Feminism Unfinished

Beginning in 1943 and continuing into the early 1950s, left-liberal New Dealers and their allies in the
labor movement introduced comprehensive “social security for all” bills intended to expand and improve
the 1935 Social Security Act. The 1945 bill, for instance, called for universal national health insurance,
extending old-age insurance to farm workers and domestic employees, raising the level of old-age,
survivor, and unemployment benefits, and adding new provisions for paid maternity leave. Social
security, proponents explained, was not just for the elderly; nor was it only about income in old age.
Social justice feminists lobbied especially hard for the provisions offering income support for new
mothers. Frieda Miller testified on behalf of the 1945 bill, for example, and continued her efforts into the
early 1950s, working with the U.S. Children’s Bureau to secure a federal law that would move the United
States closer to the family policies emerging in other industrial countries: a minimum three-month paid
maternity leave with job security. Full social security, she and others proclaimed, could not be achieved
until society provided for the health and security of mothers and children.
Although proponents of “social security for all” legislation made little progress nationally, social
justice feminists did secure modest victories at the state level benefiting mothers and children. In a
handful of states, for example, women mounted successful campaigns to keep open wartime childcare
programs. In California, the statewide CIO Women’s Auxiliary spearheaded the effort, reaching out to the
Waitresses Union and other sizable women’s and community groups to pressure the legislature. They won
funding for kindergartens, after-school programs, and other childcare programs. Led by its president,
Tillie Olsen, the postwar California CIO Women’s Auxiliary, like most chapters across the country,
lobbied actively for the progressive reform agenda adopted by the CIO’s national women’s auxiliary,
which included among its top priorities public funds for childcare and child rearing, expanded social
security protections, and an end to job and wage discrimination against women and minorities. Labor
auxiliaries admitted the wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, and, on occasion, “friends” of union men, and
by the 1940s some two million women belonged. Most of these working-class women held or would hold
paid jobs outside the home, and their reform agenda reflected that postwar reality.
Although at the state level social justice feminists could claim some victories in securing funding for
mothers and children, their efforts to expand New Deal wage-and-hour legislation to the majority of
workers met with considerable frustration. While the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), first passed in
1938, set wage floors and hour ceilings for industrial workers, many women and people of color fell
outside its coverage. The majority of white women workers, concentrated in small retail and service jobs,
lacked federal wage-and-hour protections, as did the mostly minority workforce in agriculture and
domestic work. The lack of legal remedies and protections for domestic workers, who were treated more
as servants or as “one of the family” dependent on paternal (or maternal) largess rather than as
“employees” with adult rights and contractual guarantees, was particularly troubling. Esther Peterson,
who worked as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Washington lobbyist from 1945 to 1948, devoted
much of her time to the FLSA. Pregnant in 1946 with her fourth child, Peterson remembered the long
weeks and months trying to change attitudes and convince male legislators that all workers, including
women and minorities, deserved living wages and protection from overwork. One legislator, paying more
attention to her ever-expanding stomach than to her economic arguments, joked that her child should be
called Max for maximum hours if a boy and Minnie for minimum wages if a girl.
Peterson’s FLSA efforts largely failed, as did most of the national campaigns to expand New Deal
labor and social welfare legislation in the 1940s and 1950s. A hostile coalition of southern Democrats
and conservative Republicans–-dubbed the “unholy alliance” by Pullman Porters union president A.
Philip Randolph—gained new members after the 1946 election, and generous financial backing from
newly coalesced business and professional associations bolstered forces bent on undoing the New Deal.