Dear Workshop Participants,
Thank you for reading this piece. “Working for Change: The NOW Sears Campaign and the Politics of Feminist Activism” is actually a much-revised version of my undergraduate honors thesis. I certainly never expected to revisit the topic, but the more I’ve thought about what (little) historians are saying about the postwar interactions of feminist activists, businesses, and state compliance agencies, the more this story seems to explain something significant.
My question to the workshop is, does the paper as it currently stands adequately pose and answer an important question that could make it a decent article? Could the piece work as part of a dissertation on postwar women’s work and activism in Chicago? The deeper question I’d like to address, and will need more evidence to answer, is how, when and why did second wave feminism abandon working class women and their particular concerns? How far does this piece go toward answering it, and what’s missing? More specifically, is the balance between information on the Sears campaign and information on the national politics of NOW, within which the campaign became something of a lightning rod, appropriately drawn? I would like to avoid providing a blow-by-blow account of the faction fight, but would more specific information about that or anything else be helpful?
Thanks very much! I look forward to your feedback.
Katie
Working for Change: The NOW Sears Campaign and the Politics of Feminist Activism
Katherine Turk, January 2008
In May of 1975, the brewing tension between the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Sears, Roebuck and Company came to a head at the annual Sears stockholder meeting. Years of Chicago-based grassroots activism against Sears, the nation’s second-largest employer of women, yielded a highly organized and rapidly expanding national anti-discrimination campaign. At the meeting, NOW members commanded attention. On the sidewalk below, outside the massive Sears Tower, they held an impassioned rally and gave interviews to sympathetic journalists. Inside, NOW representatives,armed with supporting statistics to back their claims, directed critical questions to Sears’ executives. They also accused Sears of failing to promote female employees and systematically excluding them from all but the lowest paid retail and clerical jobs. “I think we’ve managed to put equal opportunity on Sears’ agenda,” one NOW member told the Chicago Tribune.[1]
Inspired by similar past victories and heartened by recent gains, NOW members believed their three-year campaign would result in a government-mandated settlement of over $100 million for Sears’ female and minority workers. They fought on behalf of all women at Sears, from the working class to the professional, for movement out of the pink collar sphere where women were clustered and for improvements within it.[2] In the early 1970s, NOW’s efforts were helping to reset the parameters of acceptable employment policy in America.
Despite its potential, the NOW Sears campaign died just a few months later when its advocates in the Chicago chapter of NOW were ousted from prominence in the national organization. The Sears effort fell far short of its ultimate objective: to deliver a lock-tight case to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and to maintain pressure on both parties until its resolution, as NOW had done in previous similar cases.[3] In 1975, NOW shifted almost all of its resources to passing an Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution, thereby abandoning most explicitly employment-oriented activism.
The 1986 court case that emerged from the confrontation between NOW and Sears, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears, has received significant scholarly attention. For the most part, historians have suggested that the trial itself was the crucible in which victory and defeat were determined.[4] This scholarship obscures both the major significance of the campaign and the root cause of its failure. Seismic shifts within the feminist movement itself resulted in NOW’s sudden withdrawal from the Sears campaign ten years before the case ever made it to court. Notably, just as NOW’s attack on Sears reached its zenith, a new faction came to power in NOW—a group of feminists arguing that women’s social equality was best secured in the political arena, not the realm of employment. Rival groups of NOW members harbored competing ideas for the path to social equality, and this internal struggle cut off the lifeblood of the push to force the retail giant to follow employment law. The NOW Sears campaign thus unfolded at a major turning point in American feminist politics.
The fate of the Sears campaign reveals deep tactical and ideological divisions among second wave feminists that our current conceptualization of the movement cannot explain. Historians have argued that the heady, free-wheeling days of the late 1960s and early 1970s constituted the golden age of the second wave. It was, however, a veneer of buoyant unity, as differences of race, class, age and sexual orientation created significant divisions within the movement. Some who believed that causes related to their personal identities were ignored by what they claimed was the white, moderate, middle-class bias of NOW, the bulwark organization of liberal feminism, either avoided NOW altogether, left to start their own organizations, or worked to push NOW’s agenda toward their personal causes.[5] Differences of identity allegedly facilitated the shift from liberal to cultural feminism. Scholars have argued that the movement slogan, “the personal is political,” encouraged women to act on their own behalf, advocating based on aspects of their identities that had arguably been marginalized within mainstream politics. The proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), designed to secure the rights of the individual, fits neatly into this paradigm.
