CANR
WORK TITLE: THE WOMEN OF NOW
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://katherineturk.com/
CITY: Chapel Hll
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Chicago, IL.
EDUCATION:Northwestern University, B.A., 2004; University of Chicago, M.A., 2007, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Academic. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, associate professor of history, adjunct associate professor of women’s and gender studies. Indiana University, Maurer School of Law, Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow, 2011-12; Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Mary I. Bunting Fellow, 2018-19; Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2023; recipient of grants and scholarships from National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, American Society for Legal History, and Institute for the Arts and Humanities at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
AWARDS:Lerner-Scott Prize, Organization of American Historians, 2012, and Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize, Organization of American Historians, 2017, both for Equality on Trial.
WRITINGS
Contributor to academic journals; also contributor to periodicals, including Slate, Washington Post, and Public Seminar.
SIDELIGHTS
Katherine Turk is an academic with a focus on women, gender, and sexuality and their intersections with labor, law, and social movements. She has published widely in these fields. She has held a number of fellowships and is the recipient of university teaching awards. Turk’s first book, Equality on Trial: Gender Rights in the Modern American Workplace, won the 2012 Lerner-Scott Prize and the 2017 Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize from the Organization of American Historians.
Equality on Trial
Turk published Equality on Trial in 2016. The account centers on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States, which forbids discrimination in the workplace on the basis of race, sex, and religion. Difficulties in enforcing it and lack of clarity as to what sex equality meant, however, weakened its effectiveness. While the new law helped form solidarities and generate its own politics, its ambiguity created problems as those responsible for enforcing it often had narrow interpretations than many women did. Conservative groups distorted Title VII’s meaning to not need to make any structural changes in business, while neoliberal groups empowered Title VII to make sweeping changes and helping women and others break the glass ceiling.
In a review in the Women’s Review of Books, Karen Pastorello observed that “Turk offers historical insight into the issues surrounding enforcement of Title VII while making sense of a tangled legal landscape. As discouraging as it is to realize that women workers were on the losing side of legal battles more often than not, the reader is propelled forward by Turk’s rendering of complicated cases into intriguing vignettes.” Pastorello also pointed out that “Turk goes beyond merely outlining the reasons sexual harassment still exists. She takes time to explain the origins of the term, weaving the material on harassment together in a way that clarifies the concept of a ‘hostile workplace culture,’ in which systematic sexual harassment seems acceptable because it is entrenched in American society.” Overall, Pastorello found Equality on Trial to be “comprehensive yet accessible.”
Reviewing the book in Labour/Le Travail, Kristina Fuentes commented that the author concludes Equality on Trial “by revisiting a point she makes at the beginning: that future struggles to secure more expansive rights that reflect difference, celebrate diversity, and protect the dignity and livelihood of all workers can look to Title VII for inspiration–not because of what the law represents today, but because of what it represented to movements of the past. Thanks to her research, we have a better understanding of the range of interpretations of Title VII that have inspired the politics of gender equality in the United States since the 1960s.” Fuentes appended that “while the history of Title VII is one in which many of these interpretations have been left behind, Equality on Trial does its part to ensure that they are not forgotten.”
The Women of NOW
In 2023 Turk published The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America. In it she documents the history of the National Organization for Women (NOW), particularly as it was shaped by Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins, and Patricia Hill Burnett. These three activist members offered their own views on feminism based on their lived experiences, shaping the evolution and ideology of the organization. Hernandez (1926-2017), the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, was appointed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission upon its establishment after helping to organize textile workers in 1965. She eventually became pessimistic that government was willing to help women. Burnett (1920-2014), who married a wealthy businessman, was frustrated with expectations and norms for white women with wealth. Collins (born in 1939), who grew up in a poor Irish Catholic family, worked in the corporate world and faced sexism daily.
Each woman held executive positions in NOW, which faced internal fighting over ideology, personal rivalries, and financial issues. Issues important to women of color and sexual minorities were frequently sidelined by the group. Turk also records the organization’s successes, as with their protests against churches, youth sports leagues, beauty pageants, federal and state laws, employment, toys, and advertising. A Kirkus Reviews contributor found it to be “a thoroughly researched and well-balanced history.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2023, review of The Women of NOW.
