Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Joyce’s experience was typical of the forthright and often violent backlash within the blue-collar work force, an assault undisguised by decorous homages to women’s “difference.” At a construction site in New York, for example, where only a few female hard-hats had found work, the men took a woman’s work boots and hacked them into bits. Another woman was injured by a male co-worker; he hit her on the head with a two-by-four. In Santa Clara County, where Joyce worked, the county’s equal opportunity office files were stuffed with reports of ostracism, hazing, sexual harassment, threats, verbal and physical abuse. “It’s pervasive in some of the shops,” says John Longabaugh, the county’s equal employment officer at the time. “They mess up their tools, leave pornography on their desks. Safety equipment is made difficult to get, or unavailable.” A maintenance worker greeted the first woman in his department with these words: “I know someone who would break your arm or leg for a price.” Another new woman was ordered to clean a transit bus by her supervisor—only to find when she climbed aboard that the men had left a little gift for her: feces smeared across the seats.
In 1980, another dispatcher job opened up. Joyce and Johnson both applied. They both got similarly high scores on the written exam. Joyce now had four years’ experience on the road crew; Paul Johnson only had a year and a half. The three interviewers, one of whom later referred to Joyce in court as “rabble-rousing” and “not a lady,” gave the job to Johnson. Joyce decided to complain to the county affirmative action office.
The decision fell to James Graebner, the new director of the transportation department, an engineer who believed that it was about time the county hired its first woman for its 238 skilled-crafts jobs. Graebner confronted the roads director, Ron Shields. “What’s wrong with the woman?” Graebner asked. “I hate her,” Shields said, according to other people in the room. “I just said I thought Johnson was more qualified,” is how Shields remembers it. “She didn’t have the proficiency with heavy equipment.” Neither, of course, did Johnson. Not that it was relevant anyway: dispatch is an office job that doesn’t require lifting anything heavier than a microphone.
Graebner told Shields he was being overruled; Joyce had the job. Later that day, Joyce recalls, her supervisor called her into the conference room. “Well, you got the job,” he told her. “But you’re not qualified.” Johnson, meanwhile, sat by the phone, dialing up the chain of command. “I felt like tearing something up,” he recalls later. He demanded a meeting with the affirmative action office. “The affirmative action man walks in,” Johnson says, “and he’s this big black guy. He can’t tell me anything. He brings in this minority who can barely speak English. . . . I told them, ‘You haven’t heard the last of me.’” Within days, he had hired a lawyer and set his reverse discrimination suit in motion, contending that the county had given the job to a “less qualified” woman.
In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled against Johnson. The decision was hailed by women’s and civil rights groups. But victory in Washington was not the same as triumph in the transportation yard. For Joyce and the road men, the backlash was just warming up. “Something like this is going to hurt me one day,” Gerald Pourroy, a foreman in Joyce’s office, says of the court’s ruling, his voice low and bitter. He stares at the concrete wall above his desk. “I look down the tracks and I see the train coming toward me.”
The day after the Supreme Court decision, a woman in the county office sent Joyce a congratulatory bouquet, two dozen carnations. Joyce arranged the flowers in a vase on her desk. The next day they were gone. She found them finally, crushed in a garbage bin. A road foreman told her, “I drop-kicked them across the yard.”
• • •
SEVERAL MONTHS after the court’s verdict, on a late summer afternoon, the county trucks groan into the depot yard, lifting the dust in slow, tired circles. The men file in, and Joyce takes their keys and signs them out. Four men in one-way sunglasses lean as far as they can over the counter.
“Well, well, well. Diii-ane. How the hell are you?”
“Hey, Diane, how the fuck are you?”
“Oh, don’t ask her. She don’t know that.”
“Yeah, Diane, she don’t know nothing.”
Diane Joyce continues to smile, thinly, as she collects the keys. Some of the men drift over to the Ready Room. They leaf through dog-eared copies of Guns magazine and kick an uncooperative snack vending machine. When asked about Diane Joyce, they respond with put-downs and bitterness.
“She thinks she is high class now that she’s got her face on TV,” one of the men says. “Like we are dirt or something.”
“Now all a girl has got to do is say, Hey, they’re discriminating, and she gets a job. You tell me how a man’s supposed to get a promotion against something like that.”
“She’s not qualified for ninety-nine percent of the jobs, I’ll tell you that right now. I bet next foreman’s job opens up, she’ll get it just because she’s female. I’ve been a road maintenance worker sixteen years. Now you tell me what’s fair?”
Paul Johnson has since retired to the tiny fishing town of Sequim, Washington. From there, he dispatches an “Open Letter to the White Males of America” to newspaper offices across the country: “Fellow men,” he writes, “I believe it is time for us to object to OUR suppression.” His wife Betty, Johnson explains, helped compose and typed the letter. Her job at a bank also helped pay the bills—and underwrote much of his reverse discrimination lawsuit.
