HIST 1152 American History since 1877 Primary Source Readings 6 & 7: The Triumph of the Right & Recent Events

Testimony Before Senate Hearings on the Equal Rights Amendment

Testimony Before Senate Hearings on the Equal Rights Amendment Gloria Steinem

 

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification

 

This is proposed Equal Rights Amendment - in its entirely - written by women’s rights activists Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman and submitted to Congress by the National Women’s Party in 1923. Paul and fellow women’s rights activist, Lucy Burns, founded the National Women’s Party in 1916, as an alternative to the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWA), which Paul and other feminists believed was too conservative.

The ERA first went in front of Congress in 1923, three years after women gained the right to vote. Many people opposed the amendment in 1923, including many prominent women such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams. They believed women were different than men and therefore should have special protections such as restricted working hours and maternity leave. 

Paul and Eastman believed in equal rights for women and men. The National Women’s

Party and other women’s rights organization, sent the Equal Rights Amendment to Congress every year from 1923 until 1972. The Republican Party included the ERA in their platform from 1940 until 1980. The Democratic Party did not include the ERA in its platform until 1972, primarily because labor unions opposed the amendment on grounds that it would undermine protections for labor. 

In 1966, Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray founded the National Organization for

Women (NOW) to advocate for women’s rights. The 1964 Civil Rights Act barred discrimination based on gender as well as race, and NOW fought for legislation ensuring equal pay, non-discrimination in employment, access to education, and other rights. At the encouragement of Alice Paul, NOW renewed the campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment. 

In February 1970, Michigan Representative Martha Griffins reintroduced the ERA to the House floor. Afraid the amendment would be ignored again, twenty NOW leaders disrupt hearings of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, demanding the committee hold hearings about the ERA. Hearings started in May of 1972. Some of the most memorable testimony came from Gloria Steinem who argued that opposition to the ERA revealed deep misperceptions about women’s capabilities despite factual evidence of inequitable treatment and in turn, promoted male domination. 

Toledo native Gloria Steinem has been a “writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organizer” for over sixty years.1 She first gained national attention after she went undercover in the early 1960s as a “Playboy bunny” at one of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs.2 She spent the 1960s fighting for Civil Rights of every kind, but was particularly active in the Women’s Rights movement and proudly called herself a feminist (as well we all should). In 1970, Steinem co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. with African American activist Dorothy Pittman Hughes. 

That same year, Steinem testified at the Congressional Hearing about the Equal Rights Amendment. The amendment passed the House and Senate in 1971 with overwhelming bipartisan support from Congress and the American public. The ERA passed in thirtyfive of the necessary thirty eight states by 1977. The campaign against the ERA began as soon as it passed Congress, primarily led by Republican women, most notably, Phyllis Schlafly, who you will read shortly. Schlafly’s anti-ERA campaign was so successful that several states rescinded passage, leaving the amendment without the necessary votes by the 1982 deadline. Conservative politicians, clergy, and organizations spent the decade in-between waging a relentless campaign against women’s rights, claiming feminism would destroy the family, turn women into lesbians and/or witches, and humiliate men.3 

Many people over the last decade or so have called for the 1982 deadline to be lifted, and Congress to call another vote. As I write this in January, the Virginia state legislature moved passage of the ERA out of their working committee for a vote on the by the whole state Congress. If it passes in Virginia, we have the necessary thirty-eight states. We need Congress to lift the 1982 deadline and allow another vote on the amendment. So far, the Republican Controlled Congress has vehemently denied allowing another vote. And so we wait.4 

Below is an excerpt of Steinem’s 1972 testimony before Congress.5 

 

 

 

My name is Gloria Steinem. I am a writer and editor, and I am currently a member of the Policy Council of the Democratic National Committee. And, I work regularly with the lowest-paid workers in the country, the migrant workers, men, women, and children both in California and in my own State of New York.

 

 

  1. Quoted from Gloria Steinem’s webpage. 
  2. Gloria Steinem, “A Playboy Bunny’s Tale: Show’s First Expose for Thinking People,Show magazine, June, 1963. If you are unfamiliar with Hugh Hefner, Playboy magazine, Playboy Clubs, and Playboy Bunnies (not to be confused with the Playmates featured in the magazine), here’s a good article: Bruce Handy, “A Bunny Thing Happened on the Way to the Club: An Oral History of Playboy Clubs,Vanity Fair, May 2011. 
  3. In 1992, televangelist Pat Robertson told his followers, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." Note the “destroy capitalism” aspect of his diatribe here. Noncompliant women are a threat to the entire economic and social structure of civilization.  
  4. Legal Challenges Await as Virginia Gets Ready to Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment,” CNN, January 11, 2020.  5 Gloria Steinem, Testimony Before Congress, 1972. 

