Feminism Unfinished

In 1947, Congress overrode President Harry Truman’s veto and passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which
amended key provisions of the 1935 Wagner Act, passed to ensure greater “equality of bargaining power”
between labor and capital and thereby boost wages, consumer purchasing power, and economic growth.
Taft-Hartley shifted economic power back to organized capital. By outlawing union recognition and
sympathy strikes, mass picketing, secondary boycotts, and other forms of worker collective action, Taft-
Hartley made it increasingly difficult for the labor movement to organize new workers in the private
sector. It also narrowed the Wagner Act’s protection of labor’s right to organize and bargain to
nonsupervisory employees only, ensuring that, unlike in other developed nations, managers and white-
collar workers in the United States would not be unionized.
New Deal reformers faced other hurdles as the “Iron Curtain” descended, dividing Europe and much
of the world into two opposing camps. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the wake of deteriorating
relations between the Soviet Union and the United States, fear of subversives within the U.S. government
reached a fever pitch. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his allies fomented a witch hunt for Communists
and others deemed un-American or a threat to national security. By the early 1950s, with Senator Joseph
McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) whipping up public fear and anger, a wide range of New Deal liberals and
leftists, including social democratic anti-Stalinists like Esther and Oliver Peterson, were subject to
loyalty investigations and subpoenaed as potential subversives before congressional committees. These
experiences left lasting scars even for those exonerated like the Petersons. Many prominent social justice
feminists, including Tillie Olsen, withdrew from active political engagement.
Unable to extend New Deal reforms legislatively, the postwar labor movement sought enhanced social
and economic security at individual workplaces. It met with some success, at least in mass production and
other heavily organized sectors of the economy like mining, transportation, and construction. In the auto
industry, for example, the UAW bargained for and won healthcare and pension coverage, supplemental
benefits for laid-off, sick, and disabled workers, and paid vacations in addition to gains in wages and job
control.
Social justice feminists, however, protested the sex bias of these new workplace policies. Many
women, they rightly noted, failed to qualify for benefits because of their part-time status, interrupted
careers, or shorter length of service. Even when they did qualify, their needs as caretakers and income
earners often went unmet. Paid-leave language covered every sort of medical problem and disabling
condition except pregnancy and childbirth. Sick leave provisions allowed time off for one’s own illness
but penalized workers when they stayed home to take care of a sick child or nurse an elderly parent. All
workers, feminists patiently explained, did not have a wife at home who gave birth and cared for
dependents. Sometimes the worker and the wife were the same person!
Moreover, the postwar employer-based welfare system provided only for that minority of workers
lucky enough to have such benefits. Cognizant of the problem, UAW president Walter Reuther initially
turned down employer offers of pensions and healthcare in the 1940s because the union favored universal
coverage for all, a goal opposed by employers. Reuther finally agreed to employer-based health and
welfare coverage in the 1950s, but he continued to hope that employers, saddled with high health and
welfare costs for their employees, would drop their resistance to government programs. Such a shift
would enhance American competitiveness with European and Japanese firms, he thought, where benefits
came largely from the state, not the employer. Ideology trumped rationality, however, and U.S. employers
opted for higher costs rather than what they labeled “socialized” benefits.

Sex Discrimination and Continuing Division Among Feminists