Labour/Le Travail, March 22, 2018, Kristina Fuentes, review of Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace, p. 289.
Women’s Review of Books, September 1, 2017, Karen Pastorello, review of Equality on Trial.
ONLINE
Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill website, https://history.unc.edu/ (August 6, 2023), author profile.
Katherine Turk website, https://katherineturk.com (August 6, 2023).
Katherine Turk studies women, gender and sexuality and their intersections with law, labor and social movements in the modern United States. She is Associate Professor of History and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Her prizes and fellowships include and a 2018-19 faculty fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law in 2011-12, and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, the American Society for Legal History, and the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill. Turk also won UNC’s Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2023.
Turk’s first book, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), examines how sex equality law has remade the world of work, eroding some inequalities and affirming others. Equality on Trial won the 2017 Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in US Women’s and/or Gender History and the 2012 Lerner-Scott Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians. In addition to many academic articles and book chapters, Turk’s public writing has appeared in Slate, Washington Post, and Public Seminar, among others. Her newest book is The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023).
A Chicago native, Turk holds a B.A. from Northwestern University and a Ph.D from the University of Chicago. She lives with her family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Katherine Turk
Associate Professor; Adjunct Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
500 Hamilton Hall
kturk@email.unc.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website
Education
PhD The University of Chicago, 2011
MA The University of Chicago, 2007
BA Northwestern University, 2004
Research Interests
Katherine Turk specializes in the histories of women, gender and sexuality; law, labor and social movements; and the modern United States. Her first book, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), examines how sex equality law has remade the world of work, eroding some inequalities and affirming others. Equality on Trial won the 2017 Mary Jurich Nickliss Prize in US Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians, and the dissertation from which it is drawn received the OAH’s Lerner-Scott Prize. Her next book, The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August 2023.
Professor Turk is an award-winning teacher and scholar. She was a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law in 2011-12 and the 2018-19 Mary I. Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Her two university-wide teaching prizes include, most recently, UNC's 2023 Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Her research has been supported by the American Society for Legal History, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. In addition to many academic articles and book chapters, her public writing has appeared in Slate, the Washington Post, and Public Seminar. Professor Turk's current projects include a history of debates over feminized labors and, with Leandra Zarnow, a study of the origins and intellectual trajectory of the field of women’s history.
More information about Professor Turk is available on her website: https://katherineturk.com.
Some Notable Publications
“‘We’re the Backbone of This City’: Women and Gender in Public Work,” in Public Service Workers in Service of America: A Reader eds., Frederick Gooding Jr. and Eric S. Yellin, University of Illinois Press, 2023 (paper)
“‘Saints’ or ‘Scabs’: Contesting Feminized Labors, Social Needs, and the Welfare State in the Volunteering Wars of the 1970s,” Modern American History 5 (July 2022): 187-208
“ ‘The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Should Rock the U. of C.’: The Faculty Wife and the Feminist Era,” Journal of Women’s History 26 (Summer 2014): 113-134
“ ‘Our Militancy is in Our Openness’: Gay Employment Rights Activism in California and the Question of Sexual Orientation in Sex Equality Law,” Law and History Review 31 (May 2013): 423-469
“Out of the Revolution, Into the Mainstream: Employment Activism in the NOW Sears Campaign and the Growing Pains of Liberal Feminism,” Journal of American History 97 (September 2010): 399-423
Graduate Students
Hannah Fuller (Co-advised with Erik Gellman)
Hooper Schultz
Isabell Moore
Courses Taught (as schedule allows)
For current information about course offerings, click here.
