In one, the mother remarked of her daughter, “She has a good brain, a sound education, a real contribution to make to her life and her times”—why then, the mother concluded with obvious frustration, should she have to live out her life battling the “insidious, invisible” curse of “faint praise” for all she does? In another, Jean crossed out “I want something more than that for my daughter” and scribbled in “something more than second class performance from my daughter.” In these handwritten edits, it becomes clear that the “Radcliffe mother” is none other than Jean herself—and the conversation took place not with a friend, but with her own conscience.
At the same time as her ideas about women’s workplace rights were shifting, Jean was also revising her approach to questions of poverty and wealth distribution. In his 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “an unconditional war on poverty in America,” pledging to raise up “that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs.” Johnson’s Food Stamp Act of 1964 was quickly followed by the Social Security Act of 1965, which created Medicare and Medicaid for the benefit of the elderly and the poor. In addition, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 created job-training programs and established the Office of Economic Opportunity, to implement the antipoverty programs. When Johnson addressed the First Annual Conference on Women in the War on Poverty in May 1967, he recognized the crucial role women activists had always played in the nation’s great reform movements. “Long before there was an official, Federal ‘war on poverty,’ . . . women’s groups were fighting poverty in the neighborhoods and legislative halls,” he opened. And continuing on: “Many of the early victories in the struggle against poverty were won because the women cared enough to work, to plan, and to make their influence felt,” citing the battle for compulsory education and the battle against child labor as two wars that “women carried on and that women won.” Now, he urged them, it was time again for “women’s work”: “to teach, to heal, to awaken the conscience of this great Nation” by again taking up the pro-statist, maternalist legacy of her reform-minded forebearers.24
Jean’s work with the National Council of Women brought her directly into contact with Johnson’s War on Poverty. At first glance, Jean’s prosperity gospel upbringing and free-market faith make her an unlikely candidate to endorse Johnson’s program. Yet looking closely at her early religious training, the possibility of such a shift was always present. From earliest childhood Jean had been taught to understand, with Matthew, that the poor we have always with us (Matthew 26:11)—and that this imposed certain duties upon her. From her account books, we know that Jean was committed to tithing, contributing a hefty portion of her monthly salary to her church and an ever-evolving slate of charitable causes. In a speech she once delivered to the women of her local Christ Church congregation, Jean reminisced how as a child each week in Sunday School she had been given a “Golden Text” to learn by heart. “They have stuck with me” she avowed, allowing she was struck by “how many of the Golden Texts have to do with this subject of poverty and responsibility.” And she went on to quote them: “Be ye kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another,” ran one; “Feed my lambs,” another. And the most sacred of all: “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you.” “With only slight differences of wording,” Jean informed her church ladies, “the Golden Rule appears in every single one of the world’s great religions.”25 This was one of Jean’s favorite New Testament passages, and one whose universality she was committed to demonstrating. In her “Personal: Inspiration” folder is filed a typewritten sheet labeled “The Golden Rule in Ten of the World’s Great Religions,” recording variations on the theme as it reappeared across cultures, from Buddhism to Islam to Sikhism.26
What changed in retirement, then, were not Jean’s core values but her understanding of what it took to put them into practice. Private charity, no matter how well-meaning or extensive, was not enough to change systemic inequalities. A turning point in Jean’s evolution on thinking about poverty, “minorities,” and economics came at the Second Annual Conference of Women in the War on Poverty in Washington, D.C., in May 1968. This conference coincided with Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s March. The overlap may have been unintentional, but it did not go unnoticed by the organizers of either event. The recent assassination of King shed an even starker light on the inextricability of systemic racism and poverty in the United States. Thousands of poor people converged on the Southwest Mall and built a makeshift tent encampment, christened Resurrection City, just a block and a half from the Washington-Hilton where the well-heeled Women in the War on Poverty delegates congregated. The contrast was sobering.