Yet, the internal rift within NOW that shifted the organization from its multi-issue orientation to its near-total focus on passing the ERA in 1975 was fought among women who differed little from each other: most were white, middle-aged, middle-class, and heterosexual. Identity politics were not at stake. Rather, their differences were ideological, shaped by experience, place and worldview. Thus, the ‘kitchen table’ conservatives identified by Lisa McGirr, who were motivated by local concerns to join national politics, had a parallel among feminist activists.[6] The feminism that bubbled up in Chicago, causing the members of Chicago NOW to push for cross-class organization and massive class action employment suits as well as political objectives such as the ERA, was a homegrown ideology dependent upon the particular circumstances of the chapter’s conception and evolution. Second wave feminist ideology was surely rooted in identity, but the particularity of circumstance and experience also powerfully shaped feminist consciousness, priorities, and loyalty. Considering these aspects of feminist politics, exploring beneath divergent tactical priorities brings to light competing notions of the sources of women’s oppression and different visions of liberalism among feminists. Did social equality first require an actively leveled playing field, or legally mandated free competition? Ideological conflicts over individual and collective rights thus powerfully animated the second wave.
This pivotal conflict between the members of Chicago NOW and their rivals in the national organization, which erupted as the Sears campaign reached its apex, was whether women’s social rights could best be secured in the economic or the political arena. Also at stake was whether the free machinations of the capitalist economy produced unequal outcomes requiring active protection of the vulnerable. While the debate over whether absolute legal equality will help or harm women is as old as feminism itself, the demise of the ERA, the second wave’s most dear priority following its 1975 reorientation, is one of the most tragic stories in the history of American feminism.[7] But obscured in this canonical tale is insight into what feminism lost when NOW shifted all of its financial and cultural resources to the formal political arena. Some feminists at the time argued that legally enforced equality could not effectively counteract the inequalities perpetually generated by a capitalist economy; they fought for more attention to the material needs of the most vulnerable women, not less. The Sears campaign represented the last drive for a cross-class feminist movement focused on a broad range of working women’s concerns—from access at the top to uplift at the bottom—and thus, the road not ultimately taken by second wave feminism. Its demise cemented the failure of 1970s feminism to make cross-class, concrete gains toward political and economic equality for all women.[8] The circumstances of the campaign’s inception and the infighting that determined its abandonment long before the famous trial reveal a hidden dimension of second wave politics in the face of an intransigent employer, a reluctant government agency, and uncertainty among liberal feminists themselves.
The National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, was devised to have local and national components that worked in tandem. The national organization encouraged and facilitated the emergence of state and local chapters, overseeing and monitoring their progress. Catherine Conroy, a union organizer and the founder of the Chicago chapter of NOW, was amazed at its early growth there. “NOW grew by itself,” she recalled. “We just have to knock people on the heads to join unions, but NOW—you can’t keep them away. They bother you to death, call you up, call you back. I couldn’t believe it.”[9] By 1973, NOW had over 40,000 members and six hundred local chapters, some of which were overseas.[10]
In the five years between the launching of Chicago NOW in 1967 and its first action against Sears in 1972, it grew to become one of the most independent NOW chapters in the nation. Some women joined NOW out of a desire to affect national policy. In Chicago, however, most joined the movement to ameliorate material grievances within their own lives or local communities.[11] This was a reflection of the particular brand of grassroots, cross-class feminism already well established in Chicago by 1970. As the industrial center of the Midwest, Chicago was a major urban area; yet, members of Chicago NOW were not as close to the seats of national political or economic power as were feminists in New York or Washington DC. In addition, many Chicagoans were transplants from smaller Midwestern cities and towns. Four of the earliest leaders of Chicago NOW, for example, hailed from Wisconsin. For the Chicagoans, politics was local. A social revolution had to start with the immediate and the material, and many Chicago feminists were focused on practice, not theory.