HIST 89: Gender and the Law in United States History
HIST 144/WMST 144: Women in United States History
HIST 289: America in the 1970s (co-taught with Benjamin Waterhouse)
HIST 356: United States Women’s History from 1865
HIST 361/WMST 360: United States Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Histories
HIST 389/WMST 389: Maid in America, Made in China: Laboring Women in Global Perspective
HIST 398: Social Movements in the Twentieth Century United States
HIST 475/WMST 476: American Feminist Movements Since 1945
HIST 890: Women, Gender and Sexuality in United States History
Katherine Turk
2018–2019
History
Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Headshot of Katherine Turk
Toggle informationClose detail panel
Photo by Tony Rinaldo
RELATED
An Intimate Narrative of NOW’s Sweeping History
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Katherine Turk is an associate professor of history and an adjunct associate professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
During her year at Radcliffe, Turk is working on her book manuscript, titled “Claiming NOW: A History of the National Organization for Women.” Drawing from oral history interviews and deep archival research at the Schlesinger Library and around the country, “Claiming NOW” will offer the first comprehensive account of the National Organization for Women, the largest feminist membership organization in American history.
Turk’s research has been supported by the American Society for Legal History, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Her first book, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), was awarded the 2017 Mary Nickliss Prize in US Women’s and/or Gender History by the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Her dissertation won the OAH’s Lerner-Scott Prize for US women’s history. Turk received her doctorate in history, with distinction, from the University of Chicago in 2011. In 2011–2012, she was a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law.
Katherine Turk, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2016)
KATHERINE TURK'S book explores how Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has both inspired progressive visions of workplace gender equality in the United States and played a role in preventing many of these visions from being realized. Through richly detailed accounts of key struggles over Title VII's sex provision since the 1960s, Turk sheds light on the different interpretive possibilities that were expressed through these struggles, and explains why the more radical, egalitarian interpretations failed to leave a permanent mark on American law and public policy. The book is meticulously researched and cogently argued, and makes a significant contribution to scholarship on US women's and labour history.
The first chapter examines the government agency at the centre of Title VII, the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC), in the first years of implementation. During this time, thousands of letters poured into the offices of the EEOC, most of them from workingclass women enquiring about the new law. Turk draws from these letters to illustrate the range and diversity of interpretations and expectations of the law that different women held, and which were based on their personal experiences within and beyond the workplace. Initially, EEOC officials adopted the time-consuming approach of reading and attempting to address each individual letter. While the pressure for efficiency pulled the agency toward the more statistical approach it is known for today, Turk's fascinating dive into the early years of the EEOC reveals that, for a short period, (and due to the unique circumstances surrounding the inclusion of the sex provision in Title VII), it was a.site of potential for progressive and inclusive government approaches to ensuring workplace equality.
In the next four chapters of the book, Turk examines how different groups--workplace caucuses (Chapter 2), feminist organizations (Chapter 3) and private and public sector unions (Chapters 4 and 5)--sought to use the law to "reset the terms of economic citizenship from laboring women's perspective." (9) In each case, initial efforts to engage with broad, inclusive notions of sex equality ultimately gave way to more narrow interpretations. Turk begins with the New York Times Women's Caucus, which brought together women from various departments representing both professional and pink-collar work. However, the concerns of journalists and other professional women often dominated the agenda, despite some caucus leaders' efforts to address the particular experiences faced by pink-collar women. In addition, a parallel (and in some ways, competing) campaign against racial discrimination at the Times drew in many women of colour who might otherwise have joined the Women's Caucus. Turk documents how the decision to pursue litigation in the early 1970s pushed the caucus even further away from a cross-class and interracial approach, as lawyers put together a "winnable" class action lawsuit that focused on barriers to upward mobility and downplayed the concerns of women who did not work in or aspire to the professional jobs.
Chapter 3 takes us out of the workplace and into the offices of the National Organization for Women (NOW). In the late 1960s and the 1970s, state and local chapters like Chicago NOW pursued grassroots activism as they sought to harness the power of Title VII, and convinced the EEOC to take on large employers such as AT&T and Sears. In the midst of the Sears campaign, however, national leadership contests at NOW brought competing visions of feminism and workplace equality to the fore; the Chicago chapter's emphasis on economic justice as imperative to gender equality was pitted against the argument that NOW needed to become more centralized, streamlined, and focused on pushing for formal legal equality. In 1975, the latter faction won the leadership race, ushering in a new era for the organization. The Sears campaign was one of the casualties of this transformation, and by the time the lawsuit went to trial in 1986, NOW was nowhere to be seen.
