1968 - Mark Kurlansky [183]
For the first time, women won the right to serve on juries in the state of Mississippi. For the first time, two women were licensed as professional jockeys, although one of them, Kathy Kusner, then broke her leg and was out for the season. The North Vietnamese National Liberation Front taught the West a lesson by sending a woman, Nguyen Thi Binh, as their chief negotiator in the Paris peace talks. And First Lieutenant Jane A. Lombardi, a nurse, became the first woman ever to win a combat decoration.
But progress was slow and long overdue, which was why the feminist organization was called NOW. Already by 1960, 40 percent of American women over the age of sixteen were working. The idea of women as solely housewives was becoming more myth than reality. What was true was that most working women did not have good jobs and were not paid well for their work. In 1965, when the federal government made it illegal to discriminate in employment by race, religion, or national origin, despite rigorous lobbying gender was left out.
NOW made a priority of changing the practice of listing help wanted ads by gender in newspapers. It was now illegal for newspapers to separately list jobs for whites and jobs for “colored.” But it was still common practice to single out women for low-paying jobs by separating “Male Help Wanted” and “Female Help Wanted” listings. NOW fought hard, using such tactics as invading the hearings by the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission with huge signs bearing telegenic messages such as “A chicken in every pot, a whore in every home.” The leading New York City newspapers dropped separate listings in 1967. But many newspapers around the country continued the practice until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against it in a 1973 case against the Pittsburgh Press.
In 1968 NOW took on a variety of issues, including a key battle in New York over changing state law to legalize abortion. At the same time, they wanted Congress to produce an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing equal rights for women. Such an amendment, the ERA, had been proposed and rejected by every Congress since 1923.
The feminist movement, like all the great movements of 1968, was rooted in the civil rights movement. Laws that enforced separate female status, a principle repeatedly upheld in the courts, were referred to as “Jane Crow laws.” Many feminists referred to NOW as the women’s NAACP, leading others to insist it was more radical—the women’s CORE or SNCC. Betty Friedan referred to women who pandered to male sexism as Aunt Toms.
Demonstration for abortion rights, New York, 1968
(Photo by Elliott Landy/Magnum Photos)
“There are striking parallels,” insisted Florence Henderson, a New York lawyer best known at the time for her defense of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown. “In court you often get a more patronizing attitude to blacks and women than white men: ‘Your Honor, I’ve known this boy since he was a child, his mother worked for my family. . . .’ ‘Your Honor, she is just a woman, she has three small children. . . .’ And I think white male society often takes the same attitude toward both: ‘If we want to give power to you O.K. But don’t act as if you are entitled to it.’ That’s too manly, too . . . white.”
The second wave of feminism might have broken sooner except that in the late 1950s and early 1960s the most talented, courageous, and idealistic women had joined the civil rights movement. Later in the sixties, the New Left was focused on ending the war, while white women in the civil rights movement for a long time felt it unseemly to raise issues of women’s rights, in the face of the far more serious abuse of blacks. Women, after all, were not being lynched or shot.
Among those white women from church backgrounds who went south and risked their lives with SNCC were Mary King and Sandra Cason—later to marry and divorce Tom Hayden and become Casey Hayden. Some of the older female SNCC workers, notably Ella Baker, were tremendous influences on the younger women. Baker, an important inspiration for Mary King and others, had started with