The Women's Movement

Last week we lost Betty Friedan, the mother of the modern women's movement. Betty Friedan is credited with the founding of the National Organization of Women (NOW) and other forward-thinking ideas for the protection of women's rights. It is sad that the younger women today have no idea what Betty and the women who followed her had to go through to ensure some of the rights we enjoy today. And I just don't understand that.

Today's young women take for granted all that we fought to gain in the 1960s. They have no idea what it was like before the likes of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinham. We may not have gotten the Equal Rights Amendment ratified, but we sure did get the issue of women's rights before the public. We started a dialog about job and wage parity that benefited working women by allowing them into workforces that previously only allowed men. Women were finally accepted into high paying blue-collar jobs like construction and plumbing. Opportunities were opened in higher paying white-collar jobs, too. More women were going to law school and medical school. They became attorneys and doctors, and, for the most part, had access to the power and money associated with those careers.

Back in the 50s and 60s, women were still being pushed toward clerical positions. Very few held managements positions, and discrimination in the job place was rampant. I, for one, found out what it was like to not be given a better paying job simply because I was a women. In the late 60s and early 70s, I worked for a stove manufacturing company (Roper) in its Repair Parts Division. After seven years with the company, I had worked my way up to a Clerk III and was earning a salary of about $123 a week. A job was posted in the main plant for a Junior Purchase Parts Analyst. The starting salary for the job was $185 a week. My seven years of experience in the Repair Parts Division gave me the qualifications for the job, so I submitted my application.

I had interviews with Personnel (HR, in less fancy days) and with the Plant Supervisor that I would be working under. Two weeks later, I got a call from the head of Personnel saying that the company had decided to freeze the position for the time being. I asked why they had waited until after posting the position to do that. Personnel told me that he was upset by what they were doing, and I asked him why. He told me that there had only been three people to apply for the position, me and two young guys right out of college who had no experience. Since neither of the college boys were qualified to do the job, rather than give such a high paying position to a woman (me), the company decided not to hire anyone for the position, until such time as a qualified male could be found. Their official policy was that a woman didn't need such a high salary. She should be married with a husband to support her.

Needless to say, I was furious. I went looking for another job right away and left that company within three months. About four years after I left, some other women filed a class action discrimination law suit against the company. No one thought to let me know about it, but the company ended up paying out close to $3 million to its women employees (including those who left due to discriminatory practices).

At the same company, a woman named Marci that I worked with in Repair Parts had been doing her job as Inventory Control Assistant for close to ten years. Her boss was a wonderful man who had had a couple of open heart surgeries. When Pete came back to work after his last surgery, the company brought one of the union guys up to work with him and Marci. Marci had to train Brian in the job. After about six months, we somehow found out that Brian, who Marcia trained and was doing exactly the same job as, was actually making almost double her salary. The company's rationale for this was that Marci was married and even though she was doing the same work, she didn't need as much money because she had a husband to support her. The truth was that Marci's husband was a farmer in bad health. Marci's salary was the primary financial support for her family. When the women of our department complained about the salary disparity, the company basically said that if we didn't like it, we could always quit.

We had to put up with this type of discrimination for many years. I was involved in one class action suit against Montgomery Wards. I had worked there for about 18 months in the Buying Office when I applied for the Junior Buyers Training program. My goal was to eventually become a buyer for the company. I was told that I didn't qualify because, despite the fact that I had over 70 hours of college credit, I didn't have my degree. A couple of weeks later, a Phillipino gentleman who had joined our department six months earlier was accepted into the program, despite the fact that he had no college credit at all. When I went to HR to question that decision, I was told that women were required to have degrees in order to participate because the company didn't want to spend all of that money training a woman who was likely to get pregnant and then leave. I offered to have my gynecologist provide a letter stating that I was sterile and not able to get pregnant, but the company still wouldn't let me into the program. I left the company a couple of months later.

I had worked for a couple of other places after that, and then I joined Paul Simon's Senate campaign in 1983. After his election, I accepted a position on his staff in Washington, and stayed there until early in 1986. I came back to Illinois and found a new job. I had only been back in the Chicago area for a few months when I received a letter from a law firm regarding a class action suit against Montgomery Wards. I called the attorney and told her my story. She told me that I qualified for a settlement and sent me the forms. I asked how they had found me, since I had moved to DC and back. She told me that their first attempt to contact me had resulted in a returned envelope and that someone in her office had taken one last attempt to find the folks whose letters had been returned. Since I had listed my phone number when I moved back to Chicago, they had been able to get my address. The result was that I got a $2400 settlement check a couple of months later. Montgomery Wards finally went out of business a few years ago. The class action settlement against them was a whopping $23 million dollars, and they never recovered from it. Serves them right!

Anyway, my point of this entry is that the working women of today have no idea about how hard it was to get salary parity for women. They simply enjoy the benefits of the work and activism of those of us who had to fight for our rights back in the 60s and 70s. Most of these younger women don't know who Betty Friedan was and how much they owe her. I think they should find out what the members of the Women's Movement went through to protect their rights. Youngsters (anyone under the age of 40), you need to learn about the women who've gone before you, and then you need to pick up the standard and continue forward.