Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Not surprisingly, women became increasingly reluctant to fight discrimination collectively the way they had in the ’70s. At a meeting in 1986 of the Journalists’ Trade Group of the National Writers Union, a journalist reviewed the erosion of women’s progress in the media and proposed forming a women’s caucus. As she wrote later: “The group’s response was informative, if depressingly predictable. Every woman who spoke after me agreed with my assessment of the situation, and each had a story of sexist treatment to tell. At the same time, every woman in the group made a point of saying that she was not a feminist and was not interested in forming a women’s caucus.”
Two efforts to organize women in the ’80s, at NBC and ABC, were hastily scrubbed in the face of management resistance. At NBC, women organized a grievance committee and began to talk about launching a legal challenge. Soon after, in September 1984, the network announced a new round of staff cuts that hit women hardest; when NBC handed out pink slips to employees in its news documentary unit, for example, nine of the ten fired were women. The grievance committee quickly disavowed any litigious intentions and began referring to its gatherings as mere “support” sessions. After a while, the obsequious nature of the group became so obvious that the members themselves began to joke bleakly about their “Ladies Sewing Circle.”
In the mid-’80s, ABC was most notorious in the industry for its poor showing on women’s employment. It had the worst record of the networks in hiring and promoting women; by 1986, it had no female executive producers and only one female bureau chief. Women that year had reported only 12 percent of the evening news spots. And the network boasted a 30 percent pay gap and several egregious cases of sexual harassment.
In 1983, Rita Flynn arrived at ABC’s Washington bureau, a seasoned newswoman from CBS with ten years of broadcasting experience. But her new employer, she recalls, treated her and the other female broadcasters like cub reporters, begrudging them serious assignments and air-time. After a while, she began to feel like she had tumbled into “a time warp.” It felt, she says, “like 1969 all over again.”
Finally, the women in the bureau met for dinner one night to discuss the problem. “None of us could ever get on prime time so it was no problem getting together,” Flynn observes wryly. When the women compared stories, they realized they had the makings of a discrimination lawsuit. They started collecting network statistics on women’s employment and pay. Flynn met with a labor lawyer.
A decade earlier, such rumblings would have prompted management to offer a settlement to fend off a damaging and embarrassing lawsuit. But in the environment of that time, corporate executives were more inclined to dig in their heels. It took months of appeals from the women just to get a brief hearing with ABC News president Roone Arledge. At the session, they presented their numbers and grievances; the executives disputed them, and the meeting was over. ABC management made only one concession: promoting one woman, a company loyalist, to vice president of public relations. As company cheerleader in this traditional female job, she served the network’s, not the women’s, cause, by defending the network’s treatment of women before the press.
Then discouragement came from another quarter of ABC, as the treatment of one woman served as a bitterly instructive lesson for many others. Cecily Coleman, the executive director of ABC’s Advisory Committee on Voter Education, had filed a confidential complaint of sexual harassment against James Abernathy, vice president for corporate affairs. Coleman said that he had repeatedly harassed her—cornering her in his office to grab and fondle her, trying to force his way into her hotel room on business trips and implying that she would lose her job if she didn’t succumb to his advances. Instead of investigating her complaint, the network fired her at once—while she was away on a business trip—then riffled through her office.
As a woman on the committee said later, its members “backed off fast” after Cecily Coleman’s firing. “It was like someone threw a snake in a barnful of horses and everybody jumped.” The number of committee members dropped to a half dozen and the group dropped its demands. Soon the committee’s spokeswoman was describing its grievances as “challenges rather than problems.”
Rita Flynn, one of the most outspoken committee members, found her career suddenly on the skids. First she was shifted to weekend hours—and told it was a “promotion.” Then she was shunted from the White House beat to “the parade route.” Soon she was no longer invited to the bureau’s social functions and was ostracized by nervous colleagues. Because she had been the one to consult with discrimination lawyers and speak to the press, “I was seen as the real bad gal.”
After a while, the experience wore her down. When Flynn’s husband was offered a job at a Portland, Oregon, newspaper, she quit ABC and moved with him, confident she could find a job in the more enlightened West. When she arrived in Oregon, however, she found that her reputation had preceded her. The general manager at one of the network affiliates there told her that he heard she was “a big-time feminist troublemaker.” No TV station in Oregon would touch her. After Flynn’s husband left her, she wound up working at a bank and taking free-lance jobs in public relations to support herself.
In the end, she came away from the experience with only one conclusion: “I’m more convinced than ever that it’s a man’s world.”
THE SEARS CASE
Most American working women, of course, aren’t fortunate enough to land a job in a middle-class profession like journalism. This was even more true in the ’80s, when real job growth was occurring in the lowest levels of the service sector. In the first five years of the ’80s alone, almost 7 million new jobs were created in the poorly paid female-dominated sales and service occupations. While 146,000 women were editors and reporters by the end of the decade, 4.2 million were salesworkers, the lowest paid of all the major occupations. American saleswomen suffer the largest pay gap of women in any field (51 to 53 cents to a man’s dollar in the last decade) and they make less than men in any other occupation, including day laborers. The average female salesworker earns $226 a week; her male counterpart makes $431. In retail, that’s largely because the average department store is still set up like the traditional family household, with the women dusting the cosmetics counters and straightening the dress racks in the minimum-wage “ladies’” departments, while the men adjust television sets and maneuver hot-water heaters in the “big-ticket” departments—and rack up big commissions on these sales. The result: women selling apparel (and about 83 percent are women) make an average wage of about $170 a week; men selling cars and boats (and about 93 percent are men) earn about $400.
