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Copyright 2015 Ruth L. Fairbanks Copyright 2015 Ruth L. Fairbanks A PREGNANCY TEST: WOMEN WORKERS AND THE HYBRID AMERICAN WELFARE STATE, 1940-1993 BY RUTH L. FAIRBANKS DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Emerita Elizabeth Pleck, Chair Professor Emeritus James Barrett Professor Eileen Boris, University of California Santa Barbara Professor Leslie Reagan ABSTRACT This dissertation shows that the US developed the outlines of a maternity policy at least by WWII. Rarely were the needs of pregnant workers or new mothers at the top of social policy initiatives. However, when European countries were developing their plans, reformers and bureaucrats sought to establish similar plans in the United States and, for a while, seemed like they might. Politics intervened in the form of the Cold War. With a few state level exceptions, the experiences of WWII were largely dismantled in the wake of political changes, business and medical opposition and the Red Scare. Subsequent policies that emerged grew largely in the private sector where women’s disadvantages in the workforce constrained maternity in the blossoming system of employee fringe benefits. Where they could, unions defended women’s access to contractual benefits, but this effort was hampered by the marginalization of maternity in the private system. Finally, with the emergence of a rights framework in the 1970s, feminist lawyers forced the inclusion of pregnancy into the central operating welfare state of private workforce relationships and benefits, leading to the current national maternity policy. However, conservatism and globalization limited this approach and indicate the necessity of public social supports for maternity, or family, benefits. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Near the end of a long process of research and writing, it is refreshing to thank the people who have helped me along the way. I have a long list. My first thoughts go to the librarians and archivists who tend the material I depend on, for without them, there would be no such study as this. Archivists at the Schlesinger Library, the Walter P. Reuther Library, the Hagley Museum and Library, the Hillman Library, the Archives of Appalachia and the National Archives at College Park were especially helpful to me in making the best use of their rich resources during rushed visits. Archivists and librarians at the University of North Dakota, Bryn Mawr and the Anderson, Indiana Public Library provided valuable research assistance and connected me to collections I would not have been able to use without their help. Staff at the Baker Library, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the Henry A. Murray Research Center and the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia were also generous with their assistance. I have benefited from a lot of hands-on help with government documents and legal cases from librarians at the University of Illinois and Indiana State University. Inter- library loan staff at the University of Illinois, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Indiana State University (where they are super fast) have provided me with reams of material over the years. The Vigo County Public Library provided me with several popular and trade sources and, finally, the charming Clinton Public Library, where I do not know the WiFi password, gave me an essential writer’s retreat. iii Getting to all these archives would have been impossible without financial support. I would like to thank the Henry A. Murray Research Center, the Schlesinger Library, the Chandler Traveling Fellowship, the Hagely Museum and Library, the Sonya Rudikoff Gutman Dissertation Grant of the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the Women’s Studies Program and the History Department at the University of Illinois for funding for travel to archives. I would also like to thank Interdisciplinary Programs and the Department of History and African and African American Studies at Indiana State University for funding to present portions of this work at conferences. My thanks to Elisa Miller, Dawn Flood, Mickey Moran, Caroline Merithew, Randi Storch, Kathleen Mapes and Tobias Higbie for reading or listening to some of the earliest versions of parts of this dissertation. As the project matured, I benefited from comments from Jennifer Gilley who gently extracted about 30 pages on unemployment insurance from an unbalanced chapter. Patricia Reeve’s comments on 9 to 5’s campaign about Video Display Terminals were doubly helpful to me. Rich House gave me detailed feedback on the Cold War chapter. Robyn Morgan helped with my bibliography and footnotes. Jaye Lee Rogers, Gerald Markowitz and Nancy Gabin provided comments on different sections. