Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution · CHAPTER 2 ·
Title VII and the founding of NOW
Chapter 2 of Protest and Change: Second-Wave Feminism and Tunisia, 1945–2015: “Organising for Equality”
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 map above is the world of Women’s rights, May 1970 — Equal pay required by law or ratified treaty.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1970 · Europe in 1970.
Part of IB History: Second-wave feminism and Tunisia →
SHORT EXPLANATION
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to end racial discrimination, but its employment section, Title VII, also prohibited discrimination by “sex”. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), responsible for enforcement, at first treated that provision as a joke. Women had a legal promise; they needed a way to make it count.
In 1966 Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, the lawyer Pauli Murray and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). Like a pressure group asking a regulator to enforce rules today, NOW pressed the EEOC to act. Its “liberal feminism” sought equality through changes in law and access to institutions.
Younger women brought experience from civil-rights and anti-war organizing. Their “radical feminism” located male power in family, sexuality and culture as well as law; the 1968 Miss America protest made that argument visible. Women workers used industrial pressure. At Ford’s Dagenham factory in Britain, 187 sewing machinists struck in 1968 and helped win the Equal Pay Act of 1970.
The map records a difference in timing. In May 1970 every US state is blue under federal equal-pay law; Britain is grey-tan because its Act had passed but would take effect only in 1975. Liberal, radical and working-class feminists pursued different forms of change, and their disagreements would shape the movement.
The full story
Title VII’s prohibition of sex discrimination began with a contested political maneuver. On 8 February 1964 Howard Smith, a Virginia congressman opposed to the civil-rights bill, proposed adding “sex” to its forbidden grounds of employment discrimination. Smith had long supported the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), a proposed constitutional guarantee of equal rights regardless of sex, and historians still debate his motives. Martha Griffiths and other congresswomen seized the opportunity, and the amendment passed.
Women soon tried to use the new law. About a third of the complaints the EEOC received in its first year concerned sex discrimination. Yet a senior official called the provision a “fluke”, and newspapers continued to carry sex-segregated job advertisements. The statute gave women grounds to complain; enforcement would determine what those grounds were worth.
At a national conference of state commissions on the status of women on 30 June 1966, attendees found they could not even urge the EEOC to act. These commissions were government advisory bodies, rather like task forces today. The women founded NOW as a national lobby, able to press claims through litigation and lobbying. Lorena Weeks, a Georgia telephone clerk, offered one such claim: a state rule barring women from lifting more than 30 pounds had denied her a better-paid job. In 1969 a federal appeals court held that Title VII overrode such “protective” laws.
Another route emerged from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student civil-rights group registering Black voters in the South. In 1964–65 younger women wrote that they typed and cooked while men made decisions. They had learned how to organize for freedom and had also encountered inequality within that struggle. The arrows follow their experience north from Mississippi to New York and Chicago, where women formed liberation groups without leaders.
Radical feminists wanted to expose male power in family, sexuality and culture, and some believed publicity could change minds faster than lawsuits. At Atlantic City on 7 September 1968, a few hundred women picketed the Miss America pageant, put bras and girdles in a “Freedom Trash Can” and crowned a sheep. They were arguing that the contest judged women like livestock. Nothing was burned, but the press invented the “bra-burner”: an image that brought the protest attention while making it easy to mock.
At Ford’s Dagenham plant in Britain, 187 women who sewed car-seat covers could exert pressure at the point of production. A regrading had placed their skilled work in a less-skilled category; their three-week strike stopped car production. It helped persuade Employment Secretary Barbara Castle to steer the Equal Pay Act through Parliament in May 1970. The lawsuit, the public protest and the strike worked in different settings, each giving women a means to challenge an inequality the others could not reach in the same way.
FULL EXPLANATION
Why “sex” entered Title VII
The story of Title VII’s sex clause is often told as a joke that backfired. There is evidence for that reading: Howard Smith was a segregationist who wanted to defeat the bill, and the House laughed during debate. But Smith had also sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment since the 1940s, urged on by the National Woman’s Party, whose leader Alice Paul lobbied for the change. Smith and his allies argued that without “sex” a white woman would have less protection under the new law than a Black woman. Historians describe that motive as racist as well as feminist. Martha Griffiths of Michigan had planned to propose the amendment herself and made the same argument on the House floor. The subsequent history reaches beyond the sponsors’ intentions. Nancy MacLean and others emphasize that working women, many of them Black, used Title VII far more than middle-class professionals did. Their thousands of complaints about seniority lists, pay and job ladders helped determine what the law would mean in practice.
Three feminisms: liberal, radical and labour
For many years historians described 1960s feminism as two branches: NOW’s older liberal wing and younger radicals in small collectives. Alice Echols’s Daring to Be Bad (1989) remains a classic account of radical ideas and quarrels. Sara Evans traced those radicals to civil-rights organizing, where women learned both practical skills and a language of oppression and liberation, then applied them to relations with men in the movement. Dorothy Sue Cobble asks us to add a third tradition, “labour feminism”. Trade-union women had sought equal pay, childcare and maternity leave since the 1940s. Many initially opposed the Equal Rights Amendment because they feared losing protective laws. The British case gives this tradition weight: union women led the Dagenham strike and its ensuing campaign before a women’s liberation group existed in Britain. The distinctions illuminate different questions. Liberals sought entry to institutions, radicals asked what should be dismantled, and labor feminists asked who would do the caring work if women were treated as men at work.
