OHS Research Library Mss 2768, box 2 Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity

Labor in Oregon, 1945–1970

LAURIE MERCIER

THE SURGE OF UNION ORGANIZING in the Pacific Northwest dur- ing the Depression and World War II brought Oregon women workers into a strong regional labor movement — but their place there was not secure. Alice Wesling of Waitresses Local 305 remembered that “the real work of organizing women” began after the passage of the National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act in 1935, granting workers the right to join a labor union.1 Newly organized, primarily male, Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions THE 1970–1971 AFL-CIO Oregon Executive Board only had one member, Nellie Fox- Edwards. Fox-Edwards recounted in a 1986 oral history interview that she became aware, after helped women workers — who were mostly segregated into teaching, cleri- joining the Retail Clerks Local 1257 in the 1950s, that women working in retail were “treated cal, restaurant, apparel, canning, and laundry work — organize and gain union like a rug on the floor” and “caught in that kind of trap” of a sex-segregated, low-wage job. She contracts across Oregon. During World War II, many of those women workers remained active in the labor movement until she retired in 1985. flocked to industrial jobs, especially in the Portland-Vancouver Kaiser Ship- yards, where they received higher rates of pay and reached almost 30 percent of the workforce. When the shipyards closed at the end of the war, white male workers fiercely defended their control of industrial jobs by emphasizing their emphasized physical strength and masculine solidarity in their defense of breadwinner privileges. After women members of Electrical Workers Local sex-segregated work in major occupations, such as logging. During the 48 complained about layoffs, the union spokesman reminded them that they postwar period, many union men recognized the need to forge partnerships “knew they were only working until such time as manpower was available.”2 with the growing number of , but often, many also Union leaderships’ fixed belief in a labor hierarchy reflected the stub- clung to patriarchal values that curbed a more expansive solidarity. They born ideology of the white male breadwinner, which assumed that men supported equal pay measures — if primarily to protect their wages — at required a wage sufficient to support a family while wives provided unpaid the same time as they resisted women working alongside them as labor- domestic and caregiving labor. Historian Alice Kessler-Harris attributes the ers or organizers. “Gendered habits of mind” were manifested locally, and persistent power of the male breadwinner ideal to deeply embedded “gen- the Oregon labor movement’s failures to abandon the trope of the male dered habits of mind” in American culture.3 In the Pacific Northwest, unions breadwinner, embrace women’s organization, cultivate women leaders, and recognize women’s concerns reflect some of those same failures in the national postwar labor movement. Laurie Mercier was awarded a 2015 Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Senior Research Fellowship After World War II, many Oregon working-class women actively cam- in Pacific Northwest History. paigned for labor and civil rights, the elimination of sex discrimination in the

6 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 © 2019 Oregon Historical Society Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 7 workplace, and support for their domestic labors. This group of “labor femi- MOST OREGON WOMEN who lost their industrial jobs after World War II nists,” as Dorothy Sue Cobble argues, recognized gender-based inequalities returned to lower-paying “women’s” jobs in laundries, food service, teaching, and sought “first-class economic citizenship,” bridging the first and second and related service occupations. Yet they retained their enthusiasm for the “waves” of feminist movements traditionally described as ending in the wage equality that many wartime jobs had afforded and for the benefits of 1930s and being renewed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.4 They did so by union representation.11 Even when faced with job segregation, women union- pushing their unions, women’s groups, the U.S. Congress, and the courts to ists, like their male counterparts, focused on organizing new workers, fighting support working women.5 In outlining these achievements, however, Cobble for union contracts, and supporting strikers as ways to provide women work- de-emphasizes how many male union members contested women workers’ ers with more autonomy and a living, if not equal, wage. While insisting that assertions. Oregon labor feminists, taking inspiration from state and national they too were breadwinners, supporting themselves or their families just as civil rights and feminist struggles, responded to that resistance by making men did, they often downplayed gender differences in order to emphasize their appeals more prominent. their common interests as workers. They expressed optimism that they could Scholars have documented how national union and political figures worked improve their material conditions with support from male allies. As an eager to alter gendered social policies, but less known is what women at the state Marjorie Dover was reported to say in 1945, after successfully organizing the level saw as their immediate concerns, how they addressed them, and how Mallory Hotel in Portland: “Hotel employees long underpaid and overworked they intersected with national developments.6 After World War II, Oregon have a chance to join a union supported by the whole labor movement.”12 Or, was one of a dozen or more states with relatively high union density, but as a 1949 Oregonian article profiling women labor leaders reported, women because of its location in the Pacific Northwest, where the major industries had “inched forward” to gain their union positions by working hard to prove of mining, forestry, fishing, and shipping remained exclusively male, much of their worth. Reflecting their optimism and putting a positive public face on the the unionized labor force was also male. Unlike places in the Northeast and movement as a whole, it continued, the women leaders now felt “no particular Midwest, where in the 1940s women broke into the ranks of industrial work- resentment or discrimination” based on their gender. In fact, they sanguinely ers and some later became leaders in their internationals, in Oregon, women insisted that organizing and collective bargaining had eliminated exploitation.13 mostly continued to toil in low-wage domestic, service, and unskilled industrial But male unionists responded to this enthusiasm with ambivalence or sectors.7 Consequently, little has been written about working-class women downright opposition. To many men (and women), working wives signified in the postwar Pacific Northwest, where much labor history has focused on inadequate male wages, and unions often used breadwinner rhetoric to the region’s militant, masculine heritage.8 This local study, by focusing on boost their pay and to limit women’s access to jobs. In 1946, for example, specific struggles and on specific union and political leaders, illustrates just the state labor federation passed a resolution insisting that the University how determined, flexible, and creative women had to be in their collaborations of Oregon grant its physical plant employees a pay raise, noting that with and multipronged strategies to win reforms for working women. rising costs of living, workers were “forced to adopt painful expedients, Evidence from Oregon suggests how women at the grassroots level including the seeking of employment by over-aged wives.”14 Nevertheless, helped shape second-wave and, as Stephanie Gilmore main- as more women organized and increased their proportion within the state tains, that focusing on community activists “offers more than a local variant labor movement, they compelled the Oregon Labor Federation to acknowl- of a national story.”9 Working-class women in Oregon labored to convince edge their energy and skills and to grant them more visible leadership roles. reluctant male unions, employers, and the state to recognize their rights At the 1946 convention, for example, after state American Federation of as breadwinners and their needs as caregivers. But they moved cautiously Labor (AFL) president J.D. McDonald announced the escort committee for and, like both their own unions and labor feminists nationally, sometimes Gov. Earl Snell, Gertrude Sweet of Waitresses Local 305 sternly reminded used the conflicting discourses of gender-neutral job equality and gender- him: “Women are a vital part of the labor movement in the state of Oregon, based difference, including special protections, to win social and political and there should be a woman on that committee.” McDonald responded support.10 Their efforts both influenced and were influenced by national patronizingly: “I am very fond of the ladies. However . . . I saw fit to make movements and brought real accomplishments before the 1970s, when a the appointments as I made them.”15 But McDonald must have heeded burgeoning accelerated the rate of change in working Sweet’s complaint, because in 1947, women sat on most if not all the annual women’s lives. convention committees and made up one fourth of the total delegates.