Chicago feminists took on a variety of pressing local issues. Health-oriented organizations such as Jane, an underground abortion service, offered assistance to all, allowing members (many of whom learned to perform abortions) to exercise their politics through local, direct initiatives. According to one participant, “We in Jane were fortunate that we were able to create a project that met an immediate, critical need and, at the same time, put into practice our vision of how the world ought to be.”[12] Other groups such as the Midwest Academy and the West Side Group were run by trained community organizers who worked to empower individuals to solve local problems.[13]
Both through formal academics and informal liberation “schools,” Chicago feminists found opportunities and eager audiences to spread the word about their movement. As of 1970, about a dozen colleges and universities in Chicago offered courses in women’s studies, many of which overflowed in enrollment.[14] Members of the feminist community spoke out against sex discrimination in academia when women at the University of Chicago held a day long conference addressing issues facing women in university settings.[15] Chicago feminists also targeted the formal education system more directly. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, one of two major ‘liberation schools’ nationwide, was founded in 1971 to “correct women’s mis-education.” To eliminate women’s general belief that certain types of knowledge were off-limits to them, the liberation school taught courses ranging from auto mechanics and health to economics and family planning to more than one thousand women citywide.[16]
The most influential organization in setting the tone for the distinctly Chicago-style feminist activism, however, was the YWCA. The YWCA had always provided institutional support for local organizations, but in the early 1970s, the Y became the seat of the grassroots feminist movement in Chicago. Serving more than 163,000 local women and children in 1973, the Loop YWCA accommodated a striking variety of women’s causes. Middle-class women’s organizations such as Chicago Women for Flexible Careers, the Illinois Women’s Political Caucus, and the American Association of University Women held meetings there, while working class women received free legal advice and welfare and daycare assistance. In 1970, the Chicago YWCA hired its first African American Executive Director, Doris V. Wilson, who recommitted the organization to serving women of all backgrounds. She said, “We want every professional woman or ADC [welfare] mother to believe that the YWCA should exist. We are a women’s movement and we want to serve the needs of women. We are not about to get hung up in status and social strata. We will articulate the stance of women; we will advocate social change, and we will work for new institutional arrangements that deal with urgent problems.” Chicago NOW was among the many local organizations that held its early meetings at the Loop YWCA, under Wilson’s auspices.[17] The YWCA epitomized the direct-action, participatory vision of feminism that the members of Chicago NOW brought to their organization.
The records of Chicago NOW provide for a composite of its membership in the early 1970s. More than half of members were between ages 22 and 30, and about a quarter were between 31 and 40. About half were married, half were single, and about one-quarter had children. Three-quarters had attended college, and forty percent had or were working toward an advanced degree. Most had full-time employment, but their occupations varied widely. The highest proportion of members classified themselves as clerical or secretarial workers; the second and third most common occupations were writer and educator, and there was a handful of middle class professionals. These data suggest that members of Chicago NOW would benefit directly from employment-oriented activism; yet, members expressed interest in a variety of feminist causes. Among new chapter members in 1974, about forty percent believed that employment issues should be the paramount concern of NOW, about thirty percent selected the ERA, and twenty percent selected education; most selected more than one of these causes. An overwhelming similarity among all survey respondents was unwillingness to participate in the national organization. Fewer than half of members in 1973 indicated their willingness to work even sporadically for the national organization despite the fact that NOW’s national office was in Chicago; only 14% of new members in 1974 were interested in attending the NOW national convention.[18] Thus, the prototypical member of Chicago NOW was a college-educated clerical worker in her late 20s who favored local activism.
Some members of Chicago NOW came to feminism through their involvement with the New Left, following a pattern identified by the historians Sarah Evans and Doug Rossinow. Both Mary-Ann Lupa, President of Chicago NOW from 1969 to 1971, and Mary Jean Collins, President of Chicago NOW from 1971 to 1973, demonstrated for African American civil rights as undergraduates at a small Milwaukee liberal arts school in the 1960s. Social injustices that kept African Americans from full citizenship equally plagued American women, they determined. Each joined Chicago NOW upon moving south from Wisconsin. Other women followed a more direct route to feminist activism. Anne Ladky, President of Chicago NOW from 1973 to 1975, found that her academic success alongside her male peers at Northwestern University did not translate into an equal shot at career opportunities in the wider world. Women whose grades paralleled or exceeded men’s in business or finance courses could only find jobs as bank tellers or secretaries. Ladky struggled, but eventually found a position in the publishing world that promised upward mobility. One of the women in her work carpool, equally disgusted by women’s lack of employment opportunity, was a member of Chicago NOW. Ladky began attending meetings and joined the group soon thereafter.
One of NOW’s strongest assets on both the local and national levels in the early 1970s was its ability to accommodate members who came to feminism from these different paths. NOW members examined their own lives and brought to the group their own perspectives and grievances. This gradual awakening allowed local chapters to adapt to the needs of their own members. “There were so many wonderful things going on in the early 70s in NOW,” said Anne Ladky, President of Chicago NOW from 1973 to 1975. “We wondered, if we take a feminist view of x, be it education, religion, economics, what would that look like?”[19] Another early member recalled the ways NOW altered her perception of the world around her. “NOW helped us a great deal and sensitized us to little clues that were everywhere—including the way organization charts listed men by their initials or names, but women by Mrs. or Miss, clearly noting whether or not they were married.”[20]