When Everything Changed (10 page)

“What do you want?” Kennedy asked when he won the election.

“The Women’s Bureau,” she replied. It was an uninspired choice, but Peterson’s husband was ill with cancer and she wanted a job in which she knew she would feel comfortable. The Department of Labor—Women’s Bureau was the traditional spot where presidents stashed a female appointee deserving of a policy-making position. It was supposed to fight for better working conditions for women, but it also frequently and defensively acknowledged that no job should take second place to domestic duties. (“
It is not the policy
of the Women’s Bureau to encourage married women and mothers of young children to seek employment outside the home,” said a 1964 publication.) The highest salary anyone in the bureau could be paid was $2,000 a year, since Congress had decided that, in the words of one lawmaker, “no woman on earth is worth more than that.”

But Peterson had made her choice, and she was reminded quickly of where it left her in the political hierarchy. When the incoming Kennedy administration organized a lunch for all its new labor officials and the Eisenhower appointees they were to replace, the secretary of labor, Arthur Goldberg, asked Peterson to take the outgoing Women’s Bureau head to lunch so the men could get together on their own. “Like a fool, I did it,” she said.

“M
EN HAVE TO BE REMINDED THAT WOMEN EXIST
.”

Republican women tended to favor the Equal Rights Amendment, but it raised hackles among many Democrats because it would eliminate the protective laws they had struggled to pass during the last generation. Esther Peterson had spent much of her life working with desperate women who were crippled by the physical demands of their jobs, sexually harassed by their supervisors, and deprived of enough time to be proper mothers to their undernourished children.
She resented the “elite
, privileged old ladies” who cared about only their own emancipation. “Are women better off being singled out for protection, or are they better served by erasing all legal distinctions between women and men? As the lettuce pickers and cafeteria workers know, it depends on your status,” she said.

But even some Democrats felt the protective laws did more harm than good, giving employers an excuse to discriminate against women and deprive them of the chance for promotion and overtime.
During the 1960 presidential campaign
, a prominent Democratic clubwoman wrote to Kennedy, asking him to support the ERA. Kennedy had replied carefully and vaguely—in a note that was probably written by Peterson. The disappointed petitioner then took the extraordinary step of having a friend on the campaign committee type a different letter on Kennedy’s stationery, announcing his support for the amendment and signing it with the automatic pen that the campaign used to duplicate the candidate’s signature. Rather than raise a controversy, Kennedy tried to ignore it, but the letter got some attention.

While the ERA was hardly a major problem hanging over the new administration, it worried Peterson. She decided to bury the issue by proposing a special Presidential Commission on the Status of Women that could be stacked with ERA opponents and then eventually issue a report on how to improve the lives of American women without the help of a constitutional amendment. Every politician seeking to avoid a sticky issue loves a study, and for the president, the commission was a win-win that got even better when Eleanor Roosevelt agreed to serve as the symbolic head.

Roosevelt had always been a one-person network for smart, talented women who had been cut out of all the male power circles in the New Deal and beyond. She had introduced them to one another, put in calls when they needed political pull, and lobbied for them when they were seeking jobs and promotions. (“
When I wanted help
on some definite point, Mrs. Roosevelt gave me the opportunity to sit by the president at dinner and the matter was settled before we finished our soup,” said one of her protégés.)
Kennedy’s relationship with the great
former first lady had always been chilly, and when the new administration failed to include any high-ranking female appointees, she told reporters, “Men have to be reminded that women exist.”

“S
HE WOULD TRAIN THE MEN
.”

The Commission on the Status of Women was made up of people you would expect to find on a panel that was meant to be modestly useful but not controversial. The male members were mainly educators and cabinet officials whose interest in the subject was in some cases nonexistent. (
Hyman Bookbinder, who served
on the commission as the representative of the secretary of commerce, cautioned that the commission “should not pretend that women as a group are equal to men as a group in qualifying for participation in the world of work and public affairs.”) Among the women, Kennedy had included the presidents of the National Council of Negro Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Council of Catholic Women, along with an editor from
Ladies’ Home Journal.
The commission would eventually issue a very responsible report that would be quickly forgotten in the anguish over the president’s assassination a few days after its release.

