systems of exclusion.)^29
Nevertheless, as the new feminist movement took up the ERA mantle in the 1970s, the commission’s
failure to endorse the proposed amendment made it appear conservative to many feminists. Its heavy
reliance on state action and top-down solutions seemed dated as well. But perhaps most damning was the
misreading of the report as a conservative document reinforcing the gender status quo. Quite the opposite
was true. American Women assumed women’s family and marketplace identities were equally valid and
should be accommodated through major and “long overdue” change in government policy and employer
practice. The report asserted that women deserved full equality—economic, political, and social. That
was a bold and progressive formulation in 1963, and it remains so in the twenty-first century.
The 1963 Equal Pay Act
By the time Esther Peterson presented the commission’s report to Kennedy in October, its
recommendation of equal pay for comparable work legislation was moot. President Kennedy had signed
the Equal Pay Act on June 10, 1963. For many on the commission, however, the new law was at best a
mixed blessing. Peterson called it a first step but worried, and rightly so, that the crucial next steps would
be long in coming.
Social justice feminists had been optimistic in 1962 when Caroline Davis and other UAW women
lobbied Congress on behalf of equal pay. As Davis testified, the bill they supported conceived of equal
pay in a capacious way. The majority of women would benefit whether they were the few in traditionally
male jobs or the many in the pink-collar world. A legislative priority for social justice feminists since
1945, the 1962 equal pay bill had the backing of the AFL-CIO and many prominent Democrats, including
Oregon congresswoman Edith Green.
President John F. Kennedy signing the Equal Pay Act, June 10, 1963. Peterson is fifth from the left in the front row. John F. Kennedy Library.
The global movement for equal pay was flourishing as well in the early 1960s. Maida Springer had
cheered in 1951 in Geneva, sitting next to Esther Peterson, when the International Labor Organization
approved its one hundredth international labor standard, the Convention on Equal Remuneration, which
contained the broad comparable work language familiar to trade union women. By the early 1960s, over
thirty nations around the world had adopted the convention as law. The United States, however, had not
signed the international equal pay convention (and as of 2014 still has not); nor would it meet the