As Turk demonstrates in the next two chapters, however, in the same years that some feminists and feminist organizations seemed to turn away from prioritizing the needs and perspectives of working-class women, some sectors of organized labour were beginning to step in. The comparable worth campaign for example, which reached its zenith in the 1980s, was led in part by public sector unions who brought the argument for pay equity all the way up to the Supreme Court and won a partial (albeit short-lived) victory. Yet comparable worth activists faced formidable pushback, including aggressive counter-campaigning from employers who claimed that measures to institute equal pay for equal worth would threaten economic stability and would move the country toward state socialism. The conservative backlash gained further steam under the Reagan administration, and in 1985--the year that would "break the back of pay equity advocates' Title VII strategy" (122) --federal courts and federal agencies such as the EEOC issued statements decisively condemning comparable worth.
Many of the factors that Turk identifies in accounting for the limited success of these campaigns will sound familiar to students of American labour and working-class history, including: difficulties with building and sustaining broad cross-class and interracial coalitions; the refusal among employers to listen to, far less address grievances; and the use of free-market language by those employers and their allies within and outside of government to dismiss the legitimacy of claims that achieving sex equality required substantial intervention in the economy. However, Turk cautions that these campaigns do not easily fit within the conventional narrative that portrays the New Deal era as the heyday of class politics, and which paints the last three decades of the 20th century as a period of organized labour's decline. Viewed through the lens of the Title VII campaigns, the era of "decline" was actually a time of promise and potential for labour feminists as some unions finally began to acknowledge the growing female workforce, and to take action on issues that disproportionately affected workingclass women.
Turk also emphasizes, however, that the failures to ultimately achieve more expansive understandings of sex equality represent a lost opportunity for improving the conditions of all workers, not just women. Moreover, as she demonstrates in Chapter 6, male employees who have sought to challenge cultural norms about masculinity and heterosexuality in the workplace, have faced their own struggles when it comes to reinterpreting Title VII. This includes efforts to include sexual orientation as a protected identity under Title VII--an issue that became particularly salient in the last years of the Obama administration, and which remains so under the new Trump administration, but for quite different reasons.
Turk concludes her book by revisiting a point she makes at the beginning: that future struggles to secure more expansive rights that reflect difference, celebrate diversity, and protect the dignity and livelihood of all workers can look to Title VII for inspiration--not because of what the law represents today, but because of what it represented to movements of the past. Thanks to her research, we have a better understanding of the range of interpretations of Title VII that have inspired the politics of gender equality in the United States since the 1960s. And while the history of Title VII is one in which many of these interpretations have been left behind, Equality on Trial does its part to ensure that they are not forgotten.
KRISTINA FUENTES
Toronto, ON
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Fuentes, Kristina. "Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace." Labour/Le Travail, no. 81, spring 2018, pp. 289+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A541346337/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1a4a3f00. Accessed 17 July 2023.
Equality on Trial: Gender Rights in the Modern American Workplace
By Katherine Turk
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016, 284 pp., $45.00, hardcover
Because of Sex: One Law, Ten Cases, and Fifty Years That Changed American Women's Lives at Work
By Gillian Thomas
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2016, 291 pp., $26.99, hardcover
Shortly after Betty Dukes sought a promotion at the Pittsburg, California, Walmart store, where she worked in an entry-level customer-service position, she instead received a demotion accompanied by a five percent wage cut. After a lifetime of low-wage retail jobs, the 54-year-old Dukes finally decided to voice her complaint. In 2000 she agreed to serve as the lead plaintiff in a class action suit against Walmart for sex discrimination. The following year, when Dukes v. Wal-Mart moved into the US District Court in San Francisco, the suit against the world's largest retail employer included more than 1.5 million current and former women employees who, like Dukes, claimed they had been discriminated against on the basis of sex. At Walmart, women were hired into lower-level positions and consistently received lower wages than men doing similar work. They received promotions far less frequently than men.