At the conference, Reverend Maurice Dawkins hailed the Poor People’s March as yet another step in the quest for justice that had begun with the civil rights marches earlier in the decade, when “the visible walls of segregation, like the walls of Jericho, came tumbling down.” But “instead of crossing over into the Promised Land,” Dawkins cautioned, “we found that we were still in the wilderness. Poverty was revealed as the enemy we had not overcome.” Like other speakers, Dawkins drew on the twin history of reform as “women’s work” and as God’s work to inspire the congregants in the face of modern poverty.27
Upon returning home, Jean wrote up minutes from the conference for the NCW bulletin as well as a shorter version as a column addressing “What One Woman Can Do about POVERTY.” The missive opened with a reading list: Michael Harrington’s classic 1962 study of American poverty, The Other America; the recently released Kerner Report, a government-commissioned study of urban race riots from 1963 to 1967. After listing ways women could get involved in fighting poverty, Jean appended this dictum: “You can resolve not to criticize welfare mothers . . . or the Poor People’s March until you have gone to Washington or visited one of the churches on the line of march, and understand something of the simplicity, of the sincerity, of the need that prompts individual marchers.”28
A speech that Jean delivered to a chapter of Church Women United in Teaneck during this crucial period gives the measure of her new commitment to educating the public on the “problem” of poverty. The challenge in this age of affluence, she suggested to her solidly middle-class audience, was how to share their prosperity with those whom prosperity had bypassed. What causes poverty, she queried? There are a number of “easy answers,” she suggested.29 “It’s all Communist,” is one: “If there are riots against intolerable, insoluble, complicated problems, it’s all communist,” she ventriloquized. Or, “people could get work if they wanted it.” “That’s another easy answer—easier than thinking,” she lectured.
She then rolled out statistics that, if anyone took the time to look at them, would dispel such lazy shortcuts. “Easier to look at the rolls of 7 million people on welfare as 7 million people wasting the good taxpayer’s money than to break down the list . . . to show how many of those people are small children, how many are mothers who must stay with their children, how many are men and women 65 and older,” Jean enlightened them. Of the 7 million, only 58,000 were even eligible to work. “Think about the percentage of 58,000 to 7 million—and you will understand a little better what the welfare rolls are composed of.” And here Jean slipped into her jeremiad voice, the one she had used, just a decade earlier, to whip up advertisers’ sense of their sacred duty to spur consumption: “Stop to think—judge not that ye be not judged—before you use that easy answer.”30
In this period Jean wrote a number of texts explaining to a lay audience how welfare works and exposing the falsity of the most common welfare myths. To the well-publicized images of welfare mothers in “Cadillacs and mink coats,” Jean responded evenly that such cases of fraud accounted for “one half of one percent of all welfare recipients.” To the specter of African American women as welfare-incentivized “brood mares,” drummed into the national consciousness in 1965 by Louisiana Senator Russell Long, Jean cited statistics proving that multiple pregnancies were tightly correlated with poverty—not a feint for government handouts. And finally, Jean enlightened her audience on the semantics of “relief” and “subsidies”: “Some of the wealthiest industries receive subsidies in the form of tax abatement,” she countered. “The oil industry, for example, receives a tax abatement of 27% that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year.” And yet the public recoils at the notion of “relief” for the poor.31
One cannot get much farther away, ideologically, from Robert Wade’s Prosperity Gospel than a little tome Jean recommended at the end of her Church Women United address: Henry Clark’s “troubling, exciting, stimulating book,” The Christian Case against Poverty.32 Clark outlines the history of thinking about poverty within the Christian tradition and explains how one prevalent contemporary American attitude—that poverty is an individual and private ill, to be dealt with by individuals rather than the public collectively—has its origins in a historical and economic reality that is far in the past. Robert Wade’s kind of philosophical disquisition on the Christian case for private prosperity, Clark argues, no longer apply. “This is not the kind of temporary poverty that a little more prosperity in the national economy or a little more diligence on the part of the poor will erase: it is structural and permanent, more likely to increase than decrease in the years ahead.” These poor are not temporarily but permanently out, and “only extraordinary measures can reclaim them from the desolate shores of the other America.”33