8 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 9 If the 1947 convention reflected some victories for equal representation, it also raised questions about how to guarantee that women would play a

role in leadership. Delegates debated and divided over Sweet’s resolution Courtesy of NW Labor Press to appoint a female at-large executive board member. Some, such as Alice Wesling, an activist with Sweet’s Local 305, and Mildred Ripley Gianini, rep- resenting the Laundry, Dry Cleaning and Dye House Workers Union, feared that reserving one position would limit women’s opportunities to run for other offices, reflecting concerns over strategies that emphasized difference. Instead, they supported an amendment that would cre- ate two vice president positions without gender labels, hoping that by having more open positions, “women would take the chance of electing one woman.”16 Although Courtesy of NW Labor Press Courtesy of NW Labor some delegates argued that without a special designation, female candidates would not win a majority of male votes, a majority of delegates voted to support the constitutional amendment to have the officers of the Federation include a presi- dent, two vice presidents, and an executive secretary-treasurer. Delegates then elected Gianini as vice president of the state fed- eration.17 The convention’s decision to not GERTRUDE SWEET was a fixture in the to create an official position for a woman Oregon labor movement from the 1920s, when she became active in the Waitresses nonetheless initiated a tradition of electing Union Local 305, until her retirement female second vice presidents. Concerns in 1981. In 1938, after her children were about emphasizing difference continued older, Sweet became Hotel and Restaurant to confound Oregon labor feminists for Employees (HERE) international vice the following four decades, during which president for the Northwest region, one of women retained but were also reduced to its few female officers through the 1950s. just one executive board position — with the implication that it was secondary in status — in the labor federation. Women unionists recognized that age and racial divisions also limited their IN THIS DRAWING by Bill Boardman (Typographical Local 58) of the 1946 Oregon State opportunities for advancement. Clerical and sales job ads, for example, speci- Federation of Labor convention, federation secretaries Gertrude Sweet and Mildred Gianini of fied that only younger women need apply. Jettie Lebor, business agent of the the Laundry Workers are among the few women to play a significant role. Through the end of the United Garment Workers Union No. 208, noted that as a result of organization century, Gianini, Sweet, and other labor feminists would push the organization to expand women’s in her trade, older women, no longer “spring chickens,” were able to earn good leadership opportunities and consideration of women’s employment and caregiving issues. incomes and thus stayed with the industry for a long time, but she also hinted that older women had few options for employment. The union protected older

10 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 11 workers, but younger, former shipyard workers reported that they despised in unionized hotels and restaurants and its members to avoid patronizing the tedium and pressures of piecework and sought other opportunities.18 contested or “unfair” shops. They rallied support for ballot and legisla- While many white working women utilized union contracts to improve tive measures that supported jobs, wages, and tips for women workers. their lot, they did not include African American And they developed community service projects to engender goodwill. and other women of color in their ranks. The LaRene Paul recalled how OHS Research Library, coll 378, box 11 Oregon AFL officially advocated tolerance of and her Communication Workers support for African American as well as Japanese (CWA) union built success American workers, who had experienced wartime by a three-pronged “attack”: incarceration, but locals during and after the war organizing, public relations, fiercely resisted extending membership to work- and community service. In ers of color.19 Women’s unions often expressed their community service proj- Courtesy of NW Labor Press Courtesy of NW Labor sympathy and sent support to civil rights struggles ects, the women publicly in the South and, later, to striking farm workers identified as CWA members in California, but they rarely practiced inclusion rather than as telephone at home. Fighting against the dual-wage system employees; then, when they that paid women and minorities lower wages, needed help from the commu- Gianini celebrated the laundry union’s expansion nity in negotiations with the in southern states and the growing presence of company, they “could get it.”21 African American delegates at the international’s Auxiliaries, including convention, but her frequent advocacy for civil union wives, daughters, sis- rights did not seem to apply to union membership ters, and , had lent in the workplaces she represented. In 1951, when critical support during the Laurelhurst Cleaners in Portland established a 1930s strikes, which had revi- dual-wage scale, paying newly hired black work- talized the region’s labor ers less than whites, Gianini’s union, joined by movement, and labor femi- the Teamsters, set up a picket. Still, her union did nists sought to reinvigorate MILDRED GIANINI began MARCELLA BEATTY AND ALMA OTTMAN are working in laundry and dry not appear to extend membership to these black them in the postwar period. pictured here in January 1965. As director of the AFL- 20 cleaning in 1917 and, in 1933, workers. Given the exclusion of women CIO National Auxiliaries, Beatty visited Oregon often helped organize Local 107, one White women unionists embraced a variety workers from the region’s to encourage state and local labor councils to form of the first Laundry Workers’ of tactics as they sought support from the male- major industries and unions, women’s auxiliaries to aid in political activities. Labor International Union bargaining dominated labor movement and from the broader CIO unions actively encour- feminists in Oregon had long recognized the potential units in the country. By 1949, it public for equal rights as workers. Because their aged wives to form auxiliaries value of having union wives, mothers, and sisters join represented over 2,200 members jobs often involved service to the public, Oregon to support union struggles, their efforts to support strikers and labor unions’ political in Oregon and southwest activities. Male union members, however, often resisted women workers understood consumer actions labor-friendly candidates, Washington towns. This image creating or sustaining auxiliaries. appeared in the Oregon Labor and community solidarity as key strategies for and programs that benefit- Press on June 9, 1950. success and eagerly cultivated alliances with ted workers, women, and union households. They organized boycotts, children.22 The Oregon AFL, insisted that consumers wear the union label and pushed by its women unionists, also organized ladies auxiliaries to help that businesses display the union card, urged voting for labor-friendly can- win statewide support for workers’ issues. In response to the passage of didates, and engaged in “spotlight picketing” — rotating pickets at selected the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which restricted union activities, Gianini urged unfair businesses. They cajoled the labor federation to hold conventions the state federation to create a dynamic educational program so that labor

12 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 13 could “tell its story.” She believed that women in unions and auxiliaries fired for union activity. By November, solidarity within the city-wide boycott “banded together would prove a powerful educational force.”23 Through began to rupture. Local 49’s Louretta Carlston complained to the Central the 1950s, the women unionists gained mixed results. In 1960, AFL-CIO Labor Council that some AFL unions had crossed the hospital picket line. The auxiliary organizer Marcella Beatty was disappointed to find only six affili- council responded by enact- ated auxiliaries in Oregon. To emphasize their importance, she reminded ing heavy fines on any union Courtesy of NW Labor Press state convention delegates that auxiliaries were no longer organized just member crossing the picket, to “have a social club or card party” — they worked for the union label, but the action suggested civil rights, and labor’s Committee on Political Education (COPE). Mock- that women activists had to ing stereotypes of women in an attempt to appeal to men, she added that maintain vigilance to compel “women have been given the name of having a big mouth . . . now we can others to respect their strug- put it to a good use, with your help.”24 gle.27 Building on principles of solidarity and notions of equity, Oregon women The Emanuel workers’ workers led a series of strikes in the late 1940s and early 1950s to establish tenacity inspired three hun- their rights as breadwinners. In April 1947, Oregon’s largely female tele- dred employees at Good phone workers joined a nationwide strike against the nation’s largest private Samaritan Hospital in Janu- employer, AT&T, demanding higher wages, a union shop, and an improved ary 1951 to also declare a pension plan. Although Oregon communities were hit hard by phone service strike to challenge assump- shutdowns, the state’s 4,700 operators held fast against company efforts tions about their jobs and to divide workers through individual settlements with local offices. As the rights as breadwinners. As strike entered its fifth week, workers employed more militant tactics. In the local press editorial- Astoria, strikers carried banners and effigies identifying “scabs.” Portland ized that hospital workers telephone operators created a “squirrel cage” picket that revolved in front “had a moral obligation of building entrances, making it difficult for supervisors and strikebreakers to to the patients,” the union enter. They even threw stink bombs at women supervisors passing through responded that the hospital the picket, saturating their coats “with the sulphurous odor,” and tore their had “a similar moral obliga- stockings “in scuffles.”25 Although the national strike ultimately dissolved, tion to those it employs.” Oregon telephone workers held out until May 16; the majority then voted The fact that they chose to to return to work, but they won an end to discriminatory wage differentials work with the sick should and a promise not to retaliate against striking employees.26 not make strikers into sec- Low-wage workers, who had much to risk in organizing or striking, often ond-class citizens, “unable faced more protracted struggles against obstinate employers, as was the to earn a wage that will EMANUEL HOSPITAL WORKERS picket for a dollar an case when Portland’s Emanuel Hospital’s nursing attendants, orderlies, maids, allow them even the most hour raise in this photograph published in the Oregonian and kitchen aides demanded wages of a dollar an hour and launched what basic necessities of life.” on August 11, 1950 (and republished in the NW Labor Press). Newspapers frequently emphasized women’s physical became a nineteen-month campaign for union recognition in August 1950. The union argued that the appearance rather than their militancy, suggesting that they They recognized that public expectations of “caring” labor required careful Lutheran and Episcopal were not serious workers or union members. strategizing, including pressuring the larger labor movement and community churches who ran the hos- to support their cause. Not wanting to risk alienating potential supporters pitals “piously say they by pulling out the employees, in order not “to let suffering humanity down,” believe in human rights... and dignity,” but “they deny it in practice,” even the Building Service Employees Union Local 49 set an informational picket, refusing to meet with the union.28 Union education and persistence paid urged patients to find other hospitals and doctors, requested Teamsters not to off. On December7 , Good Samaritan granted its workers a contract. Finally, deliver nonessential supplies, and demanded the reinstatement of employees on March 14, 1952, Emanuel nonprofessional employees also won union