Nevertheless, it is important to our story. The commission—and the state commissions on the status of women it spawned—brought together smart, achieving women who might otherwise have never met. And it required them to talk about women’s rights, a subject that seldom came up in their normal work in government or academia. It created a special chemistry, a kind of synergy that made things happen.

Most of the people on the commission and its staff tended to treat discrimination as a simple fact of life. (Mary Eastwood, the brilliant Justice Department attorney, said she had thought nothing of it when she was interviewed for one of her first government jobs and told that she would of course “have to be a lot more qualified for a job than a man in order to get it.”) While many of them had wanted different careers than the ones they got, the women were almost universally successful by 1960 standards. They were polite, well-behaved, and committed to working within the system.
But they were about to enter into what Pauli
Murray, a commission lawyer, called “the first high-level consciousness group.” By the time they were through, many would realize that inwardly, they had been seething all along.

Marguerite Rawalt, a government tax
attorney, was appointed to the commission as a token ERA supporter. She was a tall, middle-aged Texan who never lost her Southern charm, universally described as “a lady” or “a very, very nice woman.” Rawalt had always quietly dreamed of one day becoming a judge. After law school, she had taken a job with the Internal Revenue Service that provided her with security and enough income to help support her family back home during the Depression. Her bosses must have been equally pleased by her impressive work habits and her hesitation about ever asking for a promotion. When she did ask, late in her career, her supervisor expressed amazement that she had never been elevated before—and raised her one grade. When Lyndon Johnson, an old Texas associate, became vice president, Rawalt finally dared to lobby for a judgeship, but she was told she was too old. “She was a lovely woman,” said Mary Eastwood, who worked for Rawalt’s group on the commission. “She had been passed over for the head of her section year after year. She would train the men.”

Disappointed in her work life, Rawalt directed her considerable energies to professional women’s clubs. (She was once simultaneously elected president and vice president of the National Association of Women Lawyers due to an overenergetic write-in campaign.) She used her various posts whenever possible to push for women’s issues, but it was a crusade that often concerned her fellow club members less than it did her. When she was elected head of the DC chapter of the Federation of Business and Professional Women, a Washington columnist enthused that Rawalt, “magnetic and winning instant attention and admiration for her legal acumen, knows the art of correct dressing as well.”

She also knew how to write letters—hundreds and hundreds of letters. It’s hard to imagine how important a talent that was in the era before e-mail. In the early 1960s, long-distance telephone calls were pricey, generally reserved for emergencies or at least special occasions. People did not have access to even the most basic office copying equipment. The only method of duplicating a letter or an announcement, short of shipping it off to the printer, was a mimeograph machine, which could reproduce text that was painfully—and often messily—typed on waxed sheets of paper.

Whenever anything happened in the inchoate struggle for women’s rights, Rawalt reached for her stamps. If a critical congressman needed to be pressured, she urged her fellow letter writers to start sending in petitions. If some minor triumph occurred—a successful meeting or a new volunteer to the cause—she sat down at her desk and dashed out notes to anyone she felt might be interested. Correspondence, for her, was a matter of bulk. Mary Eastwood remembered being in awe of Rawalt’s extraordinary efficiency at sealing envelopes. “She’d lay them all out with the sticky part showing and get a damp sponge and run it down them.” At a time when women who did succeed made every effort to avoid anything that resembled secretarial work, Rawalt was the one who was never afraid to get her hands inky.

One of Rawalt’s chief allies
on the commission staff was Pauli Murray, the extraordinary African-American lawyer who had been hired from Yale, where she was pursuing a PhD. Murray, like some other talented black Americans forced to prove themselves over and over, was an almost compulsive academic overachiever. She had worked her way through Hunter College in New York despite financial troubles that left her suffering from malnutrition. She graduated in 1933, one of four blacks in a class of 247. After an unsuccessful attempt to integrate the University of North Carolina graduate school, she went to law school at Howard University, the only woman in her class. Scrimping as always, she lived in an unused powder room in a girls’ dormitory.