In working for economic justice, Jean also came face-to-face with the brutality of American racial apartheid. The NCW worked in partnership with the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), and Jean composed a column for the NCW newsletter—part of a series she titled “What One Woman Can Do!”—that explicitly addressed how whites could join the fight for civil rights, making their opinion heard in the marketplace, in the workplace, and in their local communities. Write to the heads of companies in which you hold stock for a commitment to increasing the hires of African Americans, Jean urged. Speak to the head of your department at work to “express the hope that your company will open its doors wide to Negro employees.” Volunteer to do work for your city’s Fair Housing Committee. Stock your local library with a “list of reading material on Civil Rights.”34
In the same newsletter, Jean also addressed the question of racial minority representation in the mass media—or, rather, its conspicuous lack. This was an issue Jean had tried and failed to tackle once before. In 1960, BBDO piloted a new project encouraging its clients to include “extra dimension” service messages in their advertising—associating their products with anything from “get out the vote” blurbs to plugs for nature conservation. Asked her thoughts on the idea, Jean recounted how she and her team on the Campbell’s Soup account had once designed an ad campaign showcasing racial integration. The proposed posters pictured “children of all races, each eating soup,” with the caption “All America’s Children Love Soup for Lunch.” The result? “Killed by the boys downstairs,” Jean noted dryly. “I doubt if it ever got to management.”35 Given the firm’s renewed interest in “service advertising,” however, Jean suggested ways they might try again: “Could we be the first agency to get a client to drop a man or a woman of another race quietly into every group picture?” she queried. “It is one thing to run ads in Ebony—it is another and more courageous thing to run ads of beautiful Negro girls and handsome men as a matter of course in Life and the Post.” She goes on to note that BBDO might not be in any position to preach to their clients about the value of diversity, however. “Wouldn’t we have to begin this one at home?” she countered. “I for one think one real proof of dedication to awareness would be to make an earnest attempt to get half a dozen bright Howard girls into our secretarial ranks, . . . make an earnest effort to broaden our own racial patterns.”36
When, eight years later, Jean turned her mind again to the problem of racism in her NCW newsletter, she was sure to include media as among those American institutions that had to be taken to task. “A child is bound to grow up with a distorted, one-dimensional view of American life if he sees an all-white world depicted in movies, television, magazines, newspapers,” Jean warned. “Make yourself felt” by writing to television stations and their sponsors with approval when they include African American characters on their shows.
In a 1968 letter Jean addressed to her senator, Harrison Williams, she thanked him for his recent missive to constituents on the subject of “the Negro and higher Education.” Jean agreed with Williams that education was key to black social mobility. But she couldn’t help thinking that the call for education was putting the cart before the horse. She recalled attending a national nutrition conference during the Depression where all the experts clamored that the poor had to be educated on the nutritional value of milk, meat, fruits, and vegetables. And yet it wasn’t until World War II boosted the economy that those people actually went out and bought, in any significant quantities, the nutrition-rich foods they had been taught to prize. “They didn’t need education, it turned out—they needed money,” Jean observed. A negative income tax, she went on to suggest, “designed to put money in the pockets of the poor,” was the only realistic way to expect increased rates of black attendance in higher education.37
Jean had been appalled by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., referring to it as “the recent deep sorrow” in a June 17, 1968, letter to a fellow woman activist. In the letter, Jean floated the idea of creating a “simple white booklet” honoring fallen “Civil Rights Martyrs.” “Inside,” she elaborated, “on the left-hand page would be a picture of one man—name, date of birth, date and place of death; on the right-hand page would be a brief biography.” The heart of the book, Jean explained, would be found in a bolded paragraph at the bottom of each page “telling exactly what has been done about his death (Name of killer; tried by an all-white jury; date. No conviction).” “I think this is a deeply needed book,” Jean mused. “We know the names. We can say them over like a litany. But then we forget. . . . It seems to me that the course of history might be altered if we could get wide circulation for a simple booklet making it very clear that the cause of justice, in most cases, has not been served.”38