14 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 15 Courtesy of NW Labor Press recognition, a 10 percent wage increase, and a reduction in the work week from forty-four to forty hours without a reduction in pay.29 Both lengthy struggles revealed how the union organizers had marshaled community support to treat women’s caregiving labors as work rather than “service.” Dependent on community support as well as labor solidarity to win con- tracts and strikes, women unionists crafted a public image as independent and deserving workers and responsible citizens. Sometimes this meant playing on gendered stereotypes, such as when a Service Employees Union official emphasized propriety, noting that its members behaved “like ladies and gentlemen” on the picket line and contrasted that with the disrespectful treatment hospital workers received from their employers.30 Recognizing the importance of public and political support, many female-dominated unions upheld standards for professionalism and service and required members to register to vote.31 Local 305 required servers to update their training, attend regular union meetings, and uphold high moral standards, including not smoking or drinking while on the job. But members also confidently asserted their rights as equal citizens. When, in October 1956, an Oregon Journal letter complained about waitresses wearing earrings that advertised support for the reelection of Senator Wayne Morse, a group of Local 305 women shot back: “Nobody tells us what kind of earrings or campaign buttons to wear, and nobody tells us how to vote.”32 Labor feminists also struggled, with some success, to change gendered media images. The Oregon Labor Press instituted a women’s page in 1950, with homemaking advice, recipes, consumer information, and auxiliary news, which drew more women readers, who then complained about glamorous pin-ups elsewhere in its pages. Mrs. O.D. Cook, secretary-treasurer of the Telegraphers Union, objected to images of “undraped women” and argued that instead of attracting more women to union issues, “more ladies will be complaining.” The editor solicited readers’ advice about whether to feature the images, generating a “pin-up battle . . . raging in the letters column.” THIS “UNION MAID” CARTOON by Stan Jennings was published in the Oregon Labor Press on Gordon Swope, business agent for the Retail Clerks, which had a large December 1, 1950. Although sources from the 1950s rarely addressed the problem of workplace female membership, protested that “cheesecake pictures of partly-dressed , this cartoon reveals how women employees faced harassment along with . . . give the paper a raffish, undignified tone . . . [that] may even offend low wages and other challenges. Unions offered one possibility for protection on the job. some people... who are likely to be our most responsible union members.”33 Critics apparently influenced the paper to publish fewer images that explicitly objectified women, but Stan Jennings’s popular “Union Maid” cartoon con- tinued to present busty, long-legged worker heroines, even as they upheld goals of gaining respect as breadwinners and as union equals, some became 34 union principles and challenged lecherous bosses. In any case, after the increasingly frustrated by the slow pace of change. Male allies often had to public debate, the newspaper’s women workers, glamorous or not, were not be pushed to offer assistance. On June19 , 1952, Gianini forcefully reproached portrayed solely as either docile or the subject of men’s fantasies. the mostly male unionists at the Oregon Labor Federation convention for While Oregon labor feminists continued to emphasize the intersecting their failure to support a critical struggle of her Laundry Workers Union. After

16 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 17 a three-year union lockout at two dry-cleaning plants in Eugene, the owners children.37 If they were married, it was often to other labor leaders, who had fired the workers and filed a Taft-Hartley injunction suit. She told the were likely to understand and support the demands of a union activist’s assembly that if the Eugene labor movement had been more cooperative, the life. Alice Wesling, who had worked for decades as a waitress in Klamath strikers could have won. Instead, its failure to take working women’s efforts Falls and then served as Waitresses Local 305 business representative seriously had risked the futures of all workers: “If we lose that injunction from the 1940s through the 1960s, was married to the business agent of suit, look out, labor movement! You will be next!” Invoking women’s rights the Hoisting and Portable Engineers union.38 In 1955, when the AFL and as breadwinners, she pleaded, CIO began merger talks, she was the only woman on the negotiating com- “For God’s sake, do not crucify four mittee.39 Not all union husbands supported their wives’ aspirations. In the hundred workers, women who are mid 1950s, Nellie Batman Holmes (later Fox-Edwards) became an orga- supporting families!”35 nizer and business agent for the Retail Clerks Union. Her union husband Although many competent disliked the long hours and travel associated with union work and urged women organized workers, or her to quit, but she liked the work and continued, believing that female were active in or served as offi- clerks needed more women in union leadership, even as her persistence cers in their locals, male unionists ultimately ended her marriage.40 continued to resist electing or Despite their modest gains, union women recognized the limits of the appointing women to statewide labor movement and collective bargaining to challenge the fundamental positions. In 1950, LaRene Paul assumptions of breadwinning. This recognition propelled them to increas- quit her job at the telephone ingly call on the state to implement key goals: increase the minimum wage, OHS Research Library, org. lot 1007, box 1, folder 6 org. lot 1007, box Library, OHS Research company to become a full-time provide assistance for child care, and enact legislation guaranteeing women organizer for CWA in Oregon the same pay as men who performed comparable jobs. and, later, in northern California, but she recalled that, through the OREGON LABOR FEMINISTS welcomed new political opportunities as 1950s and 1960s, it remained “an the labor movement helped the Democratic Party make gains in a state unusual position for a woman.”36 long dominated by Republicans. With its extensive network of women In addition to labor’s resistance, volunteers, including many union members and wives, the party expanded patriarchal cultural constraints its campaigns in every county. Beginning in 1950, Democrats increased burdened women with caregiving their seats in the state legislature and elected former teacher and union responsibilities, making it difficult member Maurine Brown Neuberger. After her husband, Richard, had won OREGON STATE REPRESENTATIVE Maurine to actively participate in union a seat in the state senate in 1948, Neuberger realized that she could “do Neuberger opens mail in 1950. Maurine and business. The success of leaders more on the floor of the House than she could knitting socks in the gallery her husband Richard helped revitalize the state such as Gianini and Sweet — who of the Senate” and devoted her two terms to supporting working women’s Democratic Party during the 1950s. As a state led their union expansions across issues, including consumer protection, child care for working mothers, and representative (1950–1954) and a U.S. Senator the state and had command- an equal pay act.41 Still, Neuberger found that her male colleagues resisted (1961–1967), Neuberger was a strong advocate for ing presences in the Oregon legislation that challenged the primacy of the male breadwinner. When she consumer issues, women’s rights, and equal pay Federation of Labor and their introduced a “babysitting bill” to provide tax deductions for working moth- for equal work. international unions — had much ers, other legislators insisted that the measure would encourage women to to do with their energy and effec- leave home and abandon their children.42 Popular with constituents, in 1954 tiveness but also with the nature of their industries and unions, as well as she turned to national politics and helped elect Richard to the U.S. Senate, their ages and family situations. Both came from female-dominated unions the first from their party in forty years. That same year Edith Starett Green where they could develop leadership skills, but those few who achieved defeated Republican Tom McCall to represent Oregon’s Third Congres- leadership positions were older or, like Sweet, divorced and without young sional District (Multnomah County) in the U.S. House of Representatives,