In 2011 the case reached the United States Supreme Court. After hearing only the initial arguments, the justices ruled, in a 5-4 decision, for Walmart, reasoning that the plaintiffs did not share enough commonalities to constitute a single class, and that any discrimination they encountered resulted from the individual women's employment decisions. The notion that the variability of individual employee's circumstances precluded the Court from certifying the case revealed the unwillingness of the majority of the justices to challenge the questionable employment practices of large corporations and compromised future class action suits against employers. The Supreme Court did much more than disappoint female Walmart employees--it failed American workers. A half-century after the passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the law designed to eliminate discrimination on the basis of sex, the Supreme Court failed to challenge blatant discrimination.
Tapping sources from legal briefs to personal interviews, and highlighting relevant cases, Katherine Turk, an assistant professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, constructs a comprehensive yet accessible account of women's struggles for workplace justice since the passage of Title VII. She explains why and how the law continues to fall short of its goal--and indeed, was called into question from the day it was passed. This may have something to do with its entertaining back story: supposedly, the racist Virginia Senator Howard Smith tacked a sex-discrimination provision onto the Civil Rights Bill because he believed that would ensure the bill's defeat. Yet initially, Title VII and its enforcement mechanism, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), seemed poised to promote workplace equality.
However, the new law posed more questions than it answered. By the time the EEOC opened its doors in July 1965, the agency had two strikes against it: a less-than-dedicated chair, in the person of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., and a backlog of about 1,000 cases. The commission's first order of business was to figure out how to proceed with the multitude of complaints, which continued to pour in. Should they be considered individually or in groups? As the underfunded commission bumped along, hindered by a lack of oversight, the enormous workload overwhelmed the agency's staff. As the number of complaints ballooned to 100,000, the commission struggled with hiring and retaining adequate staff.
Turk offers historical insight into the issues surrounding enforcement of Title VII while making sense of a tangled legal landscape. As discouraging as it is to realize that women workers were on the losing side of legal battles more often than not, the reader is propelled forward by Turk's rendering of complicated cases into intriguing vignettes. She reveals a previously little-known aspect of the law, noting that men in so-called pink-collar positions can also experience sex discrimination, and she argues that men's Title VII claims "forced government officials to untangle and refabricate the strands of male, masculine, and heterosexual privilege in the workplace."
According to Turk, the biggest dilemma initially facing the EEOC was whether the federal goal of sex equality could coexist with state protective laws aimed at women workers. While some, such as Aileen Hernandez, an early commissioner of the EEOC, envisioned creating equal workplace conditions by extending sex-based protections, such as rest periods and proper seating, to men, others, such as the labor leader Esther Peterson, believed these hard-won state protections should be reserved for women. Such controversies were eventually decided case by case by the courts.
In some instances, the feminist lawyers and activists who came to the aid of working women hoped the EEOC would navigate uncharted terrain. In 1972, the National Organization for Women (NOW) launched an ambitious, two-pronged national campaign on behalf of thousands of women employed by AT&T. Exerting pressure simultaneously on the government and the company proved successful, and the corporation ultimately paid out $50 million to female and minority employees who had experienced discrimination on the job. What seemed like a successful strategy, however, didn't work against Sears, Roebuck, which routinely pushed women into low-paying or part-time jobs devoid of benefits. In that case, the campaign fell apart in the face of dissension among NOW's leadership over the goals the organization should pursue.
Turk demonstrates how the legal process established working definitions of previously fluid terms such as "comparable worth" and "sexual harassment." In 1980, Winn Newman, chief counsel for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), pushed the concept of comparable worth into the courtroom when he charged the state of Washington with setting discriminatory pay policies based on sex. Data revealed disparities between the wages in female-dominated and male-dominated jobs. In 1983, the court decided in favor of the union. However, the EEOC's new chair, Clarence Thomas, declared comparable worth to be outside the intent of Title VII, and forced the commission to dis regard incoming comparable-worth claims. This sentiment filtered through the judicial system, and a federal appeals court reversed the AFSCME decision and similar rulings.
