The commission would study “not just the legal status but the general status” of women, inaugurate a
broad public conversation over how to ensure first-class citizenship for women, and recommend specific
reforms to advance that goal.^19 Needed reforms, according to social justice feminists, included
overturning laws that disadvantaged women, passing new “equal pay for comparable work” and civil
rights laws, and changing employer and state policies to accommodate mothers and other caregivers.
In 1948, NWP and social justice feminists squared off against each other in a dramatic confrontation
before the House Judiciary Committee, each group fighting for its own women’s rights bill and each group
defending its own larger political agenda and choice of allies. Social justice feminists, organized into a
loose network of labor, civil rights, and women’s groups led by former U.S. Women’s Bureau director
Mary Anderson, vigorously championed their bill, introduced by California Democratic congresswoman
Helen Gahagan Douglas. The NWP, backed by powerful business groups and conservative Republicans,
fought equally hard for their bill.
The two sides disagreed over what “women’s equality” and “sex discrimination” meant and what kind
of legislation met the needs of the majority of women. NWP feminists favored strict legal equality
between men and women in labor laws as well as in laws affecting marriage, divorce, and child custody.
As NWP’s Nina Horton Avery asserted, “All adults should be treated alike.” New York Republican
congresswoman and ERA supporter Katharine St. George backed her up, asserting that women “want to
be free to work as equals asking for no special privileges.” Educated in Europe and “presented at the
Kaiser’s Court” before her stint as executive vice president and treasurer of her husband’s coal brokerage
company, St. George saw few obstacles facing women except laws discriminating on the basis of sex.^20
Social justice feminists thought otherwise. They opposed the uniform, gender-neutral legal approach,
which they feared the ERA would inaugurate. Instead of a blanket amendment instituting formal legal
equality, they called for a review of laws affecting women and a determination on a case-by-case basis of
whether they disadvantaged women. The laws deemed to advantage women, such as job-protected leave
after childbirth, even if they treated men and women differently, should be retained. As Frieda Miller put
it, “identity of treatment” is not the same as equality.^21 Sometimes it was necessary to treat men and
women differently in order to advance women’s equality. To insist upon women’s legal rights in relation
to men without regard to what happened to women’s other rights could result in less overall progress for
women.
Class and Cold War politics were on full display in the 1948 hearings. Pauline Newman accused ERA
proponents of being “selfish careerists” without concern for the needs of low-income women. Food and
Tobacco Workers leader Elizabeth Sasuly agreed: she characterized the ERA as “an empty concept of
equality” offering women “the right to be exploited.” As the male legislators looked on, a few chortling at
the squabbling women, NWP feminists returned the vitriol in kind. They called their opponents “lady
bountiful” sentimentalists and “lackeys” of male-led unions. They defended the ERA as “vital to the
American way of life” and dismissed the unions opposed to it as “communist.”^22
The Communist label would also soon be used to great effect against the principal legislative sponsor
of the 1947 Women’s Status Bill. In 1950, Helen Gahagan Douglas, a consistent ally of the social justice
women’s movement and a frequent sponsor of “equal pay for equal work” bills as well as other
progressive legislation, lost her Senate bid in California to Richard Nixon. In a vicious smear campaign,
Nixon questioned her loyalty and that of her Jewish husband, Hollywood actor Melvyn Douglas, and
claimed the “Pink Lady” was “pink right down to her underwear.”^23
Needless to say, neither bill advanced very far in 1948 or in the decade following. But that did not
mean the battle between social feminists and equal rights feminists subsided. Indeed, it raged on