Women’s numbers in the Santa Clara County’s skilled-crafts jobs, after the Supreme Court ruling, increased by a paltry two to three a year. By the end of 1988, while the total number of available craft slots had grown from 238 to 468, the number of women rose only to 12. This was not because women had lost interest in these jobs. They were enrolling in union craft apprenticeship programs in the area in record numbers. And a county survey of its own female employees (who were still overwhelmingly relegated to the clerical pool) found that 85 percent of these women were interested in higher-paying “men’s” jobs. Moreover, 90 percent of the women surveyed said they believed they knew the reason why they weren’t getting these higher-paying positions: discrimination.
LADY BENCH-HANDS AND GENTLEMEN TESTERS
The Supreme Court would ultimately undercut Diane Joyce’s legal victory, too—only two years after she “won” in Washington. Within ten days in June 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court rolled back two decades of landmark civil rights decisions in four separate rulings. The court opened the way for men to challenge affirmative action suits, set up new barriers that made it far more difficult to demonstrate discrimination in court with statistics, and ruled that an 1866 civil rights statute doesn’t protect employees from discrimination that occurs after they are hired.
One of the four cases that summer, Lorance v. AT&T Technologies, dealt a particularly hard blow to blue-collar women. The court ruled that women at AT&T’s electronics plant in Illinois couldn’t challenge a 1979 seniority system that union and company officials had openly devised to lock out women. The reason: the women had missed the 180-day federal filing deadline for lodging unfair employment practices. The court made this ruling even though five past court rulings had all allowed employees to file such challenges after the deadline had passed. And ironically enough, that very same day the court ruled that a group of white male firefighters were not too late to file their reverse discrimination suit—against a settlement of an affirmative action case filed in 1974.
In the economically depressed town of Montgomery, Illinois, forty miles outside Chicago, nearly all the jobs pay minimum wage—except at the Western Electric plant, where circuit boards are assembled and tested for AT&T. As long as anyone at the plant can remember, the factory had been rigidly divided by sex: the women had virtually all the lowly “bench-hand” jobs (assembling and wiring switching systems by hand) and the men had virtually all the high-paying “testing” jobs (checking the circuit boards). So it had remained until 1976, when three women decided, wi
thout so much as a nudge from affirmative action recruiters, to cross the gender line.
Pat Lorance was one of the first to ford the divide. She had been working since adolescence, ever since her father had deserted the family and left her mother with no job and five children to raise. She joined the plant as a bench-hand; after eight years she was weary of the tedious work and even wearier of the low pay. When she heard that the local community college was offering courses to qualify as a tester, Lorance decided to give it a try. She brought two women, both bench-hands, with her.
“In the beginning, it was a little intimidating because the teacher, who was from Western Electric, told us, ‘You know, women don’t usually finish.’ But by the fourth course, we won his respect.” She eventually completed sixteen courses, including electronic circuitry, computer programming, and “AC/DC fundamentals.” To fit it all in, Lorance worked the five A.M.—or sometimes even the three A.M.—shift, studied in the afternoon, and attended class until 9:30 at night.
Officials at Western Electric—AT&T were closely, and uneasily, following the women’s efforts. At the time, the EEOC was pursuing its highly visible round of class-action suits against industrial employers, including other divisions of AT&T, and the company’s managers knew that if the women at the plant began raising questions publicly about the company’s equal employment record, they could well be the next target. In 1976, as employees at the time recall, the personnel office suddenly began calling in some of the female bench-hands, one by one, and offering them a deal. As several women who got the summons remember, a personnel manager informed them that the company had “mistakenly” overlooked them for some job openings. They could now receive a check of several hundred dollars as “compensation;” all they had to do in return was sign a statement promising never to sue the company for discrimination. The women say they were also instructed not to discuss the matter with their co-workers. “Some of the girls wanted to know what the jobs were,” recalls one woman, a bench-hand, who, like the others, asked that her name not be used for fear she will lose her job. “Some didn’t want to take the money. But it was like, ‘Take the money or you are out the door.’ I got over $600.” (Company officials say they have no record of these sessions in the personnel office. “We have found no facts to support such claims,” the company’s attorney Charles Jackson says.)
By the fall of 1978, Lorance had all the academic credentials she needed and she applied for the first vacancy in testing. Company officials accepted her for the job—then, a week later, told her the job had been eliminated. Then she heard that the company had hired three men as testers that same week. She protested to the union, and after a struggle, finally became the company’s first female tester.
By the end of 1978, about fifteen of the two hundred testers were women. To the men in the shops, that was fifteen too many. “They made these comments about how women were dumb and couldn’t do the job,” Lorance recalls. “I have a pretty good personality and I just shrugged it off, figured they’d get over it.” But as the number of women rose, so did the men’s resentment.
Some of the men began sabotaging women’s test sets, hooking up the wires the wrong way while the women were on their breaks or spilling ink on their schematic notebooks. They tacked up a series of humiliating posters around the plant. A typical example: a picture of a grotesquely fat woman standing on a table with her nylons down around her calves and money spilling out of her shoes. The men wrote on it: “Yesterday I couldn’t spell tester. Today I are a tester.”