Turk goes beyond merely outlining the reasons sexual harassment still exists. She takes time to explain the origins of the term, weaving the material on harassment together in a way that clarifies the concept of a "hostile workplace culture," in which systematic sexual harassment seems acceptable because it is entrenched in American society. Turk credits Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairwoman of the EEOC from 1977 - 1981, with advocating for women's right to be free of sexual harassment. Women had often been reluctant to voice complaints for fear of retaliation. Under Norton's leadership, the commission issued strict guidelines, including definitions of sexual harassment, which are still a valuable resource for victims and advocates.
In Because of Sex, Gillian Thomas, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), describes ten landmark cases that affect every working woman. She provides concise biographical sketches of the plaintiffs and their attorneys, and descriptions of the advocacy groups (most notably the Working Women's Institute, the ACLU, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund) that assisted them as they challenged violations of Title VII. These included the loss of jobs due to pregnancy, inequitable pension contributions, discriminatory hiring practices, and sexual harassment by employers and fellow employees. Drawing on expertise accumulated when she served as a litigator for the EEOC and for the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund (now Legal Momentum), Thomas skillfully transitions from explaining legal petitions to telling the stories behind precedent-setting cases.
Each of the cases Thomas presents offered a unique challenge to the interpretation of Title VII, and they all possess certain commonalities. The plaintiffs were ordinary workers trying to earn a living who suddenly found themselves embroiled in controversies of national proportions. Most were unaware of their rights under Title VII; they often learned that legal recourse was available to them only by chance. For example, Ida Phillips was told that she was ineligible to apply for a job at the Martin Marietta Corporation because she had a three-year-old daughter. The company had a policy against hiring women with young children, because it thought their child-care responsibilities might interfere with their work. The policy did not apply to male applicants. Encouraged by a neighbor who was employed at the factory, Phillips wrote to President Lyndon Johnson. A representative from the White House wrote back, referring Phillips to the EEOC.
Dianne Rawlinson also suffered from discrimination during the hiring process. A college graduate, Rawlinson was rejected from a position as an Alabama prison guard because she failed to meet the weight requirement of 120 pounds. She filed a complaint with the EEOC, but heard nothing for more than a year. In the meantime, while working at a hair salon, she mentioned her dilemma to a customer, who happened to be one of the founders of the Southern Poverty Law Center. She helped Rawlinson join a discrimination suit already in progress.
One of the most significant cases Thomas chronicles is Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson (1986), which involved sexual harassment in the workplace--the most difficult violation of Title VII to prove. Mechelle Vinson was the victim of a capricious boss who threatened to fire her when she resisted his sexual advances, and she eventually submitted to him. However, finding the workplace abuse too much to bear, she filed suit and promptly lost her job. When she visited Judith Ludwic's Georgetown law office seeking a divorce, she tearfully spilled her story about being sexually harassed, and Ludwic promised to help. In 1986, eight years after Vinson first filed her suit, the Supreme Court ruled in her favor, marking the beginning of what many considered a legal revolution.
Two decades later, in 2006, the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Company hired Shelia White, a 42-year-old single mother, as forklift operator. She was the only woman in a department of approximately 100 employees. Her male counterparts made her life on the job miserable with lewd comments. When she filed a complaint with the railroad about being singled out for mistreatment, she was demoted to general track laborer. A woman at her church who worked for the EEOC convinced her to file charges.
White and women like her felt confident enough to come forward once they realized that they could change the climate of their workplaces. These courageous women, their attorneys, and ultimately the EEOC, achieved several successful Supreme Court rulings and, in the words of Teresa Harris, another victim of sexual harassment, that made it "easier to do something about it."
Both Turk and Thomas concur that at the very least Title VII exposed discrimination against working women. At best, the law removed some of the barriers facing women and protected them from sex discrimination. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has stepped up in all too few cases. It has failed to require powerful defendants such as Sears and Walmart to remove barriers to women workers and to provide an equitable work environment. Over the decades, a few professional women have broken through the "glass ceiling" to achieve high rank, although some find themselves tokenized. For an increasing number of women and men, business as usual has changed.