In a letter one month later to the same friend, Jean recounted how disturbed she had been at the Women in the War on Poverty meeting upon seeing a delegate from Kentucky muttering, “‘I would not have come if I had thought they were going to talk about that Martin Luther King.’” In what appears a prescient glimpse into the “Southern strategy” that Richard Nixon would exploit to such success in the presidential election that fall, Jean mused: “The thing that really worries me . . . is the new ‘skillful silence,’” she remarked. “I felt it first in Washington . . . —important people, intelligent people, people at the heads of major groups, arch-conservatives many of them, who have learned not to talk, but to sit quietly and listen, and still go away unconvinced. It is this group—the new underground of the right—that I have a feeling will show up at the polls.”39
Jean’s innocuous profile as a white, middle-class defender of homemakers and domesticity gave her credibility among those “Main Street” housewives who might have been on the fence politically, caught between the two competing political styles available to women during this turbulent period. In much the same way as her intuitive grasp on gender norms during the 1950s allowed her to pivot between male and female points of view in her ad copy, so now Jean’s ideological fluidity on questions of social justice and feminism afforded her buy-in with a demographic that more overtly liberal organizers might not have been able to reach. In a 1964 letter addressed to Corienne Robinson Morrow, an early civil rights activist and a key voice in pushing forward legislation for equal housing, Jean proposed that the NAACP or CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) sponsor an informal “Walk a Mile for Freedom” campaign as a less high-stakes way, short of joining a sit-in or Freedom Ride, for concerned citizens to show their support for civil rights. The event could be organized over several weeks in the summer in cities across the country, Jean brainstormed, with a traveling “Freedom Scroll” to be signed by each participant once he or she had completed the mile. “It seems to me that a lot of people who would be distressed by the idea of jamming traffic or chaining themselves to posts would feel impelled to pick up a sign and walk a mile,” Jean reasoned. “And that they would feel uncomfortable about the quiet, relentless march of good people going on day after day through the summer.”40 Jean knew from long experience that the civil rights protesters’ direct, albeit nonviolent, defiance of the law would scare off women trained to perform a rigorously “quiet,” private, and unobtrusive femininity. In this letter, she proposed a recruiting tactic that might work on more middle-of-the-road civil rights converts. “Dream? Naïve? Or possible?” She left it up to her civil rights colleagues to decide.
Similarly, her deep understanding of the conservative mindset led her to caution fellow activists to tread lightly in making political appeals. Her proposed column entitled “What One Woman Can Do!” for the NCW’s newsletter would mount a stealth attack on “the new underground of the right,” as Jean termed it. By first offering chatty, hands-on ways for the reader to get involved in the fight for fair housing, for instance, or opposition to South African apartheid, the column could then expand to “gradually include more and more material about the far right without ever starting out with a ‘rightist’ label that immediately alarms some of our conservative friends,” Jean suggested. This was just one of many “steps we might take against the danger on the right,” she concluded.41
Jean ended her missive by referencing a book recently published by the Anti-Defamation League, The Danger on the Right, that she insisted was required reading for all concerned Americans. The book cataloged the growing power of what its authors called “the Radical American Right,” spearheaded by the John Birch Society, as well as the “Extreme Conservatives” who provided useful cover for their more fringe fellow travelers. The cheerful economic liberalism and free-market faith that Jean had championed during her career appeared now to have mutated into something darker. The authors of The Danger on the Right closed their study by chiding “true conservatives” such as William F. Buckley, who continued to “blink at the Radical’s game out of either softness or blindness.”42 Nothing less than the future of the republic depended on cutting right-wing extremists off at the root.
Jean agreed. In brainstorming how the new “underground of the right” might be brought around, she sensed that more education was needed at the grassroots level. But, at times, she found it difficult to remain optimistic. “It is hard to know where to begin,” she confessed to a friend. “It is such a peaceful-looking country, in the country.”43 Jean’s genial faith in an America of “good folk” and the Golden Rule had been shaken. Not all, she discovered, was as it seemed in the dark fields of the republic.