JAMIE RICHARDSON: The JFK 35 podcast is made possible through generous support from the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: I must say, I am a strong believer in equal pay for equal work. And I think that we ought to do better than we're doing.
MATT PORTER: Sixty years ago, President John F. Kennedy passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963. It was one of the first federal anti-discrimination laws that dealt with wage discrimination on the basis of sex.
But while Kennedy was the man who signed the bill into law, it was only because of a woman led movement that the act became a reality. We'll hear about those women and their stories next on JFK35.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
[APPLAUSE]
MATT PORTER: Hello, I'm Matt Porter. Welcome to this episode of JFK35. As we come to the end of Women's History month, our final two episodes of March will look at the story of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which made it illegal for companies to pay men and women differently for equal work.
The Equal Pay Act, signed by Kennedy in June 1963, has had lasting implications in its attempt to level the playing field among men and women in the workplace. In a special back to back episode series, we'll take a look back at the history of the Equal Pay Act and reflect on the last 60 years since its passage.
In 1961, the push for a law like the Equal Pay Act was on the mind of activists and prominent women journalists like May Craig. Craig was a leader among the small but growing band of women who covered politics in Washington.
On November 8, she bluntly asked the President what he was doing when it came to the issue of equal pay for equal work on the basis of sex.
MAY CRAIG: Mr. President, the Democratic platform in which you ran for election promises to work for equal rights for women, including equal pay, to wipe out job opportunities discriminations. Now, you have made efforts on behalf of others. What have you done for the women according to the promises of the platform?
JOHN F. KENNEDY: Well, I'm sure we haven't done enough.
[LAUGHTER]
I must say, I am a strong believer in equal pay for equal work. And I think that we ought to do better than we're doing. And I'm glad that you reminded me of it, Miss Craig.
MATT PORTER: Despite President Kennedy giving a short and rather lackluster answer to Craig's question, he may have already made one of the most significant moves for the future of the Equal Pay Act.
In 1961, Kennedy appointed labor activist Esther Peterson to the Women's Bureau in the US Department of Labor. Peterson would urge Kennedy to establish the President's Commission on the Status of Women, which would be set up in December 1961, one month after Kennedy answered that question from May Craig.
Joining me now to discuss more about Peterson and the movement she helped lead as award winning author and distinguished professor of history and labor studies at Rutgers University, Dorothy Sue cobble. Dr. Cobble, thank you for joining me today.
DR. DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: I'm happy to be here, Matt.
MATT PORTER: Well, I'm happy you're here. And I'm happy that we can delve into this topic of the history of the Equal Pay Act and the women who are behind that movement in the 1960s.
But before we get to the Kennedy administration in 1960, I thought it would make sense for us to quickly go back to some of the originations of these growing feminist movements, which was the 1920s with the passage of the 19th Amendment. What was the idea of equal pay at this moment as women got the right to vote? And maybe how did it differ from other feminist goals that were also emerging at the same time?
DR. DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: Let me talk a minute about the Equal Pay demand and what a long history that has. And then, I can bring us back to this pivotal moment of the passage of women's suffrage in 1920.
I think it's really important for our listeners to get a sense of how long this struggle was. And also, working women and labor women were really central to the equal pay struggle. It happened, really, in terms of legislative initiatives. But also, pressure at the workplace for employers to change their policies.
And you see that kind of dual approach as early as the 19th century where you have some federal legislation that provides equal pay for federal employees. But also, strikes that women led on behalf of equal pay. And this kind of dual approach continues right into the 20th century.
And it does pick up steam during World War I when the War Labor Board proposes equal pay between men and women. That also is undergirded in terms of pushing for women's mobilization in the 1920s with the passage of the Suffrage Amendment.
One of the problems, though, after 1920 is that the women's movement really splits into competing factions with one group focused more on ending discrimination just on the basis of sex, and another group that also wants to take up issues of sex discrimination, but wants to put that in a broader context of ending other kinds of discrimination, discrimination on the basis of race, class, and other issues.
And this comes up in a debate over how to proceed politically with women's suffrage with the National Woman's Party moving from suffrage to a focus on the Equal Rights Amendment. And another group saying, we've achieved partial suffrage for women, but there are many women who still don't have the right to vote because their discrimination is not based on sex, but based on other things such as race or citizenship or literacy or other kinds of barriers.
And so that's an important divide in the women's movement after 1920. And you see this coming up in the fight for the Equal Pay bills in Congress. There are competing bills for equal pay, and there are competing definitions for what equality would mean and what equal pay would mean.
MATT PORTER: And so you've described people who support the idea of equal pay as labor feminists. And here, you're describing that there are not just one type of feminism in the country, but almost a number of competing movements. In your books, you describe that labor feminists had this disagreement as far as how to proceed, as you were pointing out, and some wanting to put forth the Equal Rights Amendment. And then, you have others who want to focus on these equal pay laws.
Can you talk more about these two sides? And from a contemporary context, it might for some people hard to understand why these two movements didn't work together. Why there was disagreement and concern about putting one ahead of the other.
DR. DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: I think part of it had to do with disagreements over priorities. The National Women's Party put its energy into removing barriers for women who wanted to enter the professions and wanted to have the same opportunities as men.