In 1973, the EEOC began investigating such employment practices at Sears, Roebuck & Company. The federal agency had received hundreds of sex discrimination complaints about the giant retailer, the nation’s largest private employer of women. And EEOC investigators had found evidence of major disparities between the sexes at Sears in pay, hiring, and promotion. The average commissioned salesman at Sears in his first year on the job, the EEOC estimated, was earning twice as much as the average non-commissioned female salesclerk, no matter how many years she had worked for the retailer. The agency calculated that about 60 percent of Sears’s job applicants were women and at least 40 percent of the applicants who met all the requirements for commission sales were women. Yet, in the five years before the EEOC launched its investigation, less than 10 percent of the high-paying commission sales jobs had gone to women each year.
By the end of the ’70s, the EEOC had negotiated multimillion-dollar settlements from every other corporate defendant it had targeted through class-action litigation. In 1973, for example, AT&T paid $50 million in settlement fees and, after claiming for years that it could find no women interested in technical work, it met 90 percent of its hiring goals within a year, quickly signing on ten thousand women to climb telephone poles, crawl into cable tunnels, and install equipment. In the next ten years, behemoth corporations from General Electric to General Motors hastened to ne
gotiate with the EEOC, and each eventually shelled out tens of millions of dollars for compensation, back pay, and training programs, rather than face what they feared would be much higher costs in the courts.
The Sears suit, however, would take a different course. The EEOC and women’s rights organizations had hoped it might extend the gains women were making in other fields to the vast retail sales force. But the Sears case came up last to bat; the EEOC filed suit in 1979, and as the national climate shifted and the leadership in Washington changed, the case’s prospects dimmed. Seeing no need to settle in such an environment, Sears vowed to fight the government in the courtroom. In 1986, the company won—with help from a judge who had trouble believing that any working woman had ever faced discrimination, from a women’s history scholar who provided “evidence” that women just preferred lower-paying jobs, and from the government itself.
In court, Sears’s defense was largely based on portraying the typical saleswoman as a shrinking violet—a timid and dependent homebody who works for pin money and doesn’t like to muss her skirts. Women, as Sears’s attorneys repeatedly and euphemistically put it, simply had different “interests” from men; they just weren’t interested in higher-paying, more “demanding” jobs. This in-court argument didn’t exactly jibe with the in-store developments that followed news of the EEOC’s investigation. As soon as Sears found out that it was the subject of an EEOC probe, the retailer’s personnel office had managed to find plenty of interested women in a hurry—enough to double the proportion of women in commission sales by the following year, and even triple and quadruple the ranks of women in such “male” departments as auto parts, plumbing, heating, and fencing.
Nonetheless, during the ten-month trial of 1984-85, Sears stuck to its “interest” argument about women. A Sears personnel manager named, aptly enough, Rex Rambo explained to the court that saleswomen were “more interested in the idea of dressing up the home and that sort of thing.” Women wouldn’t want to sell tires because they might have to go out “if it’s snowing or raining or whatever it is.” They wouldn’t want to sell household equipment because women “did not like the idea of going into strangers’ homes.” Sears salesman Ed Michaels testified that women couldn’t cope with selling fences: “It does require walking through the yards,” he said. “You have to have boots with you.” And Ray Graham, Sears’s director of equal opportunity, offered only this piece of evidence to support his theory that women recoiled from big-ticket sales work: When he was a store manager back in 1965, he recalled, he once assigned three women to sell kitchen stoves; two quit within months and one asked for a transfer. Under cross-examination, he admitted there might be another reason for the women’s dissatisfaction: at the time, employees of both sexes considered the stoves division one of the least desirable assignments.
The company’s hiring procedures codified the idea that only the manliest could stomach what one Sears witness called the “rough and tumble” of commission sales. All applicants for commission jobs at Sears had to take a “vigor” test that asked questions like: “Do you have a low-pitched voice?” “Have you played on a football team?” “Have you ever done any hunting?” “Do you swear often?” Though Sears told the court that by the 1970s it no longer paid much attention to the test results, the company continued to administer the exam—even after an in-house study actually linked higher “vigor” scores with poorer salesmanship.
To make its case that women were simply uninterested in commission jobs, Sears needed an expert with more credibility and less partiality than its own managers. The company found a key witness in Rosalind Rosenberg, a women’s history professor at Barnard College. And she came with a big bonus: she was a feminist. Rosenberg might have seemed an odd choice. Her 1982 book, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism, focused on the success of feminist social scientists in the early 1900s in challenging the late-Victorian view of sex differences as ironclad and biologically determined. One might assume that she would make a similar argument about the sex roles assigned modern-day saleswomen. But in Rosenberg’s testimony for Sears, the scholar argued that the tiny number of women in commission sales reflected only “the natural effect” of women’s special “differences.” To regard these natural disparities as evidence of sex bias at Sears, she told the court, was “naive.”