I am here in support of the equal rights amendment. Before I get on with the statement I would like to point out that Mrs. Wolfgang[1] does not disavow the principle of equality only disagrees on the matter of tactic. I believe that she is giving up a long-term gain for a short-term holding action. Some protective legislation is gradually proving to be unenforceable or contrary to title VII.[2] It gives poor women jobs but serves to keep them poor. Restrictions on working hours, for instance, may keep women in the assembly line from becoming foremen. No one is trying to say that there is no difference between men and women, only as I will discuss more in my statement that the differences between, the differences within the groups, male and female, are much, much greater than the differences between the two groups. Therefore, requirements can only be sensibly suited to the requirements of the job itself.

 

During twelve years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country. I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places, and turned away from apartment rentals; all for the clearly-stated, sole reason that I am a woman. And all without the legal remedies available to blacks and other minorities. I have been excluded from professional groups, writing assignments on so-called “unfeminine” subjects such as politics, full participation in the

Democratic Party, jury duty, and even from such small male privileges as discounts on airline fares. Most important to me, I have been denied a society in which women are encouraged, or even allowed to think of themselves as first-class citizens and responsible human beings.

 

However, after 2 years of researching the status of American women, I have discovered that in reality, I am very, very lucky. Most women, both wage-earners and housewives, routinely suffer more humiliation and injustice than I do.

 

As a freelance writer, I don’t work in the male-dominated hierarchy of an office. (Women, like blacks and other visibly-different minorities, do better in individual professions such as the arts, sports, or domestic work; anything in which they don’t have authority over white males.) I am not one of the millions of women who must support a family. Therefore, I haven’t had to go on welfare because there are no day-care centers for my children while I work, and I haven’t had to submit to the humiliating welfare inquiries about my private and sexual life, inquiries from which men are exempt. I haven’t had to brave the sex bias of labor unions and employers, only to see my family subsist on a median salary 40 percent less than the male median salary. I hope this committee will hear the personal, daily injustices suffered by many women– professionals and day laborers, women housebound by welfare as well as suburbia. We have all been silent for too long. But we won’t be silent anymore.

 

The truth is that all our problems stem from the same sex based myths. We may appear before you as white radicals or the middle-aged middleclass or black soul sisters, but we are all sisters in fighting against these outdated myths. Like racial myths, they have been reflected in our laws. Let me list a few.

 

That women are biologically inferior to men. In fact, an equally good case can be made for the reverse. Women live longer than men, even when the men are not subject to business pressures. Women survived Nazi concentration camps better, keep cooler heads in emergencies currently studied by disaster-researchers, are protected against heart attacks by their female sex hormones, and are so much more durable at every stage of life that nature must conceive 20 to 50 percent more males in order to keep some balance going.

 

Man’s hunting activities are forever being pointed to as tribal proof of superiority. But while he was hunting, women built houses, tilled the fields, developed animal husbandry, and perfected language. Men, being all alone in the bush, often developed into a creature as strong as women, fleeter of foot, but not very bright.

 

However, I don’t want to prove the superiority of one sex to another. That would only be repeating a male mistake.[3] English scientists once definitively proved, after all, that the English were descended from the angels, while the Irish were descended from the apes: it was the rationale for England’s domination of Ireland for more than a century. The point is that science is used to support current myth and economics almost as much as the church was.

 

What we do know is that the difference between two races or two sexes is much smaller than the differences to be found within each group. Therefore, in spite of the slide show on female inferiorities that I understand was shown to you yesterday, the law makes much more sense when it treats individuals, not groups bundled together by some condition of birth.

 

A word should be said about Dr. Freud. the great 19th century perpetuator of female inferiority.[4]  Many of the differences he assumed to be biological, and therefore changeless, have turned out to be societal, and have already changed. Penis Envy, for instance, is clinically disappearing.[5] Just as black people envied white skins, 19th century women envied penises. A second-class group envies whatever it is that makes the first-class group first class.

