Feminism Unfinished

out-of-home employment and did not offer support for the welfare rights movement. By contrast, many
poor lone mothers wanted to be able to care for young children themselves, as prosperous mothers could,
and fought requirements that they should be forced into the low-wage labor market and then pay those
same low wages to babysitters. They received support from the more left-wing women’s liberation
movement, which wanted to support poor women and to make the point that domestic labor was an
honorable vocation.
That women were traditionally responsible for all housework and childcare is a large part of the
reason for their lower wages: paying women less had been justified by the notion that they took jobs only
for “pin money,” to afford “extras,” while fathers or husbands supported them. This assumption had never
been true for all women, and as the marriage age rose, as separation and divorce increased, and as
children grew more expensive, most women’s wages became vitally necessary to their families. Paying
women less increased profits for employers, lowered men’s wages, and weakened labor’s collective
power in bargaining with employers—yet many working men still supported this inequality, conditioned
by assumptions about women’s “natural” role. Besides, the labor market was sexually segregated, so
women were slotted into “women’s jobs,” which paid less. (Even in 2013, female-dominated jobs paid
an average of $408 per week and male-dominated jobs $553 per week.) A self-reinforcing logic operated
here: women’s jobs paid less because women did them, and women did them because the jobs paid less.
The women’s movement challenged all these aspects of employment discrimination, with considerable
success.
An early campaign targeted the sex segregation of job announcements and advertisements. Heretofore
they were listed in separate newspaper columns. For example, these ads appeared in the 1968 Raleigh
News and Observer:

HELP    WANTED  MALE

Wanted: Office  Supervisor. Wholesale   distribution    office  offers  rapid   financial

advancement to  young   man who learns  over-all    operation   quickly.    Start   $400.

HELP    WANTED  FEMALE

Wanted, settled white   lady    to  work    nights  in  rest    home.   Some    experience  and

transportation.

Wanted, General Office  “Gal    Friday” type    job for stable, personable  lady    in  one girl

office. Starting    $80.

Attorney Sylvia Roberts, a founder of NOW, won the first sex-discrimination victory under the EEOC in
1969, arguing for Lorena Weeks, who was banned from a better job because it required being able to lift
more than thirty pounds. Women laughed about that, since they carried kids and groceries weighing much
more. So Weeks came into court with her heavy manual typewriter—which she often had to move around
in her workplace—and indeed, it weighed more than thirty pounds. In 1973, after NOW women had been
picketing city newspapers for several years, the Supreme Court, still all male, finally ruled 5–4 that
segregated employment ads constituted unlawful discrimination. (Chief Justice Warren Burger’s dissent

charged that the decision opened a “treacherous path” toward government regulation.)^38
Desegregating want ads would have achieved little, however, without women’s increasing ambitions
and assertiveness in pursuing the jobs. As the value of most men’s earnings fell, and fewer husbands
could single-handedly support a whole family, more women recognized that they would be permanently