The saga of Title VII teaches a fundamental lesson: passing new laws does not translate into immediate changes in attitudes and behaviors. Both Turk and Thomas agree that cultural change proceeds at what Thomas aptly terms a "glacial pace." Sexual discrimination has been a circumstance of women's employment since they first entered the paid workforce two centuries ago--and despite progress, both authors demonstrate that it remains pervasive. Plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases have challenged the "locker room" values of corporate America, from degenerate executives to warped bosses to wayward male employees--patriarchy at its worst. Male bravado and sexual assault continue to be condoned, and bragging about reprehensible behavior failed to disqualify a perpetrator for our nation's highest office.
Despite an amendment to Title VII that allows the EEOC to initiate litigation in sex discrimination cases, the law is far from ideal. Perhaps its biggest defect is that it exempts employers with fewer than fifteen employees. Whereas pay and hour discrimination based on sex are no longer the issues they once were, measures to remedy women's inequitable status in the workplace when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth still fall short--and the US remains the only developed country without a federal paid family leave policy. There is such a long way to go! Sexism, compounded by racism, classism, and ageism, reigns in sectors across the country and its threat is bolstered by the current political climate. Ultimately, change has to come from women themselves--women like Mechelle Vinson, Shelia White, and Betty Dukes, who risked their livelihoods, and used the law to change social and cultural boundaries. Inspired by these kinds of courageous examples, women must revitalize their feminist energies to challenge those in power whenever their personal and political rights--which took centuries to win--are threatened. While Betty Dukes has long since retired from Walmart, women---many of whom remain oblivious to her case--still shop there.
Karen Pastorello is a professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at Tompkins Cortland Community College (State University of New York). She is a co-author of Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (2017).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Old City Publishing, Inc.
http://www.wcwonline.org/womensreview
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Pastorello, Karen. "The glacial pace of change." The Women's Review of Books, vol. 34, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2017, pp. 31+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A509015032/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a4dd0d1a. Accessed 17 July 2023.
Turk, Katherine THE WOMEN OF NOW Farrar, Straus and Giroux (NonFiction None) $32.00 8, 15 ISBN: 9780374601539
How the influential women's organization evolved.
Historian Turk tells a lively story of the development of the National Organization for Women by focusing on three activist members: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins, and Patricia Hill Burnett, women whose vastly different backgrounds shaped their views on feminism. Hernandez (1926-2017), a New Yorker, was the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. In 1965, after a decade spent organizing textile workers, she was appointed to the newly established Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. However, she soon became disillusioned "in her quest to make government power work for women." Burnett (1920-2014), married to a wealthy Detroit businessman and the mother of four, was a frustrated artist, chafing against society's "expectations for a moneyed white wife." Collins (b. 1939) was raised in an Irish Catholic family that struggled financially, and after college, she worked in the corporate world, where sexism was rife. Turk traces the women's careers and growing influence in NOW: Hernandez became its second president, succeeding Betty Friedan; Burnett led the organization's international program; in the 1980s, Collins became one of NOW's two vice presidents. The author also reveals the "smoldering disagreements," internal rivalries, and financial problems that beset the organization from the start. Disagreements arose over NOW's position on the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion; lesbian, transgender, and Black women felt excluded from NOW's largely White, middle-class membership. Turk recounts NOW's protests against sexism "in churches, law, employment, beauty pageants, Little Leagues, advertising, toys, and more," and she sets the organization's goals and strategies in the context of an increasingly polarized political arena. Admitting that she considers herself a beneficiary of NOW's achievements, she recognizes that she lives in a world "where elite women can scale the heights of influence while their sisters suffer crushing inequality and insecurity; a world where sexism thrives, but often in disguise; a world whose backlash to feminism is evidence of the movement's continued power." The book includes 16 pages of black-and-white images.
A thoroughly researched and well-balanced history.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Turk, Katherine: THE WOMEN OF NOW." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A752722773/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5cb14f04. Accessed 17 July 2023.