There was another group of women that I've written about who also believed that unfair discrimination against women should be eliminated. But they were also focusing on what were the needs of lower income women and what were the most pressing needs from their perspective.
They believed that working women needed not only opportunities, but they needed their living standards raised and they needed worker rights and worker protections. And so that often put the two groups at odds. I think it might be helpful to think a bit about how they differed in terms of their approaches to equal pay.
There were two competing equal pay bills that were introduced for the first time right at the end of World War II. And one of these bills was much narrower in the sense that it wanted to establish equality between men and women who were doing the same jobs. The Equal Pay Bill that was introduced by labor feminists and their allies, which was a much broader bill, they wanted equal pay for what they called equal pay for comparable worth.
By defining equal pay broadly, you would cover the majority of women. So you would cover women whose jobs were not exactly the same as men, but who had comparable responsibilities and skills. And part of the reason this was so important to them is that they were concerned with what I would call fair pay or wage justice.
And part of achieving that would be to end discrimination against women on the basis of sex. But part of that would also be to raise the pay of those who were at the bottom of the income ladder. And that has been and still is disproportionately women.
So they were pushing also for living wages for women, what we would call minimum wages. And I don't think it was an accident that the bill that was finally passed in 1963 was an Amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. The labor feminists and their allies, led by women like Esther Peterson, believed that the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 was one of the most important laws for raising women's pay. And they fought to extend and improve that legislation.
The Equal Pay Amendment that they were able to push for and achieve in part in 1963 certainly raised women's wages. And it was a important victory. John F. Kennedy called it a significant step. But they saw it as just a first step.
MATT PORTER: Can you tell us a little bit about who Esther Peterson was and how she got involved in this labor feminist movement?
DR. DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: She's a fascinating figure. She was raised in a Mormon Republican household. Born in 1906. But over the course of her life, she was active in feminist causes and labor causes and civil rights causes. And by the 1960s, she had become the highest ranking woman in the Kennedy Administration.
She was very important in the actual passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963. And so she certainly needs to be recognized for that achievement and better known. But it's also interesting to think about the broader context and what allowed her to make progress in the early '60s.
She was part of a group that came together after World War II that was connected to the Women's Bureau. It was a labor advisory committee that-- Frieda Miller, who was the director of the Women's Bureau at the time set up. And it brought together a lot of the top women leaders in the labor movement.
And we have to use our imagination and think back to this mid-century moment when the labor movement was-- represented 35% of the workforce and was very powerful in terms of what it could negotiate economically with the largest corporations, but also, its political empower.
This group really proposed broad changes and reforms, not only for women, but for low income workers and workers of all races. The group sustained its efforts into the '50s. But with the new Republican administration in 1952, the group transformed into a group that wasn't so connected with the Women's Bureau and called itself the National Committee for Equal Pay.
And that group really sustained the Equal Pay efforts in the 1950s. They were able to pass a number of state laws. By the early '60s, there were equal pay laws in some 20 states. And this was a group of labor women, but also women who were leaders in the YWCA, in the AAUW, the American Association of University Women, in women's clubs.
So they were very important. By the end of the '50s, there was a real sense that there was momentum possible on the issue of equal pay. Esther Peterson, who had spent a decade abroad in Europe, had come back. She was the principal female lobbyist for the AFL-CIO.
And she brought together a group of women to push for equal pay as well as a broad agenda for women's status and women's rights. She was also the principal person behind Kennedy's presidential commission on the Status of Women, which she was able to secure an enactment setting up that commission in 1961.
MATT PORTER: So let's briefly touch on that. Esther Peterson, she campaigned for President Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. She found a place in the administration to be an advocate. And she sets up this Presidential Commission. What was the purpose of the Commission, the issues that it would look at, who made it up, and ultimately, what did it recommend?
DR. DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: The Commission idea, like the idea for equal pay, has a long history. There was a group that put forward a bill for a commission on women's status that was part of a larger initiative in 1947. They were inspired, in part, by Truman's commission on civil rights around that same time and also the UN Commission for Women. So it had both inspiration for what was going on domestically, but globally.
So they pursued that idea, and again, with the new Democratic administration being elected in the '60s, they thought the time was right. Esther Peterson had been instrumental in putting together a broad group that helped campaign for Kennedy and Johnson.
She had also known JFK when he was a Congressman in 1946. And she had been a lobbyist for the Amalgamated Clothing Union. She also knew well Arthur Goldberg, who was Secretary of Labor, and had been a former counsel to the CIO.
So she held a meeting in her office. Brought together the women she had worked with for decades. They were powerfully placed in some of the top unions. And they began to pursue not only the Commission, but a bill for equal pay. They introduced a bill in 1961. There was also a competing bill for equal pay, which they did not support because it was narrower and did not meet their hopes for a strong bill that would cover the majority of women.
They had to make some compromises along the way, but they made progress. In 1962, there were many unions that lobbied for the bill and women's groups that came out in support. The opposition included the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups who argued that, in many cases, women were not as productive as men. They were not as reliable as men. They should not be paid the same as men.
