Feminism Unfinished

reflected, first, interrelated and quite possibly inseparable demands for tangible gains and respectful
treatment, and second, personal relationships as the basis of organizing. 9to5’s first ten members spent a
year just talking, venting resentments, and musing about how to bring in more workers. They began a
newsletter that focused on disrespect as well as the male/female wage gap. They began to offer services
such as workshops providing free legal advice and courses on leadership skills. In 1973 the group sent
Ellen Cassedy to Chicago to attend the Midwest Academy, run by Heather Booth of the CWLU. What she
learned confirmed a personalized recruitment method: before anyone could become a 9to5 member, she
had a private lunch with an older member. This provided an orientation and created a personal
relationship. New members were then immediately given some responsibility, a task to accomplish; this
method not only enabled the group to identify potential activists but also made the new person feel needed
—a vital part of becoming part of a community.
Even the services 9to5 provided to individuals who never became active members served to educate
and raise consciousness. Many workers complained about workplace problems but did not identify them
as sex discrimination—for example, a service representative at New England Telephone who said she
was “treated like a child” or one at an engineering firm who thought it natural that the draftsmen were all
men. By taking such cases to the EEOC, the complainants were learning about sex discrimination. By
asking questions that stimulated thinking, 9to5’s surveys functioned as a form of consciousness raising.
When office-worker organizers tried to reach clericals in the banking and insurance industries,
however, those mega-corporations struck back with massive anti-union publicity, threats, and firings and
successfully held off unionization. The early successes of clerical organizing, ironically, rested on
discrimination against women, which put middle-class and working-class women into the same clerical
jobs and thus created a cross-class alliance. When feminist pressure opened managerial and professional
jobs to educated women, that class alliance was broken, and the union movement weakened accordingly.
As throughout the labor movement, unionizing achieved only limited gains with respect to overall social
justice issues. 9to5 organizers found that women responded less positively when they brought in other
issues, such as the Vietnam War, so kept their focus specific to clerical work. Many workers were afraid
of the labels “feminist” and “union,” and 9to5 did not use them.
Nevertheless, 9to5 and similar women’s organizing influenced thousands, perhaps even millions, of
women workers toward increased self-respect; and when these efforts combined with the massive
cultural transformations wrought by the rest of the women’s movement, they brought higher wages and
made supervisors understand that office workers were not their wives. By parodying “National
Secretaries Day” with slogans like “Raises, Not Roses,” the movement hammered in the understanding
that clericals were workers who would not be bought off with one day a year of thanks. But the movement
soon changed the slogan to “Raises and Roses”!
For employed mothers, childcare was an absolute necessity. (Fathers—there were few single fathers
then—were not typically held responsible for their children.) Working-class women, whose wages were
usually not high enough to pay for daycare centers, relied on family members or “home daycare,” done by
other working-class women who cared for a few children other than their own in their homes. In the
World War II period, the need for women to work in defense plants had led to government-subsidized
childcare; after the war these programs were usually cut, despite women’s agitation to keep them. Now
women’s liberation groups took up the fight—especially at universities and other large employers.
Elsewhere daycare cooperatives arose, sometimes staffed entirely by parents, sometimes with
professional staff paid through a sliding scale in which those who could afford higher fees subsidized
those who couldn’t. Responding to women’s pressure, federal programs begun in the early 1970s offered
limited numbers of very poor families some childcare help. On the whole, however, the women’s