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Indiana State University for their on-going support, in particular Lisa Phillips who read and commented on portions of this project and Debra Israel who created several opportunities for me to present my research and whose comments have helped me to think about my work in new ways. I appreciate Namita Goswami’s generous offer of help and her enthusiastic encouragement. Anne Foster’s pragmatic advice got me over a last minute hurdle. My student assistant, Tara Hopkins, patiently tracked down some stray citations from the iv Congressional Record and counted and sorted newspaper stories about the FMLA. Staff at ISU’s RICOH Resource Center were very helpful in getting necessary copies printed and shipped to my committee, despite a last minute font size issue. Vilma Hunt, an epidemiologist in environmental health, spent several hours talking with me and sharing her personal files. While the project took a different direction, I am still thankful for that early assistance. Thanks also to Mary Berg, who introduced me to Dr. Hunt. Jennifer Gunn’s stories about working as a coal miner shed new light on the CEP. Landon R.Y. Storrs helped me understand the FOIPA request process and shared insights on research in FBI files. Rebecca Sharpless, Nancy Gabin, Allison Hepler, Jennifer Klein, Joan Sangster and Laura Briggs all answered several questions thoughtfully and generously. Though Nathan Godfried has never seen any of this, I never would have started it without that first history class. At the University of Illinois, Shannon Jo Croft was an irreplaceable guide, a kind and generous medium connecting me to the completion process from wherever I was that wasn’t Urbana, a pen- pal with superpowers. I have been lucky to have great teachers at the U of I whose classes sparked imagination and also laid a foundation in fundamental readings. This dissertation’s grounding in labor archives directly reflects Jim Barrett’s labor history research seminar. This dissertation began in one of Leslie Reagan’s classes on the history of health and disease as I tried to find ways of bringing my labor background into my studies with her. A class on Comparative Welfare States taught by Sonya Michel and Mark Leff provided me with invaluable tools to construct questions and look for answers in my research and the secondary literature when this project took a policy turn. v Deep thanks go to my committee for their careful reading of this dissertation and for their productive suggestions on a set of early chapters. I would also like to thank Leslie Reagan for her suggestion of a title for the first chapter and for pointing me towards Nancy MacLean’s book. Eileen Boris, whose own work has affected me deeply, has been generous with encouragement and I’m thankful that she was willing to join this committee as an outside reader. In this long journey, I have been lucky to have two advisors. During the research phase and for the first stumbling drafts, Jim Barrett provided direction and encouragement, connected me to resources and created a culture of exchange, growth and support among his group of graduate students. Over the past several years, Liz Pleck coaxed and prodded me to sift my treasured (some might say hoarded) boxes of photocopies and soup of half-cooked explanations and digressions into some more coherent story about the meaning of pregnancy in the American workplace. Her steady feedback on the writing, her pointed questions about the research, her critiques of the reasoning and her amazing ability to always suggest additional interesting and relevant books have made this much better than it would have been without her oversight. I’ve also benefited from her tactical guidance about how the dissertation fits into career plans and possibilities. She’s truly the “dissertation whisperer.” My greatest thanks go to my family and the friends so close as to be family. Long ago, my mother, Betty Fairbanks, told me about trying to hide her first pregnancy when she was a young high school teacher in the years before LaFleur v. Cleveland Board of Education. That first baby was me and this story was one of the early kernels of this dissertation. Beyond helping me find a research project, my mother has shown a faith in me that I would like to live up to. She never seemed to doubt that someday I would finish vi this dissertation. My father, Avard Fox Fairbanks, provided an example of sustaining an intellectual interest over long-term and I’ve sometimes felt like him, hunkered down behind my teetering piles of copies and notes, often enough at the dining room table--just like Pappy but with a nicer chandelier. My in-laws, Nancy Martland and Carl Martland, have supported me in ways both intangible and also very tangible, like child care, working space and technical support, office equipment and what amounted to Martland Family Dissertation Fellowships. Nancy told me her own stories of working while pregnant and the disconnect she felt when her doctor advised a mid-day nap and she wondered where he expected her to take it, “on my desk?” My siblings, especially my sister Sarah Packham and her husband Nate Packham, tolerated my extra baggage of computer, books and piles of notes taking up corners of their house every single visit for many years.
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