What Dagenham won, and what it did not
The Dagenham machinists’ demand was often described by the women themselves as recognition of their skill. They had been placed in grade B, below men doing comparable work, rather than skilled grade C. Barbara Castle’s settlement raised their pay from 85 to 92 percent of the men’s rate for the same grade, but left the grading unchanged. A second strike in 1984 finally won skilled status. The 1970 Equal Pay Act reached beyond the factory, although it gave employers five years to comply. Many rewrote job descriptions so that men and women no longer performed “the same or broadly similar” work. Even so, economists Zabalza and Tzannatos found that women’s hourly earnings rose from roughly two-thirds to about three-quarters of men’s between 1970 and 1977, one of the fastest narrowings on record. In 1983 Britain had to add an “equal value” rule after the European Court of Justice, the highest court of what is now the European Union, found the original Act short of European law. The strike helped begin a larger legal process, but its gains arrived slowly and remained contested.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A civil-rights law with a sex clause. Once Title VII prohibited sex discrimination, a job advertisement marked “male” or a lower pay scale could be presented as evidence that the law was not being enforced. The sex clause had entered the law almost accidentally, yet it supplied women with a specific legal tool and a demand around which to organize.
Experienced women with nowhere to take their anger. The state commissions had given hundreds of women experience in law, research and lobbying. At their third national conference in June 1966, they discovered the limits of those bodies: the commissions could pass no resolutions and had no power to press the EEOC. On the last day, women who knew how institutions worked founded NOW so they could act outside them.
The civil-rights and anti-war movements as schools. Registering voters in Mississippi and organizing against the Vietnam War taught young women to run meetings, write leaflets and confront authority. The same movements exposed them to sexism. SNCC women’s papers in 1964 and 1965 described exclusion from leadership. Women’s liberation drew on their skills, anger and language of oppression, liberation and solidarity. In Britain and France it likewise grew from student and anti-war protests in 1968.
Women workers who could stop production. The 187 Dagenham machinists made seat covers needed before cars could leave the factory. A strike by this small group could therefore stop one of Britain’s largest plants, giving the women bargaining power of a kind middle-class lobbyists lacked. Their success showed working women across Britain the possibilities of industrial action. Their union, the National Union of Vehicle Builders, backed them and helped turn a grading dispute into a national argument about women’s pay.
THE TURNING POINT
The founding of NOW, 30 June 1966. Books and commissions had supplied ideas and contacts. NOW, founded on 30 June 1966, added a permanent national organization with a program, membership and legal strategy. Within a few years it had chapters across the country, sued employers and petitioned the EEOC; from 1967 it also campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment and repeal of abortion laws. Its liberal reformism helped define the movement’s mainstream, against which later radical, Black and working-class feminists partly defined themselves.
What it changed
The EEOC is forced to act. NOW’s pressure and thousands of complaints helped push the EEOC to rule in 1968 that sex-segregated job advertisements were illegal. From 1969 courts began striking down “protective” laws that had excluded women from better-paid work. Legal rules shifted within five years, though the pay gap barely moved. A local NOW chapter’s complaint led to the Pittsburgh Press case, in which the Supreme Court upheld a ban on sex-segregated newspaper advertisements in 1973.
A movement split by method and goal. The movement’s branches disagreed about what equality required. Liberals sought access to institutions, radicals wanted to transform marriage, sexuality and culture, and labor feminists pressed for pay, childcare and protection. These differences produced both energy and bitter disputes. NOW fought internally over abortion and lesbian members, whom Friedan called a “lavender menace” in 1969. The argument over representation reflected a movement encompassing many different women.
Equal pay becomes law in Britain. Britain’s Equal Pay Act passed on 29 May 1970 but gave employers five years to remove separate rates for women. It came into force in December 1975 alongside the Sex Discrimination Act. That delay explains Britain’s grey-tan color on the 1970 map. The Dagenham women struck again in 1984 because their work still lacked a skilled grading.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Which did more to create change for American women in the 1960s: the law, or the movement that formed to enforce it?
Title VII came first. The politics of race, a congressman’s motives and lobbying by veteran feminists produced a federal ban on sex discrimination at work before a mass movement existed. It gave women a tool they could invoke. But the EEOC’s early treatment of the sex clause as a fluke shows why the tool needed users and advocates. NOW, thousands of complaints from working women and cases such as Weeks pressed for enforcement. The movement also changed expectations about women’s lives in ways a statute could not. Law and movement thus depended on each other: Title VII supplied a target and a means of action, while women’s efforts gave its promise practical meaning. A new right can become the starting point for another campaign.
An interesting fact
Long before the Dagenham strike, the European Economic Community’s founding treaty of 1957 had included an equal-pay principle. Article 119 required member states to ensure equal pay for equal work. France had insisted on the clause partly because French law already required equal pay and its industries feared cheaper female labor elsewhere would undercut them. The provision remained largely unenforced until Belgian air hostess Gabrielle Defrenne sued Sabena, which had forced her to retire at 40 while male stewards continued flying. In 1976 the European Court of Justice ruled that Article 119 gave individuals rights enforceable in national courts.
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