rated job skills and changed their policies to conform to the less biased rating systems put forward first
by the UE and later by its anti-Communist rival, the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE). As a
result, Mary Callahan, a widowed mother, saw the paycheck from her job assembling radios at
Philadelphia’s RCA plant meet her family’s basic needs for food and housing for the first time in sixteen
years of employment. The RCA union’s emphasis on wage equity and its success in securing maternity
leave in the 1940s—not a benefit she enjoyed when her children were born in the 1930s—fueled
Callahan’s deep commitment to union activism. She acceded to the top position in her large majority-
female local in 1946 and kept it for the next thirty years. By the 1950s, she was also the top female
national officer in the IUE—a union of over three hundred thousand workers, 40 percent female—and
chaired its national Women’s Council. Pushed by Callahan and others (after Callahan retired in 1977), the
IUE was a leading voice for ending sex-based discrimination in wages and benefits into the 1980s.
Particularly galling to social justice feminists trying to build support for equal pay was their inability
to persuade the National Woman’s Party to join in their campaigns either at the workplace or in Congress.
The NWP did not oppose equal pay; it simply had its sights set on passing the ERA. The Republicans
endorsed the ERA in 1940; in 1944, the Democrats joined them. By 1946, the ERA was ready for
consideration in both houses, having been favorably reported out of committee for the first time since its
introduction in the early 1920s, and the NWP was confident of finding the votes it needed. It had not
reckoned, however, on the growing strength of its feminist adversaries. Social justice feminists, busy
stirring up legislative support for equal pay in 1945, realized they needed an equal rights bill as well.
Such a bill would serve as an alternative to the ERA and, of equal importance, be a rallying cry for their
vision of women’s rights.
A cartoon by LeBaron Coakley from the IUE News, March 1, 1954, showing the IUE’s support for equal pay for women. The caption “An
Easter Bonnet She Deserves” was emblazoned across the original cartoon when it appeared. IUE Archives, Special Collections, Rutgers University
Libraries.
In 1947, they introduced the Women’s Status Bill into both houses of Congress, reflecting their abiding
opposition to the NWP’s version of equal rights. It also revealed their intellectual debt to Truman’s 1947
President’s Committee on Civil Rights and the United Nations’ ongoing initiatives to assess women’s
status worldwide. The 1947 bill and the subsequent women’s rights bills they championed in the 1950s
sought “to eliminate unfair discrimination based on sex” but did not favor a constitutional amendment or a
single legal intervention like the ERA. Rather, they proposed a Presidential Commission on the Status of
Women as the first step in raising the overall “political, civil, economic, and social status of women.”