In 1980, Jan King joined the second round of women to break into the tester ranks. She had worked at the company as a bench-hand since 1966, starting at $1.97 an hour. King desperately needed the extra money: her husband, a violent alcoholic, spent most of the money he earned on drink and gambling, and she had a child to support. “I looked around at the plant one day and I realized I had just accepted what I saw there,” she says. “I thought I wasn’t any good in math because that’s what they said about women. But part of my brain said, Wait a minute, if they can do it, I can. Just because I was brought up to be a certain way, that doesn’t mean I have to stay that way.”
King had to fight for the job on two fronts, work and home. “My husband said, ‘You are not going to go to school for this. It’s a waste of time.’” First he threatened her. Then, when she went to class anyway, “he’d do stuff like five minutes before it was time for me to leave, he’d announce that he wasn’t going to baby-sit. But I just kept at it because there was this little voice in the back of my mind saying, ‘You are going to end up taking care of your daughter by yourself.’ I knew if he left, he was the kind of guy who was not going to be paying child support.”
The company officials weren’t any more helpful. As King recalls, “The whole attitude at the company was, women can’t do it. Women can’t do math, women can’t do electronics.” As women began applying to become testers, the company suddenly issued a new set of training and examination requirements. Some of the tactics were peculiar. One of the top managers tried to require that female testers be sent home if they didn’t carry see-through purses, a strategy supposedly to discourage thieving.
When some of the men who were testers heard that twelve more female bench-hands had signed up for training at the community college, they decided matters had gone far enough. The younger men were the most upset; because they had the least seniority, they knew that the bench-hand women who had worked at the plant for years would be ahead of them for advancement—and behind them for layoffs. In the winter of 1978, the men organized a secret union meeting; when Lorance heard about it, she and a female co-worker made a surprise appearance.
“They weren’t real happy to see us,” she recalls. Lorance sat in the union hall and listened. She discovered they were drafting a new seniority system that would prevent women from counting their years as bench-hands in calculating their length of employment. If approved, it would mean that women would take the brunt of any layoff in the testing department. Lorance and her friend went back and spread the word to the other female testers.
At the union meeting to vote on the new seniority proposal, ninety men gathered on one side of the hall, fifteen women on the other. One man after another stood up to speak on behalf of the proposed seniority plan: “I have a family to feed. Do you know how much a loaf of bread costs now?” Then the women stood up, to say that many of them were divorced mothers with families to feed, too; their ex-husbands weren’t paying any child support. “This is a man’s job,” one of the men yelled. “Yes, but this is a woman’s factory,” a woman retorted, pointing out that more women than men were on the company payroll; he just didn’t notice them because they were tucked away in the lowest-paying jobs.
In the end, the men won the vote; in the testing universe, anyway, they still had numbers on their side. The union officialdom assured Lorance and the other women at the time that the seniority plan would have no effect on downgrades or layoffs, just advancement. Company officials, who had helped design the new seniority system and quickly approved it, made similar promises about layoffs. The women accepted their guarantees—and didn’t file suit. As Lorance points out, no one was being laid off in 1978, so “why cause trouble when you don’t have to?” None of the women wanted to risk losing the jobs they had fought so hard to get.
Jan King, for one, needed her paycheck more than ever; she was facing even more problems at home. “It was like every step I took toward improving myself, every step forward, he saw it as a rejection of him,” she says of her husband. “As long as he could keep me dependent on him, then he could think that I would stay.” Her husband turned even more violent; he began dragging her out of bed by the hair, beating and, ultimately, raping her. Whenever she made a move toward divorce, he would threaten murder. “If you leave me, you’re dead,” he told her. “If I can’t have you, no one can.”
• • •
WHEN THE recession hit in 1982, the women discovered that the union and compan
y officials had misled them; the seniority plan did apply to layoffs, and the women were the first ones out the door. Eventually, women with nearly twenty years’ experience would lose their jobs. Even women who weren’t let go were downgraded and shunted back to the bench-hand side of the plant, a demotion that cost some women more than $10,000 in yearly wages.
Lorance was downgraded immediately. She went to a superior she trusted and asked for an explanation. He spoke to his bosses, then came back and told her, “I’m sorry, Patty, but they told me I have to write you up [for a reprimand].” But what, she asked, had she done? He explained that she had “asked a question.” Then he pulled her aside and said he suspected the real reason was they hoped this would discourage her from taking legal action. “Well, you know what that made me do,” Lorance says. The next day she pulled out the Yellow Pages and started dialing lawyers.
Ultimately, Lorance and three other female testers filed suit against the company. (One of the women later dropped out, after her husband forbade her to pursue the litigation.) Bridget Arimond, a Chicago attorney who specializes in sex discrimination law, took the case, which was promptly derailed in the courts over a technical debate about the filing deadline for unfair employment practices. The company contended that the clock started running in 1978, when the seniority system was first adopted, and their complaints constituted “stale claims.” “The ladies hadn’t exercised their legal rights at the appropriate time,” Charles Jackson, Western Electric’s counsel on the case, asserts later. “It was really their fault.” The women maintained the clock started when they were fired; how could they have known until then that the policy was unfair? “The irony of it all,” Arimond says, “was that the whole fight in court came down to whether women who had no background in the law didn’t file on time. Yet, the judge [in the lower court] waited over a year to rule on the motion.” That judge: John Nordberg of the Sears case.