18 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 19 of economic equality. Helen Nikkum, for example, had found work with IBM in Salem in 1951 after graduating from college and expressed frustration at legislation that prohibited women in manufacturing from working over 40 hours a week. “The law was intended to protect them from overwork,” she noted, but “they were protected over the right to be paid overtime. The man I trained with who became office manager was paid for all of the overtime that he worked. I was not. I would have to clock out at 5 o’clock, go back to my

OHS Research Library, CN 002265 Library, OHS Research desk and continue working without being paid.” When she complained to her boss about pay and promotion inequities, he replied, “That’s the way it is.”46 The pressure exerted by increasing numbers of women in the workforce helped transform the Oregon Bureau of Labor into an important ally. In 1952, the agency published a fiftieth anniversary booklet that boasted the state had “led the nation in progressive labor legislation,” focusing on the broad postwar civil rights accomplishments for minority and women workers. In 1949, Oregon had passed a Fair Employment Practices Act that prohibited employers and unions from discriminating against a worker because of race, religion, or national origin, and the bureau claimed that “few occupations 47 MAY DARLING (second from the right) discusses Portland Federation of Teachers Local 111 are closed to women.” programs and politics with other area women labor leaders. Seated with her in the coffee corner In the early 1950s, after a handful of states had passed equal pay legisla- of the Portland Labor Temple are (from left): Hulda Floren, Esther Nauman, Theresa Alger, and to tion based on a model bill authored by the U.S. Labor Department’s Women’s Darling’s right, Mary Lou Christian. The Labor Temple (1918–1965) provided an important gathering Division, the Oregon State Council of Retail Clerks and its labor allies joined place for women organizers who were based in the building. This photograph appeared in the with the Oregon Business and Professional Women (BPW) and American Asso- Oregon Journal on August 31, 1952. ciation of University Women (AAUW) to persuade sympathetic state legislators to introduce and support a bill to abolish discriminatory wage rates based on sex.48 Records of the Oregon Senate and House hearings on the bill reveal how male labor representatives, legislators, and employers affirmed notions becoming one of the first women elected to Congress who did not inherit of gender difference as they debated the role of women workers. In crowded a seat from a husband’s prior election. Green spent the next two decades committee hearings, state AFL and CIO leaders favoring the bill spoke about championing the interests of girls and working women.43 the importance of paying the same rate for the job in order not to undercut the These Democratic victories aided the equal pay movement, which had male family wage. Gordon Swope of the Retail Clerks Union urged legislators gained steam among labor and middle-class feminists after World War II. to consider the reality that one-third of Oregon workers were women, who During the war, labor unions, fearing that lower wages would encourage “work to make a living [but] are undercutting men’s wages. This jeopardizes employers to prefer women, had insisted with some success that women an adequate standard of living.” He testified that many female bank tellers industrial workers be paid the same as men. In 1945, the U.S. Senator from and retail store clerks received significantly less than their male counterparts Oregon, Wayne Morse, helped introduce the first national equal pay bill.44 for doing the same work. Whether employers thought “that women are supe- A number of scholars have documented well the long struggle to win pas- rior to men” or simply sought to reduce labor costs, they were hiring more sage of the Equal Pay Act (EPA).45 The efforts of Oregon working women women in retail jobs. John R. Moore of the Salem Trades and Labor Council and Green highlight the significance of grassroots activism in influencing argued that women should receive equal pay because they also contributed state and national policies as well as the debates about how to argue for comparably to profits, affirming that a woman in a store might not be able to 49 equality while maintaining the “difference” of protective legislation. In the lift heavy objects, “but [she] can smile all day and bring in the customers.” process, more working women began to reject those protections in favor Employers’ testimony justified lower wages by stereotyping women

20 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 21 workers as temporary and unreliable. They claimed that after investing time Congress. Yet, in order to preserve her support in Oregon and to become and money in training, “girls have a knack for getting married and leaving effective in Congress, during her first years in Washington, D.C., she avoided their job.” Clifford Zollinger, representing the Oregon Bankers Association, associating herself solely with women’s issues, insisting in one interview argued that banks paid male tellers more than women because male college that women were just as interested in foreign policy or labor issues as graduates “can go further in the business and be of more value at a future men.54 But Green heard often from her constituents about job discrimina- date.” Apparently trusting that women were unaware that male employees tion and the economic challenges facing working women, and she used were already openly favored, Zollinger also contended that equal pay her position on the House Education and Labor Committee to help them. legislation would undermine morale as more women employees would At the Oregon AFL-CIO convention in 1955, Green reported that the three question whether they had been discriminated against. Others disguised most important bills to come out of the committee — an increase in the their opposition to equal pay by arguing that the requirements of Oregon’s minimum wage, federal aid for school construction, and the lowering of the protective legislation forced them to discriminate. W.F. Lubursky, of the voluntary retirement age for women from 65 to 62 — all benefitted work- Portland Retail and Trade Bureau, insisted that such gendered protections ing women. She also joined a growing chorus calling for the end of wage limited the weight that women could carry and mandated additional rest inequality and asked Oregon’s Retail Clerks Union to send her materials breaks, making women employees less productive and more expensive.50 that had helped union women pass the Oregon law.55 In contrast to men’s arguments, working- and middle-class women While Green tried to move an equal pay bill forward each Congressional rejected differences altogether and united to testify against the inherent session, many of her male committee colleagues refused to consider it, so unfairness of a dual wage structure. They spoke against protective leg- she turned to the public for support. She frequently argued to the media, islation as limiting opportunities, even as international unions continued women’s groups, and her Oregon constituents that an equal pay bill was to juggle arguments supporting both protections and equal wages. Even “sorely needed.” To undermine the cultural resistance she encountered, she though her union had campaigned after the war to forbid (and “protect”) focused on the necessity of women working and tirelessly recited facts about women from working as bartenders, Anne Chambers of the Restaurant how they sustained families. Women were not just “second breadwinners” Workers insisted that women wanted bartending jobs because they “can working for “pin money”: almost half supported dependents.56 Green focused still make more than working as a waitress.” To her, the jobs were compa- on this group — women breadwinners — to win male support, even though rable and should be paid the same. Thirty BPW members from nine Oregon she also privately supported women’s rights to work by choice. clubs, speaking as both employers and employees, argued for legislation As labor feminists struggled to dislodge assumptions about the male that recognized the value of individual workers rather than as employees breadwinner model, they found an important ally in the Oregon Bureau discriminated by sex. Nellie Burns, Oregon BPW president, proclaimed to of Labor. In 1958, research director Eric J. Weiss published a report on the the House committee that rather than being temporary workers, “women “Self-Supporting Woman in Oregon.” Drawing on testimony given to the state are here to stay!”51 House Committee on Education and Labor to extend coverage of the 1938 The state legislature yielded to labor and women’s groups, and in April Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and a recent survey of working women in 1955, Republican Gov. Paul Patterson signed the bill that guaranteed women eight Oregon cities, the report highlighted a growing gender wage gap and workers the same wages as men when they performed comparable jobs in a the dire economic circumstances of the 55 percent of women wage earn- workplace.52 Legislators had backed away from defining comparable work, ers who were divorced, separated, or widowed and caring for dependents. however, reassuring opponents that pay scales could be based on experi- Weiss argued that one prejudicial argument was replacing another: instead ence, which allowed loopholes, and failing to provide strong enforcement of paying lower wages for allegedly lesser abilities, employers were paying measures. That lack of enforcement led many union and BPW women to seek women for “allegedly lesser needs and requirements.”57 federal regulation. Supported by labor feminists in her state and elsewhere, Weiss’s interviews for the report revealed the particulars of women’s frus- Green introduced federal equal pay legislation in May 1955, shortly after trations with this double standard. One Portland cashier reported that “too her first election to Congress, and, for the next eight years, was a prominent many divorced women are trying to raise children on much less money than advocate for its passage.53 their [ex] husbands make for similar jobs.” A secretary noted that women “can Green quickly learned that women and girls had few advocates in handle the same jobs as men do. It costs a woman the same amount . . . for