It was also clear that they were afraid that such a bill would cause them to lose profit. They would have to raise wages. But that opposition was not as strong as the supporters who believed that equal pay was a matter of simple justice. And that, also, it was good for the economy. There was a belief, at the time, that when you raise pay, you actually are stimulating economic growth.
And that it's important to have a fair pay system so that you don't have competition unfairly. So equal pay was also seen as something that would benefit men as well as women.
MATT PORTER: So as we get to the final bill, there was a compromise. And rather than or equal pay for comparable work, which is sort of what Esther Peterson and her advocates wanted the language to be, it ended up being equal pay for equal work. And how did that distinction weaken the Equal Pay Act in a way that it continues even today?
DR. DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: Very few women do exactly the same jobs as men. Our society is still very much, in terms of the labor force, one that's segregated by sex. So men and women do different kinds of work. That was true in the 1960s, and it's still true today. There's been some progress, but the problem certainly persists.
Esther Peterson and the women who were pushing the broader notion of equal pay believed that you needed a bill that would allow women who weren't doing exactly the same work as men, but whose jobs involved comparable skill should also achieve justice in what they were paid.
They asked, why should a woman who sits on the line packing fruit be paid less than the man who sweeps the floor? These two people are not doing the exact same job. But certainly, there should be some fairness in wage setting.
So they wanted a bill that would eliminate wage bias in the setting of wages. And a bill like that would affect not just the small proportion of women who were doing exactly the same jobs as men, but a broader swath of women.
MATT PORTER: So for Esther Peterson looking back at the Equal Pay Act after it was signed, how did the Equal Pay Act end up changing things for the better? And how did Peterson look on the Act after it was passed?
DR. DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: Esther was very much of a pragmatic visionary in the sense that she wanted to find ways of making progress even if they were incremental. But she never lost this broader vision of where we should be heading.
So she thought of equal pay as a first step, a starting point. And she applauded it as a victory. She was also very clear that it had been a compromise and it was insufficient. She believed that there would be improvements that would come later.
And even though there was disappointment in having to accept a compromise bill, one that was much narrower, they believed that further change was possible. They did make some advances, certainly, with ending and diminishing race discrimination. They pushed very hard and were crucial to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
They also pushed for amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act. And the 1963 amendments were quite substantial. They broadened the act to cover many of the jobs that had been excluded. Many of those jobs were ones done primarily by people of color.
But the 1966 amendments also expanded the law to include a lot of the low paying service jobs in retail and hospitality and other sectors. So for Esther Peterson and her allies, achieving equal pay or equality in the wages between men and women, was very important. But also, raising the wages of those at the bottom was crucial.
MATT PORTER: I wish we could keep talking about this all day, but I do only have a couple more questions that I think we have time for. And the one I want to make sure we talk about is the 1960s, when you look at leadership positions in the White House or people who are in public leadership positions, almost entirely men. So what was the significance of having women like Esther Peterson in the administration, even if a lot of the work was quote "behind the scenes?"
What was the significance of having her there and having people like her in that administration? And did it help pave the way for future Esther Peterson's or future women in leadership in politics that came after her?
DR. DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: She was somebody who operated behind the scenes, certainly. But she also had a very public presence. And the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women is, I think, one of the most important moments in the history of women's movements in terms of setting off a much larger movement and campaigns for women's equality.
So the commission itself, the report that they took two years to write, actually had very far seeing policies that I think we would do well to come back to and reconsider. And these include universal childcare, making that available to women, but also broad notions of equal pay. The commission was very clear that workers, particularly women, needed access to paid leave, sick leave, but also, parental and medical leave.
So they had many proposals that are back on the agenda today. The commission also really helped jumpstart the mass feminist movement that emerged in the late '60s. Once the Federal Commission issued its report, there were groups in all the states that came together-- women's groups-- to try to implement and further some of these reports on the state level.
So that became a really important institutional forum that allowed women to come together and talk about their second class citizenship and begin to organize for change. So the National Organization of Women that is born in 1966, they had been close to the commission movement. But also, other groups as well.
So I think that's a really important part of the story of the rise of what we think of as second wave feminism.
MATT PORTER: Thank you so much for taking us through the history of the Equal Pay Act. And not only that, but seeing where we've come since then and how the President's Commission of Women launched the women's movement we've seen today. Thank you, Dorothy Sue, for joining us today.
DR. DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: Thank you, Matt.
[GENTLE MUSIC]
MATT PORTER: The history of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 is only the first part of our story. Join us for part two airing tomorrow where we'll look at how the Equal Pay Act helped shape the last 60 years of law and policy regarding the equal treatment of women and others in schools, universities, and the workplace.
We'll reflect on its successes and the work still yet to be done to ensure equal pay becomes a reality for all workers. You can also visit today's episode page at jfklibrary.org/jfk35 for more resources about the history of the Equal Pay Act, including hearing from Esther Peterson herself in an oral history found here at the JFK Library.
If you have questions or story ideas, email us jfk35pod@jfklfoundation.org, or tweet at us jfklibrary using the hashtag jfk35. If you liked what you heard today, please consider subscribing to our podcast or leaving us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
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