convention’s international norm in its own domestic equal pay legislation. In 1962, as the labor-backed
equal pay bill inched along the tortuous route to becoming law, it met formidable opposition from the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and key conservative legislators,
women and men.
The opponents’ strategy was not to block “equal pay” legislation altogether but to narrow it, ensuring
that it affected only a small subset of women: those doing substantially the same job as men. The defining
moment occurred in the House debate. Katharine St. George, the same Republican congresswoman who
had opposed the Women’s Status Bill in 1947, rose to amend the bill, proposing to strike out “for work of
comparable character” and substitute “for equal work.” To St. George, the path to equality lay through
“equal treatment,” and women could only lay claim to first-class citizenship based on being the same as
men.
Others jumped into the fray, arguing that “equal may mean exactly alike,” and “if you put in the word
‘equal,’ we will have no equal pay bill at all.” St. George rebutted that charge with a bow to a version of
feminism that many would eventually conflate with feminism itself. “We do not want favors,” she claimed.
“What we really want is equality,” and that “implies no difference.”^30 St. George’s amendment passed,
and the Equal Pay Act, approved by both the House and the Senate the next year, retained her amendment.
Substituting “equal” for “comparable” limited the law’s effectiveness dramatically. The 1963 Equal
Pay Act only allowed for equalizing wages when men and women performed substantially similar tasks.
By denying the sex bias in wage setting in female-majority jobs and the need for more broad-based
comparisons, the law left pay in the majority of women’s jobs unchanged. Many of these jobs would
continue to pay poverty wages into the twenty-first century, even though, as with childcare, they were
among some of the most valuable, demanding, and responsible jobs in society.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the “Sex” Amendment
By 1963, the top priority for social justice feminists was civil rights legislation. No woman gave a major
speech that summer at the famous 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; and although
National Council of Negro Women president Dorothy Height was included in the leadership group for the
march and sat on the podium looking out at the quarter of a million marchers, there were no women or
women’s organizations represented in the march’s official “big ten” organizing committee. Nevertheless,
countless women had long made securing first-class citizenship for all people a priority. Myra Wolfgang,
Addie Wyatt, Maida Springer, Lillian Hatcher, Caroline Davis, Pauli Murray, and many others, as we
have seen, had campaigned to bring an end to Jim Crow in the workplace, the military, schools, and other
settings for decades. They helped pass fair employment practice laws prohibiting employment
discrimination in the majority of states, and in 1961, they had been part of a powerful coalition of labor
and civil rights groups that successfully convinced President Kennedy to sign an executive order banning
“discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin” in businesses with federal contracts, a
quarter of all private sector companies.
In 1963, however, what social justice reformers wanted was a comprehensive federal civil rights law.
Working with Dorothy Height and others, Esther Peterson had organized a national women’s committee on
civil rights to press for passage of federal civil rights legislation soon after she assumed her White House
appointment, and at last, victory seemed achievable. In the wake of the march, civil rights legislation
advanced, and following Kennedy’s death in November, it made rapid strides in both houses,
encountering few surprises. But on February 8, Democratic congressman Howard W. Smith, the influential