22 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 23 clothing, car, and insurance.” The report demonstrated that working women led a precarious existence, depending on relatives to help with childcare or provide housing and rarely receiving support from former husbands. Some even admitted that they gave up custody of their children to former husbands

Courtesy of the author who earned more, demolishing the argument that women breadwinners would destroy family life. Instead, discriminatory wages affected women’s abilities to care for families.58 Many of the women interviewed recognized that unionization — and access to jobs where men predominated — offered hope for greater income security. Likely aware of overall declining union membership by the late 1950s, the report argued that state wage and hour conference boards should establish higher minimum wages.59 A controversy over hiring in the U.S. Post Office in Portland reflected ongoing tensions between women’s equal rights to jobs and the masculine breadwinner ideal and provoked Green to mediate. On May 1, 1959, in response to an announcement that the post office would now encourage women to apply for open positions, one employee wrote to Green: “I do not think a working wife should have perfereance [sic] over a man supporting a family.” Green immediately responded that “the objective you have in mind,” namely, preventing the hiring of women at lower pay rates, could be best addressed by adopting an equal pay act. Challenging the reference to the male breadwinner hierarchy, she argued that women should have the right to compete and that a better way of protecting wage standards was to encourage high employ- ment rather than restrict jobs by gender.60 After the Multnomah County Labor Council passed a resolution opposing the postal service’s plans to hire more women, Green and U.S. Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield intervened to educate resistant unionists and their wives. On May 21, Roy C. Hill, business representative of the Painters, Decorators & Paperhangers Local 10, reversed his position and admitted to Green that the council sometimes got “carried away”; after reviewing her communication, he had “cleared up . . . the equal pay situation” with the city’s unions. To soothe men’s fears, Green focused on maintaining wage standards rather than on the abstract concept of women’s rights, although her work nevertheless advanced that cause. While Green succeeded in convincing union men that they should sup- port equal pay, the Post Office reassured men that opening jobs to women would not threaten the gendered order of work. In a follow-up communica- tion, Cecil M. Harden, Special Assistant to the Postmaster General, affirmed that women “both as citizens and as competent members of the potential work force of the Nation, should not be excluded.” He also stated, however, THE COVER of this 1958 Oregon Bureau of Labor report illustrates women workers in their sex- that mechanization eliminated the need for physical strength in some jobs, segregated occupations — as secretaries, waitresses, and nurses. The report highlighted women’s frustrations with the persistence of low wages and the lack of available child care, and it recommended, which were “more attractive to women than to men.” Harden tried to mollify among other reforms, that the Wage and Hour Commission increase the state minimum wage. those fearing the loss of masculine authority by suggesting that the arduous

24 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 25 physical demands of most jobs meant they were likely to remain male.61 Neuberger, “Labor was never very strong for women to get big-headed.”69 Green also had to mediate tensions between labor and middle-class In 1962, Green’s House Education and Labor Committee held hearings on women’s clubs over priorities for working women. Although the BPW the equal pay proposal, signaling its support and imminent passage.70 Doz- supported Green’s equal pay efforts, it was equally fervent about passing ens of constituents wrote to Green praising her efforts, even as they warned the (ERA) — a movement that began in 1920 about lack of enforcement, as in Oregon’s equal pay law. Wilma Stevens of and gathered steam after World War II. Like most labor supporters in the Port Orford reported: “As a working woman with the same responsibilities as a 1950s and 1960s, Green feared the ERA would eliminate hard won special man I am vitally interested in this legislation which I feel is only just and right.” protections for women workers, such as maximum hours and rest breaks, Warren Loyal Irwin of Portland thanked Green for her “gallant fight for equal and alienate the AFL-CIO, which hoped to expand protections to all work- rights for women . . . long overdue” and recalled his ’s struggles as a ers.62 She deftly sidestepped the issue by assuring Oregon BPW chapters school teacher “at a low wage” and his sister who finished business college that supporting the EPA was the smartest strategy to achieve gains for and became a cashier at a “low[er] wage to men’s wages for a responsible job.” women.63 As she wrote to Joyce Willis, president of the McMinnville BPW, Mrs. Homer McMillin complained that she was fired from her job at Tektronix in the ERA was “far too broad”; preferable was the “selective rather than Beaverton because she refused “to perform the buffing operation any longer the ‘shotgun’ approach” in her equal pay bill, “since employment greatly unless I received the same wage scale” as men who worked in the area.71 discriminates against women.”64 Green’s position reflected the challenge Some Oregon constituents, especially male employers, claimed the EPA labor feminists faced in trying to eliminate discrimination while recognizing would usher in dramatic changes that would destroy the male “genuine differences,” especially domestic burdens — a position she and breadwinner and American families. Bob Dove of Portland complained that most labor feminists would abandon by the 1970s, when there was more the “modern” woman was doing a poor job taking care of children and was widespread, popular support for the ERA and some women were pressing “more interested in getting away from home to make money,” increasing men to assume more domestic duties.65 divorce rates and women as heads of families.72 K.D. Flesichman, vice presi- During the early 1960s, the EPA gained traction with a new president dent of the North Pacific Lumber Co. in Portland, wrote Green that he was and Congress and through dedicated lobbying by women’s groups. As opposed to the EPA because “our experience has proven that women, due to John F. Kennedy’s campaign chair in Oregon, Green had urged him to their household duties. . . . are not career workers.” He added, “does it seem support equal pay legislation. Shortly after his election, he appointed her wise to encourage the mother to work and thus evade her responsibility to to his President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW), along with her family?” An exasperated Green responded that she did not understand Maurine Neuberger, who, after her husband’s death in 1960, became the first why he would object to paying employees the same amount for the same Oregon woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate (and only the fourth in U.S. work and noted the “volumes of testimony” that showed women working in history).66 As the first federal commission devoted to assessing women’s identical jobs were paid a lower wage.73 Green’s arguments about women status, the PCSW — along with the EPA, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and as breadwinners did not contest their family roles, claiming instead that they amendments to the FLSA — represented, as Cobble notes, the culmination should be compensated fairly in order to better care for families. of two decades of work by labor feminists to gain “first-class economic Due to the tireless work by Green and other advocates, supportive lobbying citizenship” for women, years before the rise of the more visible women’s from constituents, and the influence of the civil rights movement, the legisla- movement of the late 1960s.67 Green and the majority of the PCSW pursued tion passed. Kennedy signed the EPA on May 23, 1963. As Maurine Neuberger antidiscrimination measures that did not alienate the labor movement’s remembered, the movement “finally built up . . . times change[d] to a certain commitment to protective legislation; they advocated a federal equal pay extent.”74 The act protected men and women who perform substantially equal law and skirted an equal-rights bill.68 Unlike Green, Neuberger — who in an work in the same establishment from sex-based wage discrimination and was interview characterized herself as more independent from Oregon labor — the first national civil rights legislation focusing on employment discrimination. opposed the committee’s support of protective legislation and supported The final EPA, however, was not what Green and labor feminists had an equal rights amendment. In their reminiscences, both Neuberger and endorsed for many years. Through amendments, Republican women (and Green expressed belief that the male labor movement had been more even the BPW) had weakened language from “comparable” to “equal” of an obstacle than a help in winning equal pay legislation. According to work and did not include effective enforcement mechanisms. As scholars

26 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 27 health care — all general labor movement issues.77 The state and the labor movement offered some mechanisms for improving women’s lives, but by the late 1960s, a burgeoning social movement compelled both to devote more serious attention to working women’s issues.

