A Matter of Simple Justice. Lee Stout
what needed to be said. As she later told the Citizens’ Advisory Council on the Status of Women, this was “a movement to achieve a fair share of the nation’s economic rewards and political leadership—a share to which our numbers, our education, our training, and our capacities as human beings fully entitle us.”5
Massive changes in American society, such as the women’s movement, are woven together from many historical threads. The people, events, and activities this work discusses are but one part of that process. However, their part has largely been forgotten. By capturing these memories in oral history, I have tried to rescue an overlooked but important aspect of those developments. Vera Glaser was just one catalyst for this change; she was not alone.
FIGURE 1
President Nixon’s second press conference, on February 6, 1969, at which Vera Glaser asked “The Question.” White House Photograph files, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
Barbara Hackman Franklin became the key White House figure in recruiting women for executive positions in the federal government in the administration of Richard M. Nixon. In her two years as staff assistant to the president, she was responsible for recruiting more than three times as many women executives for the government as in any previous administration. The story of these “few, good women” is to a great extent her story as well. Thus, this book is organized in two parts: the first provides a narrative overview of the evolution of the “women’s program” and Barbara Franklin’s leadership of it, the second tells us more about those “few good women” as they speak out on a variety of topics including their backgrounds, recruitment, and experiences in government.
But before we turn to the Nixon administration and the remarkable experiences Barbara Franklin had there, we should consider several historical threads that led us to that significant but little known early point in President Nixon’s first term.
PART ONE
Advancing Women’s Role in Government: Barbara Hackman Franklin
CHAPTER ONE
Today we rarely give the gender of a working person a second thought. We are as accustomed to seeing female police officers as we are to seeing male nurses, female doctors, and male elementary school teachers. This is not to say that the old traditions of certain jobs being predominantly male or female have completely disappeared; women still fill the majority of positions in teaching, nursing, and libraries, for example. Rather, it is the certainty that most jobs will be composed exclusively of men or women that has disappeared. There are still some glass ceilings, but in the 2008 election, we almost had a woman as a major party candidate for president and, for the second time, we did have a woman as a major party candidate for vice president.
Other benchmarks have also been reached: women now constitute more than half of the American workforce. They are the majority of university graduates and the majority of professional workers in the United States. There are now women CEOs in many important companies. It could well be that the growing economic power of women is the biggest social change of the last half century. Nevertheless, the advancement of women and the concerns of the American women’s movement have focused as much on the achievement of civil rights for women as they have on equal participation in the economy and the job market.
The evolving role of American women in our society has a fascinating history, but it is generally accepted that World War II marked a turning point. Some 350,000 to 400,000 women eventually served in uniform during the war as nurses, in communications, in staff positions, and, on the home front, in all manner of jobs, as well as in the Women Airforce Service Pilots, who despite their high-risk duties were recognized as official veterans only in 1977. Several million more women joined the workforce to help support the war effort. “Rosie the Riveter” is their symbol, but women served in many other roles in manufacturing, farm labor, and office work as well as in traditional female-dominated professions, such as nursing and teaching. Compared with these millions, however, few women had cracked the barriers to enter business management and other professions.
FIGURE 2
In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman candidate for vice president from a major party. Alice Marshall Women’s History Collection, Penn State Harrisburg Library.
FIGURE 3
A World War II army recruiting poster for women focused on the many roles they could fill. Alice Marshall Women’s History Collection, Penn State Harrisburg Library.
From 1940 to 1945, women as a percentage of the workforce grew from 26 percent to 36 percent; in real numbers, this meant an increase from 13 million to 19.3 million women. By the end of 1946, however, more than half of those 6.3 million additional women had left the workforce, largely because of the men returning from the war. Some had taken jobs out of patriotism, others because they needed the money or wanted something interesting to do. Now many were happily returning to their families and homes, although some did not leave voluntarily. Although the culture still saw women’s primary role as wife and mother, women had changed; the idea of the working mother, either out of necessity or preference, would increasingly become commonplace and gradually be accepted as normal over the next thirty years.
In that great resumption of prewar normalcy, between 1945 and 1950, women as a portion of the workforce fell back from 36 percent to 29 percent, but in the 1950s it would gradually begin to climb again, reaching 35 percent in 1960 and 42 percent in 1970. However, women were still consigned, because of sex segregation or stereotyping, to lower paying positions—one study found three-quarters of all women even in the late 1950s working in “women only,” low-wage jobs.
Although more women than men completed high school, college attendance on the part of women lagged behind. In 1951, women made up only a third of all college students, but from 1952 on, women’s enrollment grew faster than men’s. The tipping point was reached in 1979, when, nationally, out of 11.6 million college students, women outnumbered men by more than 200,000. The gap continued to widen, and by 1995, it was nearly 1.6 million.
While more women were earning degrees in the 1950s and 1960s, the concerns of both working women and homemakers were growing as well. The G.I. Bill of Rights, which educated hundreds of thousands of veterans (male and female), also helped those new graduates, now working in America’s booming postwar economy, to buy new homes. Some of them were in suburban housing developments, where men would leave, often with the family car, to commute to work. Women stayed home to raise their children, aided by electric and gas appliances in a new world of labor-saving devices. Although wives were more frequently in the job market now to help support the increasing costs of meeting all the family’s expectations and desires in this new consumer-driven society, they tended to be looking for a job, rather than a career.
FIGURE 4
Women student debate team members record speeches to advance their work in forensics, 1948. Penn State University Archives.
Still, many suburban women found themselves isolated to a degree that was not common before in city or town environments; they began to feel frustrated in their existence as homemaker and mother. Betty Friedan, in a 1960 article in Good Housekeeping, found “a strange stirring, a dissatisfied groping, a yearning, a search that is going on in the minds of women,” looking for a “chance for self-fulfillment outside the home.” Friedan did not have a name for this phenomenon yet, but two years later she filled out the