employed. With aspirations raised by the women’s movement, they made gains because they used the anti-
discrimination laws to bring grievances that forced the EEOC to act. In 1970, women earned on average
59 percent of men’s wages; in 2011, 77 percent. (This differential exists today despite women having
more education than men.) The improved ratio narrowed the gap considerably but did not always improve
women’s standard of living. Women’s earnings in comparison to men’s rose in large part because men’s
real wages fell (now $22 per week lower on average than in 1980)—thus many women gained relatively
but became poorer in absolute terms.
Employed women’s grievances went far beyond wages. Sexual harassment had hounded employed
women for centuries. Some of their first strikes, two hundred years ago, protested lewd behavior by
foremen. Women in the armed forces had been slotted into the worst jobs with the least benefits and
subjected to widespread rape and harassment. In the 1970s, waitresses and saleswomen typically had to
buy uniforms or clothing that conformed to standards of appearance imposed by employers and sometimes
highly sexualized. Lacking clear job descriptions, they were often called upon to perform arbitrary and
insulting tasks, to put in exceptionally long hours, or to give up breaks and holidays at the whim of
employers. They were called “girls,” whatever their age, and addressed by first names, while a male
superior was always “Mr.” Women found this disrespect galling. For clericals, nothing symbolized the
disrespect they felt more than being asked to make coffee—and their resentment emanated directly from
feminist consciousness raising. That their bosses felt entitled to make this demand expressed their
expectation that women “naturally” performed domestic chores. Expectations spilled from their homes
into their offices; clerical work appeared not only as a job category but also as an emanation of
femininity. It was not accidental that Aretha Franklin’s 1967 hit “R.E.S.P.E.C.T.” became the virtual
anthem of the women’s movement.
Leaflet by Women Office Workers of New York, 1979.
Women’s liberation generated a wave of organizing in female-dominated jobs, and it was here that
Karen Nussbaum found her life’s work. College-educated women were still limited to jobs as secretaries,
for which they were usually overqualified, and brought organizing campaigns into job categories that
male-dominated labor unions had neglected. The most famous of them, 9to5, began in 1972 when Karen
Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy, both Harvard University clericals, started the office workers group 9t05,
which created a sister organization, the union SEIU 925. Women Employed (WE), an offshoot of the
CWLU, began in 1973. One of its early studies of clerical work—which WE, cleverly, managed to get
funded by the Playboy Foundation—began with this telling anecdote from a receptionist: “A client came
onto the floor . . . looked directly at me and asked, ‘Isn’t anyone here?’ ”^39
All these organizing projects flowed from consciousness raising, as well as feminism’s osmosis into
the consciousness of many who had never experienced consciousness-raising groups: the strategies