what can be called the “masculine mystique,” or the valorizing of the qualities associated with
masculinity and the male sphere of employment. They believed winning first-class citizenship for all
women involved more than equal access to the market and to men’s jobs. It required transforming the
masculine work patterns, norms, and practices of the work world itself and rethinking how the traditional
male and female spheres were valued. Jobs in postwar America had been designed with a man in mind,
they claimed, and with the assumption he had or would have a full-time wife at home. Since men did not
get pregnant or nurse, no parental leave policy was deemed necessary. Similarly, work hours were
constructed without thought to the schedules of children or to any other family obligation outside of
employment.
The CIO’s top woman staffer, Vassar graduate Katherine (Kitty) Ellickson, who helped organize
mineworkers in the early 1930s before graduate study in economics at Columbia, thought this work world
a relic of a bygone era much in need of dismantling. Rather than ask women to adjust to an outmoded
world of work, she wrote, the new postwar women’s movement should insist that employers “adapt the
man’s world to women.” That task, she believed, “transcend[ed] the efforts of isolated individuals” and
demanded fundamental shifts in cultural norms, workplace practices, and social policy.^16
The “masculine mystique” disadvantaged women at home as well as on the job. It reinforced a gender
hierarchy in which the masculine was valued over the feminine. Qualities associated with femininity such
as nurturance or collaboration were deemed less valuable, as was the work traditionally performed by
women. The unpaid “reproductive” labor of caregiving took second place to the income-generating
“productive” endeavors of the market. But why, labor feminists asked, shouldn’t the work of caregiving
and of service, whether paid or unpaid, be seen as valuable and worthy of respect? And why shouldn’t the
woman on the production line receive the same union protections and high pay as the supposedly more
“skilled” male production worker next to her? These were the questions posed by social justice feminists
at midcentury. By challenging the “masculine mystique” and the masculine norms embedded in workplace
structures and social policy, they mounted a destabilizing assault on the gender order of their day.
Yet what postwar social justice feminists did not seek to change is as revealing as what they did.
Certain things, they assumed, either did not need to change or were incapable of being remade. Unlike
1970s feminists, they did not view gender as a social construct. For the postwar feminists, sex differences
were real, in part biological and unchangeable, and perhaps even desirable. Sex-based hierarchies
needed dismantling, but less clear was whether gender divisions could or should be rearranged. Should
men and women do the same jobs? Should men and women share equally in caregiving and the work of
the home? These questions were asked but never really answered. Nor were they the burning concerns of
the day. The midcentury priority was ending the unequal valuing of gender differences, not ending
difference itself. If women’s sphere and what women did could be equally valued, then half the battle had
been won. It was this battle of equal worth that they fought.
To make progress on their ambitious reform agenda, social justice feminists launched legislative and
workplace campaigns in the 1940s and 1950s in three broad areas: economic and social security for all
Americans; an end to unfair discrimination against women as a sex; civil rights and first-class citizenship
for minorities. They worked with men in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the
Democratic Party. In addition, they organized separately with other women, working primarily through the
U.S. Women’s Bureau to form various coalitions with like-minded women’s groups.