POST WORLD WAR II LABOR HISTORY has often emphasized the Cold War’s impact on weakening unions, but as the case of Oregon demonstrates, another key reason for the labor movement’s decline was its failure to actively support women and workers of color, weakening its ability to defend against 78 JFK Library and Museum, JFKWHP-AR7965-A new assaults in the late twentieth century. Unions provided lukewarm support for women organizing in their sex-segregated job sites and for equal pay, while many white male members remained fixated on the male breadwinner ideal and on maintaining their perceived privileges. The failure of the state’s unions to organize women’s auxiliaries after many years of concerted efforts by its women members spoke to how the labor movement could not even sustain its most important allies. Through the 1960s, national AFL-CIO Women’s Activities director Margaret Thornburgh scolded the Oregon federation for letting most of the women’s departments dissolve and, in 1965, pointed to men’s hypocrisy in claiming that their locals did not support auxiliaries because “women fight.” She noted that “it would take a heck of a lot of fighting on the part of the women to equal what has taken place in [the state] convention this week. . . . But when IN HER TWENTY YEARS in Congress (1955–1975), Oregon Representative Edith Green men fight . . . it’s called constructive criticism.”79 Resolutions by state leaders doggedly pursued legislation for in education and the workplace, including and prodding by women union activists could not overcome the resistance of the Equal Pay Act. Here, she is pictured to the immediate left of President John F. Kennedy as male-dominated locals and labor councils to alter their culture and embrace he signs the Equal Pay Act on June 10, 1963. Senator Maurine Neuberger stands to the right women’s goals to build broader solidarity. of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Even if Oregon’s labor movement appeared to seesaw from support to apathy — if not outright hostility — for women’s activism, by the late 1960s, more than two decades of advocacy by labor feminists and their supporters have noted, the act preserved the white, male breadwinner wage in that it had resulted in some favorable actions by state and federal governments and excluded domestic and restaurant services and agriculture, where women, more public acceptance of the reality of their breadwinning roles. Oregon especially women of color, were concentrated.75 And the act did little to appointed commissions to study, and passed legislation to address, workplace 80 improve access to “men’s” jobs — including the region’s well-paying union- discrimination and a persistent pay gap. Even the traditionally pro-business ized industries, such as forest products — from which women had been Oregonian began featuring editorials critical of pay disparities, continuing 81 historically excluded. Even so, the few Oregon women in these industries discrimination, and the lack of childcare facing the state’s working women. were enthusiastic about seeing their pay boosted. Marguerite Bye, a del- After the 1965 creation of Title VII’s enforcement agency, the Equal Employ- egate from Local 100 of the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite & ment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), more working women turned to the 82 Papermill Workers in Portland, eagerly asked Green for copies of the EPA to courts to force unions and employers to hire and promote them. Many Oregon use in coming wage negotiations.76 But most letters from working women to women workers realized that too many employers classified jobs with refer- Green, before and after the act’s passage, urged her to seek other federal ence to protective restrictions in order to maintain sex-segregated employ- remedies to assist female breadwinners by raising the federal minimum ment. The Governor’s Committee on the Status of Women reported in 1968 that wage, repealing the Taft-Hartley Act, and expanding the FLSA and access to the regulations revealed “an outmoded paternalistic attitude toward women

28 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 29 employees.” In 1969, Diana Richards, an employee at Griffith Rubber Mills in OHS Research Library, Mss 2768, box 1 Portland, filed the state’s first sex-discrimination case, charging her employer with not promoting her to press operator. The U.S. District Court ruled in her favor, and it also reinforced the primacy of Title VII in noting that the company had honored state law and union contract regulations prohibiting women from lifting objects heavier than thirty pounds; hereafter, the state would need to modify its protective legislation to avoid conflicts with the federal law.83 Many labor feminists in Oregon had long questioned the value of protec- tive legislation, and once again, the Retail Clerks Union focused the state’s attention on how it created inequities in the workplace. Beginning in 1965, Local 1188 in Coos Bay led a series of strikes to pressure grocers to equal- ize pay and eliminate distinctions between “light and heavy duty.” After two weeks of a work stoppage in late July, food clerks returned to work under a new contract that retained pay differentiation although with a smaller gap. By the late 1960s, the food industry had equalized pay scales of men and women employees in the Portland area, but Robert Dillman, president of Local 1188, reported to the Oregon Labor Commissioner’s ad hoc committee on sex discrimination that the retail food industry “is full of discrimination.” The union went on strike against Safeway stores in other Oregon counties over pay and seniority list differentials. Appealing to women consumers in a flyer “to Women who shop at Safeway from Women who work at Safeway,” the union noted that discrimination against women — over the classification of jobs as “light” or “heavy” to avoid paying women higher wages — forced the strike. Male employees were given “ ‘heavy duty’ classification, on the assumption that a man may sometimes lift or move or carry something that a woman doesn’t” and every woman “light duty” — at 10 to 12½ cents an hour less. But, as Dillman admitted, strikes were difficult to sustain because “there are more males in the union and men won’t strike to give women equal pay and opportunities.” In 1970, however, when a Coos Bay woman and Local 1188 jointly filed a lawsuit against the company in U.S. District Court, Safeway voluntarily eliminated its gendered job classifications.84 Women’s labor gains were met with new local and national challenges. Although the proportion of women in unions was growing, the actual numbers of union women workers were not. Automation, capital mobility, and increas- ing employer hostility to union power led to declining unionization across industries and among locally owned businesses. The Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union faced an uphill battle organizing the low-wage workers in INSPIRED DURING THE LATE 1960s by new state and federal legislation that banned 85 the new motel and drive-in businesses. Additionally, as the number of jobs workplace discrimination and a growing feminist movement, the Retail Clerks Union challenged in Oregon’s timber-based economy began to shrink, so did the proportion discriminatory job categories and wages through a series of strikes in Oregon. Here the union of unionized workers. Gertrude Sweet recalled that, during the 1960s, as makes a special plea to women consumersto boycott Safeway until the strike is resolved.

