coordination and the drafting of the commission’s final report, she turned once again to Kitty Ellickson,
who took a leave from the AFL-CIO. To the commission itself, Peterson persuaded Kennedy to appoint a
mix of twenty-six powerful figures from government, business, labor, education, and the community,
including her friends Mary Callahan of the Electrical Workers, National Council of Negro Women
president Dorothy Height, and social historian and New Dealer Caroline Ware. Caroline Davis, Addie
Wyatt, Bessie Hillman, Pauli Murray, and others in Peterson’s circle of women reformers sat on the seven
subcommittees advising the commission.
The commission’s report, American Women, presented to the president on October 11, 1963, Eleanor
Roosevelt’s birthday, would be overshadowed by the tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination the
following month. Nevertheless, within a year of its release, American Women sold sixty-four thousand
copies, and governors across the country, surprised at the outcry it generated from women, formed state
commissions on the status of women. Involving thousands of participants from all walks of life, these
commissions, created an expanded and energized national network dedicated to women’s reform. The
commission’s report, like the other 1963 feminist salvo, Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, was thus
key in sparking the rise of a new mass women’s movement.
The final report of the PCSW reflected many of the concerns and sensibilities of the postwar labor
feminist network. “Full equality of rights” had been denied women, the report proclaimed, and
government had an obligation to rectify the situation. The PCSW called for revaluing household and
reproductive labor through social supports, including paid maternity leave, universal childcare services
for women “whether they were working outside the home or not,” and changes in Social Security that
would allow housewives to build up equity as if they were earning wages. The commission insisted
unequivocally on the right of all women to employment and noted the need to eliminate the “special
discriminations” faced by low-income mothers and minority women. It favored opening up educational
and training opportunities for women so that women could move into jobs traditionally held by men. At
the same time, it recommended upgrading the jobs in which the vast majority of women worked. As part
of that effort, American Women endorsed raising the minimum wage, equal pay for comparable work
legislation, and the extension of New Deal statutes to cover those left out. Finally, the commission asked
for a stronger governmental commitment to the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively and
to programs enhancing women’s political and civil leadership.^27
American Women generated considerable controversy. In 1963, most commentators, at least those who
took the report seriously, worried that by affirming women’s rights to employment the report encouraged
women to abandon their home responsibilities. In contrast, a decade later, critics faulted the commission
for paying too much attention to the needs of mothers and homemakers and not enough to women’s
employment rights. By the 1970s, with a new feminist movement in full bloom, the PCSW report began to
be described as timid and maternalist, meaning it overemphasized women’s domestic identities. Some
saw it as an anti-feminist document sponsored by an administration hostile to the ERA and to women’s
rights.
It is true that the PCSW did not endorse the ERA. It sidestepped the issue by relying on Pauli
Murray’s contention that women’s equality of rights under the law could be advanced through the
Fourteenth Amendment and thus the ERA “need not now be sought.”^28 Murray’s judgment carried
particular weight among the commissioners because of her long and fierce advocacy against the twin evils
of race and sex discrimination. (In 1965, while finishing her studies at Yale Law School—and becoming
the first African American to receive a JSD from Yale—she would refine her legal theories further and
publish a famous article on “Jane Crow,” making explicit the parallels between sex- and race-based