 

Another myth, that women are already treated equally in this society. I am sure there has been ample testimony to prove that equal pay for equal work, equal chance for advancement, and equal training or encouragement is obscenely scarce in every field, even those–like food and fashion industries–that are supposedly “feminine.”[6]

 

A deeper result of social and legal injustice, however, is what sociologists refer to as

“Internalized Aggression.” Victims of aggression absorb the myth of their own inferiority, and come to believe that their group is in fact second class. Even when they themselves realize they are not second class, they may still think their group is, thus the tendency to be the only Jew in the club, the only black woman on the block, the only woman in the office.

 

Women suffer this second class treatment from the moment they are born. They are expected to be, rather than achieve, to function biologically rather than learn. A brother, whatever his intellect, is more likely to get the family’s encouragement and education money, while girls are often pressured to conceal ambition and intelligence, to “Uncle Tom.”[7]

 

I interviewed a New York public school teacher who told me about a black teenager’s desire to be a doctor. With all the barriers in mind, she suggested kindly that he be a veterinarian instead.

 

The same day, a high school teacher mentioned a girl who wanted to be a doctor. The teacher said, “How about a nurse?”

 

Teachers, parents, and the Supreme Court may exude a protective, well-meaning rationale, but limiting the individual’s ambition is doing no one a favor. Certainly not this country; it needs all the talent it can get.

 

Another myth, that American women hold great economic power. Fifty-one percent of all shareholders in this country are women. That is a favorite male-chauvinist statistic. However, the number of shares they hold is so small that the total is only 18 percent of all shares. Even those holdings are often controlled by men.

 

Similarly, only 5 percent of all the people in the country who receive $10,000 a year or more, earned or otherwise, are women. And that includes the famous rich widows.13 The constantly

 

increasing again for the first time in 100 years. As expected, the wage gap is wider for African American and Latinx women, and as this article points out, the increase in the wage gap is not because women’s salaries are decreasing, but rather because women are more likely than men to do unpaid/unsalaried labor in the workplace. This is especially true for women of color. The article also shows how the United States compares to other countries regarding the gender wage/pay gap. Spoiler alert: not good. The US has a massive gender wage/pay gap compared to the rest of the world. In fact, this article quotes economists who say it will take another century for the US to achieve gender parity. That’s your great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, in 3018. 

repeated myth of our economic power seems less testimony to our real power than to the resentment of what little power we do have.

 

Another myth, that children must have full-time mothers. American mothers spend more time with their homes and children than those of any other society we know about. In the past, joint families, servants, a prevalent system in which grandparents raised the children, or family field work in the agrarian systems–all these factors contributed more to child care than the laborsaving devices of which we are so proud.

 

The truth is that most American children seem to be suffering from too much mother, and too little father. Part of the program of Women’s Liberation is a return of fathers to their children. If laws permit women equal work and pay opportunities, men will then be relieved of their role as sole breadwinner. Fewer ulcers, fewer hours of meaningless work, equal responsibility for his own children: these are a few of the reasons that Women’s Liberation is Men’s Liberation, too.

 

As for the psychic health of the children, studies show that the quality of time spent by parents is more important than the quantity. The most damaged children were not those whose mothers worked, but those whose mothers preferred to work but stayed home out of role-playing desire to be a “good mother.”

 

Another myth, that the women’s movement is not political, won’t last, or is somehow not

“serious.”

 

When black people leave their 19th century roles, they are feared. When women dare to leave theirs, they are ridiculed. We understand this: we accept the burden of ridicule. It won’t keep us quiet anymore.

 

Similarly, it shouldn’t deceive male observers into thinking that this is somehow a joke. We are 51 percent of the population; we are essentially united on these issues across boundaries of class or race or age; and we may well end by changing this society more than the civil rights movement. That is an apt parallel. We, too, have our right wing and left wing, our separatists, gradualists, and Uncle Toms. But we are changing our own consciousness, and that of the country. Engels noted the relationship of the authoritarian, nuclear family to capitalism: the father as capitalist, the mother as means of production, and the children as labor. He said the family would change as the economic system did, and that seems to have happened, whether we want to admit it or not.[8] Women’s bodies will no longer be owned by the state for the production of workers and soldiers; birth control and abortion are facts of everyday life. The new family is an egalitarian family.

 

Gunnar Myrdal noted 30 years ago the parallel between women and Negroes in this country. Both suffered from such restricting social myths as: smaller brains, passive natures, inability to govern themselves (and certainly not white men), sex objects only, childlike natures, special

 

 

skills, and the like.[9] When evaluating a general statement about women, it might be valuable to substitute “black people” for “women”–just to test the prejudice at work.

