Oregon and perpetual sponsor of equal pay legislation. She favored women’s rights but opposed the sex
amendment because she believed it would “be used to help destroy the bill.” As a “white woman” she
had “been discriminated against,” she volunteered, but “the Negro woman has suffered ten times the
amount of discrimination.” She concluded: “If I have to wait a few years to end this discrimination against
me, [I am willing] if the rank discrimination against Negroes will be finally ended.”^36
In the end, the sex amendment passed. Although many supporters of the original civil rights bill voted
against it, Southern senators and others not known for their advocacy of women’s equality or civil rights
voted in favor. Many then switched sides when the bill—which now included prohibitions against
employment discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race, religion, and national origins—came up
for its final vote. An overwhelming majority of liberals and moderates in both parties now endorsed the
legislation with the blessing of their labor, civil rights, and women’s movement allies; most conservative
representatives, including Howard Smith, voted no.
After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, other legislative victories followed. In 1965, the
Voting Rights Act struck down barriers to political participation across the country, including land and
property ownership requirements for voting as well as the infamous literacy tests and “grandfather
clauses,” which by limiting suffrage to those whose grandfathers cast ballots disenfranchised descendants
of slaves. Women’s suffrage had finally been extended to the many left out in 1920. In 1966, Congress
raised the minimum wage and at long last broadened the wage-and-hour provisions of the 1938 Fair
Labor Standards Act to cover the majority of workers, including the majority of women, though still
excluding domestic and agricultural workers who were mainly people of color. In subsequent years, a
similar alliance of labor, civil rights, and poor people’s movements would achieve additional gains.
Despite overheated rhetoric about welfare state dependency from a rising conservative opposition, over
the course of the 1970s Congress would expand aid to the poor, primarily mothers and their children,
raise minimum wage levels several times, and make new groups, including domestic workers, eligible for
Social Security and other benefits.
The Torch Passes
Nineteen sixty-six marked the high point of legislative unity for social justice feminism. That summer, at
the annual meeting in Washington of the state commissions on the status of women, close allies for a
quarter century found themselves on opposing sides. A new feminism, with new organizations, leadership,
and priorities, was surfacing.
Even before the meeting commenced, tensions flared. The two most prominent feminists in the
Johnson administration, Peterson and U.S. Women’s Bureau director Mary Dublin Keyserling, a stalwart
New Dealer and former National Consumers’ League leader, felt under siege from those on the outside
who in their view lacked sufficient sympathy for a liberal administration attacked from the right and left.
Some of the strain among women activists reflected the seismic shift under way in the political culture:
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 escalation of the Vietnam War created bitter animosities among
progressives; older interracial and cross-class alliances were breaking apart; the liberal commitment to
worker organization and class-based policies was waning. The New Deal generation with its politics of
social solidarity and security, forged in economic depression and world war, was being eclipsed.
Tension over tactics—whether to pursue older strategies of gradualism and loyalty to the Democratic
Party or adopt more confrontational and politically independent approaches—was palpable as women
activists descended on Washington. Frustration with the Johnson administration’s foot-dragging on