30 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 31 timber jobs declined in towns such as Klamath Falls and Medford, female contracts, take a more active role in electing women to leadership roles in service workers suffered as well.86 Sweet’s observations were born out by their locals, and participate in statewide conferences on sex discrimination. Jan Newton and Sandy Gill’s study of women workers in Oregon, which Advocating for non-discriminatory contracts and child care legislation, she demonstrated that as the number of blue-collar jobs declined in the West, so argued, would encourage working women to take a more active part in local too did the proportion of blue-collar women who were organized — from 38 unions.89 Recognizing that the annual labor convention was “strictly oriented percent in 1966 to 21 percent in 1970. The authors found that the proportion towards men and men’s issues,” Fox-Edwards and others organized an annual of women union members in white-collar and service jobs also declined.87 luncheon at the convention to discuss women’s issues they believed should Discrimination, poverty, and caregiving demands also remained problems be at the forefront of the labor movement, including equal pay and child care for the majority of Oregon women wage earners. In 1968, Weiss returned (an issue that, she noted in her oral history, has “never gone away”). The ad to the subject he had pursued a decade earlier — working women with hoc group later merged with the Oregon chapter of the Coalition of Labor dependents. His new study had a more desperate tone, with ample data Union Women (CLUW), a national organization created in 1974 to address the to again contest the stubborn cultural belief that wages of breadwinning needs of unorganized working women and make unions more responsive to women were supplementary and to illustrate how the gendered labor mar- the concerns of their women members.90 ket unfairly penalized women. The women interviewed for They Carry the Civil rights, antiwar, and feminist activism in the 1960s spawned a new Burden Alone complained about raising children on low incomes and the generation of women leaders who became more demanding about work- lack of affordable child care. Weiss found disturbing what working women place and union justice, and by the 1970s, Oregon’s labor feminists were with dependents described as “the hardest bill to pay”: for a majority it was optimistic about revitalizing the labor movement to support equal rights, medical care; for rural and suburban women, it was reliable transportation; full-employment and child-care legislation, low-wage women workers, and and for African American women it was clothing for their families. Black public policy advocacy. They had received AFL-CIO support to organize more women, concentrated in the service sector, had higher unemployment rates women into CLUW, believed an equal rights amendment was imminent, and than white women, and 70 percent, compared to 33 percent of white women, held that the state and federal governments, in expanding affirmative action earned less than $3,000 a year, below the federal poverty level.88 Unlike the and enforcing Title VII, were in their corner.91 earlier study, however, survey respondents did not mention labor unions as After twenty years of organizing for the CWA, LaRene Paul recalled that solutions to low wages, indicating how unions were losing ground. Instead, during the early 1970s, “finally the women’s movement blossomed, things the study emphasized education, training, and enforcement of equal pay and began to develop.” She echoed the reflections of other labor feminists of Title VII antidiscrimination measures to lift women workers out of poverty her generation who welcomed the new energy and demands of a youthful and into more lucrative occupations. social movement. This optimism, coupled with a dramatic rise in public-sector Declining awareness about the value of unions can be attributed in part to organizing, which brought more women into the labor movement, suggests the general decline in union density, but the lack of women’s representation that — unlike the arguments offered by some labor historians — the 1970s in leadership also played a role. In the late 1960s, Nellie Fox-Edwards was did not necessarily signal the beginning of the end of labor vitality.92 Nor the only woman on the eighteen-member Oregon AFL-CIO board, reflecting did it mark the end of labor feminism. In 1973, after the Oregon Legislature little progress since Sweet’s day. In 1969, Labor Commissioner Norman Nilsen passed a collective bargaining bill that allowed public employees to union- appointed her to a new Committee on Sex Discrimination in Employment, ize and strike, women who dominated teaching, nursing, and government which would study gender discrimination practices in workplaces and develop office work developed a stronger presence in the state labor movement.93 guidelines to enforce Oregon’s civil rights provisions. Inspired by the expand- The efforts of post-1970 Oregon labor feminists to win union leadership ing feminist movement and the committee’s findings, Fox-Edwards dedicated positions, legislation, and equal pay, along with the disappointments that herself to reforming the state AFL-CIO. Her reports to the federation revealed followed towards the end of the century, await another chapter.94 “many and widespread” problems of in employment, and she believed From the 1940s through the 1960s, women struggled against wage the labor movement could become important agents in advocating for women discrimination and for a place in the Oregon labor movement. They pres- workers. She pleaded with unions to eliminate discriminatory practices in sured their unions and lobbied state and federal legislators to boost the

32 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 33 remained stubbornly resistant to change. Working women insisted, how- ever, on gaining recognition and rights as breadwinners, presaging other feminist achievements, and challenges, in coming decades. Because of the persistence and activism of postwar labor feminists, work- ing women today are accepted as breadwinners and have gained formal equality under the law. The achievements of that earlier generation of women, and the scale of resistance to them, are perhaps underestimated because of OHS Research Library, Mss 2768 Library, OHS Research the persistence of wage inequality, job segregation, sexual harassment, and discrimination based on gender and race. Although union membership as a share of the American workforce declined steadily after the 1960s, to just 10.5 percent today, women constitute almost half of all members. In Oregon, 51.6 percent of union workers are women. Although their wages still lag behind men’s wages, they experience a smaller gender wage gap.95 But they still share some of the same challenges as their sisters in the twentieth century, chief among them gendered pay gaps, anti-union employers, limited leadership opportunities in labor, and the lack of assistance for caregiving. Some scholars have observed that although many professional women have benefitted from legal equality, class inequalities among women have concurrently widened.96 The historical undervaluation of women’s work — both in sex-segregated NELLIE FOX is pictured here campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the state labor occupations and at home — continues to perpetuate women’s low wages commissioner in 1978. In 1975, she defeated two male candidates to become the Oregon AFL- and generational family poverty. Sixty percent of Oregon’s minimum wage CIO Director of Political Education and Legislation, the first woman elected to such a post and workers are female, concentrated in the growing retail, home and personal the highest elected woman union official in the . She lost her bid for state labor care, food service, and administrative sectors. In its recent report on women commissioner to Mary Wendy Roberts, who served as commissioner for sixteen years. and girls, the Women’s Foundation of Oregon determined that the state is one of the least affordable for child care, has disproportionate barriers for women of color, and is where women have the “second highest rate of asset minimum wage, require equal pay, and support welfare measures aiding poverty in the nation.”97 These statistics only underscore how the goals of women with domestic burdens. In their pursuit of access to “men’s” jobs Oregon’s earlier labor feminists — for pay equity, greater unionization, and and wages, they became less interested in traditional protective leg- social policies to aid caregiving — still call for collaboration and activism to islation. Labor feminists also enlisted a broader community of support, create a more equitable future. including unorganized workers, union wives, and middle-class women, to aid in general education, consumer boycotts, and political action. They worked through their unions, the state labor federation, political action committees, women’s labor auxiliaries, the Oregon Bureau of Labor, and the U.S. Congress, through Green, to make gains in economic, social, NOTES and political equality. Although the labor movement formally embraced women’s participation, it tried to steer support to its traditional issues, The author is grateful to the many people who Fraser, and the OHS Research Library staff and including organizing sex-segregated workplaces and electing progressive provided assistance with this article, espe- volunteers, Eliza Canty-Jones, Erin Brasell, politicians who supported labor causes. This study reveals that in Oregon, cially Linda Shopes, Hans-Petter Grav, Norm Helen Ryan, Jim Strassmaier, Carolyn Mat- gender ideologies operating in the workplace, labor movement, and home Diamond, the Northwest Labor Press, Scott thews, and the anonymous OHQ reviewers.

