Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · 1970
Did the law or the movement do more for 1960s US women?
The seminar question: “Which did more to create change for American women in the 1960s: the law, or the movement that formed to enforce it?”
In 1964 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act banned sex discrimination in employment, but the agency created to enforce it, the EEOC, at first treated the word “sex” as a joke. In 1966 Betty Friedan, Pauli Murray and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) to make the government keep its promise.
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The law opened the door before anyone was ready to walk through it, and the reason lies in how the word “sex” entered Title VII, the employment section of the new civil-rights law. On 8 February 1964 Howard Smith, a Virginia congressman who opposed the bill, proposed adding “sex” to the forbidden grounds for discrimination. His motives are still debated, because he opposed civil rights yet had long supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a proposed constitutional guarantee of equal rights regardless of sex. Martha Griffiths and other congresswomen seized the amendment and it passed. In its first year about a third of the complaints to the EEOC, the agency created to enforce the law, concerned sex discrimination, yet a senior official called the sex provision a “fluke” and sex-segregated job advertisements continued. A right without enforcement is only a promise, and the lesson pushed women to organise.
The short answer
- A civil-rights law with a sex clause. Title VII gave women a legal weapon that existed almost by accident, and a weapon creates a constituency of people who want it used. Once discrimination by sex was illegal on paper, every job advertisement marked “male” and every lower pay scale became evidence of an unenforced law. The distance between the statute and its enforcement gave women a precise, winnable demand, which is the kind of demand that builds organisations.
- Experienced women with nowhere to take their anger. The state commissions of the early 1960s had trained hundreds of women in law, research and lobbying. At their third national conference in June 1966 they learned that the commissions could pass no resolutions and had no power to press the EEOC. Frustrated insiders who know how institutions work are among the most effective founders of protest organisations, and NOW was founded by exactly such people on the last day of that conference.
- The civil-rights and anti-war movements as schools. Young women who had registered voters in Mississippi or organised against the Vietnam War learned to run meetings, write leaflets and confront authority. They also experienced sexism inside these movements: in 1964 and 1965 SNCC women wrote papers describing how they were kept from leadership. They took both the skills and the anger into women’s liberation, which explains its language of oppression, liberation and solidarity. The same pattern appeared in Britain and France, where women’s liberation grew out of the student and anti-war protests of 1968.
- Women workers who could stop production. At Dagenham 187 machinists sewed the seat covers without which no car could leave the factory, so a strike by a small group halted one of Britain’s largest plants. This gave them leverage that middle-class lobbyists lacked, and their success showed working women across Britain that equal pay could be won by industrial action. Bargaining power, more than numbers, decides whether a protest can force concessions. The machinists also had the backing of their union, the National Union of Vehicle Builders, which turned a grading dispute in one factory into a national argument about women’s pay.
THE TURNING POINT
The founding of NOW, 30 June 1966. The founding of NOW is the hinge because it gave second-wave feminism a permanent national organisation with a programme, a membership and a legal strategy, something no number of books or commissions could provide. Within a few years NOW had chapters across the country and was suing employers, petitioning the EEOC and, from 1967, campaigning for the Equal Rights Amendment and the repeal of abortion laws. Its founding also defined the movement’s mainstream as liberal and reformist, which is why later radical, Black and working-class feminists defined themselves in part against it. Movements become durable when they build institutions, and NOW was the institution.
What it changed
The EEOC is forced to act. Pressure from NOW and from thousands of complaints pushed the EEOC to rule in 1968 that sex-segregated job advertisements broke the law, and in 1969 courts began striking down “protective” laws that barred women from better-paid work. The legal ground of the workplace shifted within five years, although the pay gap barely moved. In 1973 the Supreme Court upheld a ban on sex-segregated newspaper advertisements in the Pittsburgh Press case, which began with a complaint by a local NOW chapter.
A movement split by method and goal. Liberal feminists wanted equality inside existing institutions; radicals wanted to transform marriage, sexuality and culture; labour feminists wanted pay, childcare and protection. These differences produced creative energy and bitter quarrels, including NOW’s internal fights over abortion and over lesbian members, whom Friedan called a “lavender menace” in 1969. The quarrels were also a sign of growth, because a movement that argues about whom it represents has become large enough to represent many different women.
Equal pay becomes law in Britain. The Equal Pay Act of 29 May 1970 gave employers five years to remove separate rates for women, and it came into force in December 1975 alongside the Sex Discrimination Act. On the map Britain is grey-tan because in 1970 the law had passed but did not yet apply. Women at Dagenham struck again in 1984, because their work was still not graded as skilled.
The full answer, argued
The law came first and gave women something they could not have won alone, a federal ban on sex discrimination at work, and it arrived through the politics of race, a congressman’s motives and the lobbying of a few veteran feminists, before any mass movement existed. Yet the evidence of the EEOC’s first years shows that a law without an organised constituency can sit almost unused: the agency treated the sex clause as a fluke until NOW, the complaints of thousands of working women and cases such as Weeks forced it to act. The movement also did things the law could not, such as changing what women expected of their own lives. The fairest judgement is that the law and the movement were mutually dependent: Title VII gave feminists a target and a tool, and feminists gave Title VII its meaning. The transferable insight is that legal change and protest usually work in a cycle, with each new right becoming the starting point for the next campaign, which is why movements so often grow stronger after their first victories.
An interesting fact
The equal-pay principle the Dagenham women fought for had been written into the founding treaty of the European Economic Community in 1957, whose Article 119 required member states to ensure equal pay for equal work. France had insisted on it, partly because its own law already demanded equal pay and its industries feared being undercut by cheaper female labour elsewhere. The clause sat largely unenforced until a Belgian air hostess, Gabrielle Defrenne, sued the airline Sabena, which had forced her to retire at 40 while male stewards flew on. In 1976 the European Court of Justice ruled that Article 119 gave individuals rights they could enforce in national courts.
This is the study layer of Title VII and the founding of NOW, chapter 2 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015; the full index of the atlas is here.
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