The reforms social justice feminists sought in the 1940s and 1950s were more than just improvements on
what the New Deal had achieved. They also introduced legislation and workplace reforms in new areas,
notably ending sex-based wage discrimination and passing a broad women’s rights bill, which they called
the “Women’s Status Bill.”
To attack wage discrimination, social justice feminists introduced an “equal pay for comparable
work” bill into Congress in 1945; they would reintroduce it every year until the early 1960s. CIO unions
and women’s organizations close to the U.S. Women’s Bureau network were the prime backers. Some
proponents, men and women, initially saw it as a way of preventing employers from lowering men’s
wages or replacing men with lower-paid women. Others, however, made a case for equal pay as a matter
of simple justice and of fairness to women. These justice claims gradually became the dominant sentiment
fueling the postwar drive for equal pay and ending wage discrimination against women.
The “equal pay for comparable work” bills of the postwar era advanced a broad idea of equal pay,
continuing a transatlantic movement among women social reformers and trade unionists that picked up
speed after World War I. Labor movement feminists and their allies believed it was discriminatory to pay
women less than men when both held similar jobs; they also believed sex-based wage discrimination
existed even when women held jobs very different from those of men. Winning “equal pay” for that small
sliver of women in “men’s jobs” would be a victory, of course, but it would fail to tackle the much
broader problem of “sex bias” in wages. The wages in female-majority service and blue-collar jobs were
lower than those in male-majority jobs because the skills, knowledge, and productivity of women and of
those doing “women’s jobs” were systematically devalued. As Addie Wyatt saw it, in “women’s
departments the quality and the merit of the work was underrated because it was considered a ‘female
job.’ It had a sexist [wage] rate to it.”^17
Eradicating the “sex bias” in wages meant rethinking the value, pay, and productivity of all jobs and
understanding that women, like men, deserved a wage capable of providing support for themselves and
their dependents. The language of the legislation they introduced reflected this expansive notion of “equal
pay” and “sex bias” in wages. The 1945 bill, for example, specified that it would be “an unfair wage
practice” to pay women less than men in jobs with “comparable quantity and quality” or in jobs with
“comparable skills.”^18 The jobs typically held by women were undervalued as to their skill,
responsibility, and productivity. Once reevaluated, advocates believed, the pay in most majority-female
jobs would adjust upward.
The movement succeeded in passing new equal pay laws in eighteen states in the 1940s and 1950s,
but federal legislation on equal pay stalled, with the same forces arrayed against it that had blocked social
security. Employer policies, however, once again proved more amenable to change than federal law,
especially in blue-collar industries, where powerful unions, pushed by women members, decided to make
equal pay part of their agenda.
The electrical unions conducted some of the most impressive campaigns for women’s wage justice in
the 1940s and 1950s. The battle opened during the war. With employers seeking to lower men’s wages
and a governmental cap on wage hikes except in special circumstances, the United Electrical Workers
Union (UE) made a case before the War Labor Board for wage increases because of discriminatory
practices against women and minorities. After the war, the UE made ending wage discrimination a central
demand when it struck GE and Westinghouse in 1946, joining telephone operators, hospitality workers,
department store employees, and thousands of others in the largest strike wave in U.S. history.
Westinghouse gave way first, agreeing to raise wages in almost all of the female-majority jobs. Over
the next decade, other companies in the electrical industry complied as well. They reevaluated how they