A lot of saleswomen simply prefer low-paying salesclerk jobs, Rosenberg maintained. They tend to be less competitive than men, she said, and less eager to work full-time or nighttime and weekend shifts, which could interfere with their child-rearing duties. These were, of course, the same arguments as Rex Rambo’s, but Rosenberg delivered them with loftier lingo. “Many women choose jobs that complement their family obligations over jobs that might increase and enhance their earning potential,” was how Rosenberg put it. Or, women “are less likely to make the same educational investments as men.”
Rosenberg didn’t explain what “educational investments” are necessary to sell Sears sofas. Nor did her theory that women would rather not work evenings and weekends make sense: Sears’s non-commissioned salesclerks have no choice but to work evenings and weekends, too, and some lower-income working mothers who can’t afford high-priced day care prefer such shifts anyway, because their husbands are more likely to be home to mind the children. Finally, by arguing that saleswomen prefer part-time work, Rosenberg assumed that they don’t bear major responsibility for supporting their households. But at Sears, a 1982 survey found that almost a third of the saleswomen were married to unemployed husbands, another 25 percent had husbands who earned less than $15,000 a year, and 75 percent had husbands who made less than $25,000 a year.
Rosenberg was initially drawn into the Sears case for personal reasons; she was friendly with Sears’s chief defense lawyer, Charles Morgan, Jr., employer of her former husband. But when Morgan first asked her to testify, she was reluctant. “My gut personal feeling was EEOC were the good guys and private employers weren’t,” she recalls. “I suggested some other names.” Besides, as she told Morgan at the time, labor history wasn’t even her field. But when the labor historians that Sears approached refused to testify, Morgan asked her again, and this time she consented.
Rosenberg says that in part she decided to testify after hearing of the EEOC’s plan to rely on statistical evidence—which she maintains is insufficient to prove discrimination. But the scholar also says her decision to participate was influenced by the new relational feminist scholarship that had emerged on women’s “difference.” These academic ideas, she says, inspired her to rethink her attitudes about feminism and to regard the demand for simple gender equality in a new light—as “old ’70s feminism” and “simpleminded androgyny.”
In forming her opinions on this case, Rosenberg didn’t conduct any independent research. She didn’t talk to any actual saleswomen or interview any female employees at Sears: “I just pretty much relied on what [the Sears legal team] gave me.” To help the Sears lawyers, she culled evidence from other scholars’ books, evidence that she said showed that women traditionally prefer “different,” more female types of jobs. She handed over this material to the Sears lawyers. They wrote her court statement for her, she says—then handed her the completed brief to sign.
In her historical survey, Rosenberg relied on the texts of several labor scholars, most extensively the writings of Alice Kessler-Harris, a feminist labor historian at Hofstra University and author of Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States, a historical study of wage-earning women. When the EEOC lawyers received a copy of the written testimony, they passed it on to Kessler-Harris for her comments. She read it, with increasing disbelief. “This is not an argument that any reasonable historian would make,” Kessler-Harris recalls thinking at the time. She was sure Rosenberg wouldn’t actually testify to it. Moreover, she felt Rosenberg’s statement had misrepresented her work. When Rosenberg did proceed to court, Kessler-Harris agreed to testify for the EEOC to correct the record o
n her own writings.
In court, Kessler-Harris pointed out where Rosenberg had twisted the meaning of her work, mostly through the creative use of ellipses. For example, Rosenberg had quoted Kessler-Harris as saying that women quit industrial jobs in droves after World War II—as historical evidence that women have “chosen” not to hold traditional male jobs. But she skipped over the part where Kessler-Harris said that women hadn’t willingly abandoned their posts, but had been forced out to make way for returning soldiers. Rosenberg had taken similar liberties with the works of other scholars. One of the distortions, of Phyllis Wallace’s study of the AT&T case, was so egregious that when she was challenged in court, Rosenberg retracted it and asked that it be expunged from the record. “It was a mistake,” she says now, made in the rush of compiling her evidence for Sears.
If claiming support from feminist scholars was one cornerstone of the Sears defense, hunting down feminist infiltration of the EEOC was the other. It was here that the backlash mentality surfaced most blatantly, as Sears attorney Charles Morgan twice tried to have the suit dismissed on the grounds that he had heard that some of the EEOC’s employees were members of women’s rights groups. Throughout the litigation, Morgan and his legal team harped on this “conflict of interest,” embarking on a kind of feminist witch hunt that became increasingly extravagant in its accusations and its rhetoric. With words that could have been lifted from a Jerry Falwell tract, the Sears attorneys charged that the National Organization for Women and other women’s groups had created “a female underground within the EEOC” that had orchestrated the “usurpation” of the agency and was now plotting to “injure” Sears. In other words, the company’s attorney held, Sears wasn’t hurting women’s rights; advocates of women’s rights were hurting Sears. “There was no victim here except one,” Charles Morgan proclaimed in court, “and that one victim is Sears, Roebuck and Company.”