 

And it might be valuable to do this constitutionally as well. Neither group is going to be content as a cheap labor pool anymore. And neither is going to be content without full constitutional rights.

 

Finally, I would like to say one thing about this time in which I am testifying.

 

I had deep misgivings about discussing this topic when National Guardsmen are occupying our campuses, the country is being turned against itself in a terrible polarization, and America is enlarging an already inhuman and unjustifiable war.[10] But it seems to me that much of the trouble in this country has to do with the “masculine mystique” with the myth that masculinity somehow depends on the subjugation of other people.[11] It is a bipartisan problem; both our past and current Presidents seem to be victims of this myth, and to behave accordingly.

 

Women are not more moral than men. We are only uncorrupted by power. But we do not want to imitate men, to join this country as it is, and I think our very participation will change it. Perhaps women elected leaders–and there will be many more of them–will not be so likely to dominate black people or yellow people or men; anybody who looks different from us.

 

After all, we won’t have our masculinity to prove.

 

[1] Reference to Myra Wolfgang, a Union activist and labor leader from Detroit. She opposed the ERA, although for very different reasons than hard right neoconservatives like Phyllis Schlafly. Wolfgang also testified at the same Senate hearing. 

[2] Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a federal law that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion. 

[3] “That would only be repeating a male mistake.”

[4] Dr. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and psychologist famous for his development of psychoanalysis. 

[5] Freud’s theory argues that young girls experience anxiety and anger upon realizing that they do not have a Penis. Freud claimed Penis Envy is crucial for girls to mature sexually because the realization teaches girls that other women (specifically their mothers) are competition for men, i.e., “the Penis” (specifically their fathers). See Freud’s Oedipal and Electra Complex theories for more details. Penis Envy is also the stage that girls realize they are inferior because they do not a Penis, which, according to Freud, is a necessary and positive aspect of maturity for women, not just sexually, but generally, speaking. In other words, Penis Envy is how girls learn they are inferior to men, and that is good. Freud reinforces the same idea that noncompliant women are a threat to everything, especially manhood.  

[6] When Steinem testified in 1972, the wage/pay gap between white women and white men was about 60 cents on the dollar (for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns 60 cents for the same work). The wage/pay gap between white women and men in 2015 was 79 cents on the dollar. The data from 2018 shows the gender wage gap is

[7] Uncle Tom is the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The phrase “Uncle Tom” has also become an euphemism for a person who is excessively subservient to a perceived authority figure, or any person perceived to be complicit in the oppression of their own group. It is a bad metaphor, try to avoid it.  13 The national average wage in 1970 was just over $6,000; however, the national average wage for women in 1970 was a little over $2,000. In 2017, the national median income was about $44,000. Average income for men (without adjusting for race, region, education, etc) was about $49,000. Average income for women (without adjustment) was about $39,000. You can see that, generally speaking, men earn more than average and women earn less than average. In 2015, the United Nations sent a team to investigate gender relations in the United States. The Report claimed American women have “missing rights,” meaning women are not protected in the United States by legislation or shared values. American women, the Report found, experience more discrimination, harassment, and violence than women in other wealthy countries. Gender discrimination and inequality (what the report refers to as “missing rights”), and the high level of public harassment of women. The Report called the lack of gender equality in the United States “alarming.”  

[8] Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was a German social scientist, author, political theorist, and co-author of The Communist Manifesto (1848), with Karl Marx. 

[9] Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) was a Swedish Nobel laureate economist, sociologist, and politician, whose book, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, was published in 1944. Myrdal and his research team (which included Ralph Bunche, Ohio native and the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize) spent over a decade working on the sweeping study of “race relations” in the United States. 

[10] Gloria Steinem testified just two days after the Ohio National Guard fired on Kent State University demonstrators protesting the US bombing of Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War, killing four people. For what it’s worth, the May 4 memorial at Kent State is incredibly powerful and very well done, and definitely worth a visit. 

The “inhuman and unjustifiable war” refers to Vietnam. In 1970, the United States had been waging war in Vietnam for six years, and still had five years to go before the Fall of Saigon, marking the end of US military action in Vietnam. 

[11] A play on The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan, an investigation into the lives and unhappiness of suburban housewives. See the textbook for more information about The Feminine Mystique.