While she was at the all-black Howard (which discriminated against her because of her sex nearly as much as other schools did because of her race), Murray wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, criticizing his failure to do more for African-Americans. The president failed to respond. But Eleanor Roosevelt wrote back, defending her husband and calling Murray’s letter “thoughtless.” When Murray stood up for her position, the first lady invited her to come to her New York apartment “to talk these things over.” Their meetings continued, and when Murray graduated from law school, a huge bouquet of flowers appeared at the commencement exercises. The black newspaper the
Pittsburgh Courier
proudly reported that the flowers were sent to the “brilliant, active, strong-willed Pauli Murray” from “Mrs. Roosevelt, wife of the president of the United States.”

Murray went to New York, struggling to find a job and living on such cheap food that she got a tapeworm. Eventually she landed a spot with a major law firm, but because she was the only woman, the only minority, and twenty years older than her peers, she was never comfortable. She accepted a post teaching in Ghana and then a fellowship at Yale, where she was doing graduate study in law. Later in life, after receiving her Yale doctorate and teaching at Brandeis University, she would attend divinity school and end her career as an Episcopalian minister. “Pauli was like a pixie—petite and energetic, even when she was in her 60s,” said Mary Eastwood, who worked with her on the commission staff. “She was afraid of nothing in terms of action. She even submitted her résumé when there was a vacancy on the Supreme Court—applied for the job!”

One constant in her life had been Eleanor Roosevelt, who continued to exchange letters with Murray and invite her for afternoon teas and weekend visits. But Mrs. Roosevelt died in 1962, before the Commission on the Status of Women could finish its work. “It became my memorial to her last public service,” Murray said.

“I
AM ALWAYS STRONG FOR WOMEN, YOU KNOW
.”

In 1964 Representative Howard Smith of Virginia appeared on
Meet the Press
to answer questions about the Civil Rights Act, which was moving through Congress. Its most controversial section was Title VII, prohibiting racial discrimination in employment. For once, there was a woman among the reporters doing the questioning. May Craig of Gannett News Service asked Smith if he would add women to the minority groups to be protected from discrimination in Title VII.

“
Well, maybe I would
. I am always strong for women, you know,” he said.

Smith, 80, was
the chairman of the Rules Committee, a post that gave him enormous power to stop or at least delay any legislation of which he disapproved. And there was a lot Smith disapproved of—including aid to education, welfare, and minimum-wage laws. He kept Alaskan statehood bottled up in his committee for nearly a year, and he once delayed civil rights legislation by simply disappearing for several days and making it impossible for his committee to schedule a time for the measure to be considered in the House. When he returned, he claimed he had been called home to his dairy farm when a barn burned down. “I always knew Howard Smith would do anything to block a civil rights bill, but I never supposed he would resort to arson,” said Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House.

Of all the forces of progress Smith wanted to stop, civil rights was at the top of the list. “
Congressman Smith would
joyfully disembowel the civil rights bill if he could. Lacking the votes to do so, he will obstruct it as long as the situation allows,” said a writer in the
New York Times Magazine.

When the Civil Rights Act came up for a vote in the House, Smith got up and offered an amendment that would add women to the groups who would be protected from job discrimination.
In case anyone might
have imagined he was actually concerned about a serious social issue (Smith was, after all, a friend of Alice Paul’s), he began by jocularly reading a letter from a woman complaining about the lack of marriageable men: “Just why the Creator would set up such an imbalance of spinsters, shutting off the ‘right’ of every female to have a husband of her own is, of course, known only to nature. But I am sure you will agree this is a grave injustice to womankind and something Congress and President Johnson should take immediate steps to correct, especially in an election year.”