34 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 35 Funding from the Oregon Historical Society see Katherine Turk, Equality on Trial: Gen- See for example, Carlos A. Schwantes, Montana: The Magazine of Western History Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Senior Research Fel- der and Rights in the Modern American Radical Heritage: Labor, Socialism, and 64:4 (Winter 2014): 3–21; John C. Putnam, lowship in Pacific Northwest History and the Workplace (Philadelphia: University of Reform in Washington and British Co- Class and Gender Politics in Progressive- Washington State University Claudius O. and Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Eileen Boris, lumbia, 1885–1917 (Seattle: University of Era Seattle (Reno: University of Nevada Mary W. Johnson Distinguished Professorship “Ledbetter’s Continuum: Race, Gender, Washington Press, 1979); Chris Friday, Press, 2008). Sue Armitage notes the dearth made this research possible. and Pay Discrimination,” in Feminist Legal Organizing Asian American Labor: The of material about women in the postwar 1. In 1929, fewer than seventeen hun- History: Essays on Women and Law, eds. Pacific Coast Canned-Salmon Industry, period in Shaping the Public Good: Women dred women in Oregon belonged to labor Tracy A. Thomas and Tracey Jean Boisseau 1870–1942 (Philadelphia: Temple University Making History in the Pacific Northwest unions, mostly in waitress, garment work- (New York: New York University Press, Press, 1992); and Greg Hall, Harvest Wob- (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, ers, railway, musicians, and retail clerks 2011), 240–56; and other works cited in blies: The Industrial Workers of the World 2015). On postwar experiences, see Antonia unions. Sr. Miriam Theresa (Caroline J. this article. and Agricultural Laborers in the American I. Castañeda, “‘Que Se Pudieran Defender Gleason), “Oregon Legislation for Women in 6. Of particular importance is Nancy West, 1905–1930 (Corvallis: Oregon State (So You Could Defend Yourselves)’: Chi- Industry,” Bulletin no. 90 (Washington, D.C.: Felice Gabin’s study of women in the Unit- University Press, 2001). Studies of working canas, Regional History, and National U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau, ed Auto Workers, Feminism in the Labor women in the Pacific Northwest mostly Discourses,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women 1931), 9; Wesling quoted in Gene Klare, “Let Movement: Women and the United Auto focus on the early twentieth century and Studies 22:3 (2001): 116–142; Jerry Garcia, “A me say this about that,” Northwest Labor Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Seattle, see Maurine Weiner Greenwald, Chicana in Northern Aztlán: An Oral History Press, November 2, 2001, https://nwlabor- University Press, 1990); Dennis Deslippe’s “Working-Class Feminism and the Family of Dora Sánchez Treviño,” Frontiers 19:2 press.org/klare/110201.html, (accessed comparison of the United Packinghouse Wage Ideal: The Seattle Debate on Married (1998): 16–52. December 12, 2018). Workers and International Union of Electri- Women’s Right to Work, 1914–1920,” Journal 9. Gilmore includes local leaders 2. Joe Lake, “Local 48 News,” Oregon cal Workers, “Rights Not Roses”: Unions of American History 76 (June 1989): 118–49; “whose activism was not represented in Labor Press [hereafter OLP], February 16, and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, “‘Not Pink Teas’: The the dominant sites of activism on the East 1945, 4. 1945–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Seattle Working-Class Women’s Movement, Coast” in her definition of “grassroots,” 3.Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Press, 2000); and Ileen A. DeVault’s com- 1905–1918,” Labor History 32:2 (Spring 1991): in Groundswell: Grassroots Feminism in Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Eco- parison of gendered craft union identity 193–230; Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Postwar America (New York: Routledge, nomic Citizenship in 20th-Century America across several strikes, regions, and AFL Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the 2013), 6, 10. On second wave grassroots (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 5. unions in United Apart: Gender and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919–1929 (Cam- feminism and coalition-building, see Ju- Kessler-Harris also articulates the evolution, Rise of Craft Unionism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); dith Ezekiel, Feminism in the Heartland persistence, and challenges to the wage in University Press, 2004). Yukari Takai, “‘These Japanese continuous- (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2002); A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and 7. See for example, Marcia Walker- ly violated the alien-contract labour laws’: Melissa Estes Blair, “‘A Dynamic Force Social Consequences (Lexington: University McWilliams, Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith The Gendered Paths of Labourers, Farmers, in Our Community’: Women’s Clubs and Press of Kentucky, 1990), and Gendering La- and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial and Housewives from Japan Traversing the Second-Wave Feminism at the Grassroots,” bor History (Urbana-Champaign: University Equality (Champaign: University of Illinois Canada-US Border in the Early Twentieth Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 30:3 of Illinois Press, 2007). Press, 2016). Ruth Milkman traces the Century,” Social History/Histoire Sociale (2009): 30–51; Janet Allured, “Louisiana, the 4. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other origins of occupational segregation by sex 40:80 (November 2007): 297–322; David American South, and the Birth of Second- Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and the concentration of women and men Keller, “Sweethearts of Jazz: The Women Wave Feminism,” Louisiana History: The and Social Rights in Modern America (Princ- in particular industries and unions in sev- of Seattle’s Black Musicians’ Unions,” Co- Journal of the Louisiana Historical Society eton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3; eral essays collected in On Gender, Labor, lumbia: The Magazine of Northwest History 54:4 (Fall 2013): 389–423. Dorothy Sue Cobble, Linda Gordon, and and Inequality (Champaign: University of 23:4 (Winter 2009/2010): 6–12; Joseph F. 10. In 1903 Oregon passed legislation Astrid Henry, Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Illinois Press, 2016), 5–6, 100–113, 170–89, Tripp, “Toward an Efficient and Moral Soci- limiting the workday for some women to Surprising History of American Women’s 208–209. The exclusion of women from in- ety: Washington State Minimum-Wage Law, ten hours, which in 1908 was upheld by Movements (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), dustry in the Pacific Northwest contrasts to 1913–1925, Pacific Northwest Quarterly 67:3 the landmark Supreme Court case Muller 1–67. Although the Oregon women did not how other states, such as Indiana, recruited (July 1976): 97–112; Greg Hall, “The Fruits of v Oregon; and in 1913 it passed the first en- describe themselves as feminists until the employers to take advantage of its pool Her Labor: Women, Children, and Progres- forceable state minimum wage law, which late 1960s (if then), they actively worked for of women workers. Nancy Gabin, “Bossy sive Era Reformers in the Pacific Northwest affected many women workers. Most gender equality and challenged sex dis- Ladies: Toward a History of Wage Earning Canning Industry,” Oregon Historical Quar- states had such protective legislation by crimination in their workplace and unions Women in Indiana,” Indiana Magazine of terly 109:2 (Summer 2008): 226–51; Aaron the early 1920s. See Nancy Woloch, Muller from the 1940s through the 1960s. History, December 1, 2016, 292–93. Goings, “Women, Wobblies & the ‘War of v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents 5. For more on legal efforts to chal- 8. Many works examine the region’s Grays Harbor’: Finnish-American Women (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996); Janice Dilg, lenge sex discrimination in the workplace, early twentieth-century male labor history. & the 1912 Grays Harbor Lumber Strike,” “‘For Working Women in Oregon’: Caro-

36 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 37 line Gleason/Sister Miriam Theresa and 12. “Mallory Hotel is now Union,” OLP, of Two West Coast Cities During the 1940s,” for example, Caroline Waldron Merithew, Oregon’s Minimum Wage Law,” Oregon March 9, 1945, p. 1. Journal of Ethnic Studies 8 (1980), 35–54; “We Were Not Ladies: Gender, Class, and Historical Quarterly 110:1 (Spring 2009): 13. Barbara Wood, “Distaff Doings in Or- Quintard Taylor, “The Great Migration: The a Women’s Auxiliary’s Battle for Mining 96–129; Robert D. Johnston, The Radical ganized Labor Ranks,” Sunday Oregonian, Afro-American Communities of Seattle and Unionism,” Journal of Women’s History Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the September 18, 1949, p. 125. Portland During the 1940s,” Arizona and the 18:2 (Summer 2006): 63–94; Melinda Cha- Question of Capitalism in 14. Oregon State Federation of Labor, West 23:2 (Summer 1981): 109–121; M. Edward teauvert, Marching Together: Women of Portland, Oregon (Princeton, N.J.: Princ- Proceedings of the Annual Convention Holland, “Oregon Civil Rights Litigation, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters eton University Press, 2006), 18–26, 60–61. [hereafter Federation Proceedings], 1946, 1964–1984: The Struggle for Equal Oppor- (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). Nancy Woloch concludes in her important p. 39, Oregon Historical Society Research tunity in the Marketplace,” Journal of the 23. Federation Proceedings, 1947, OHS study of the rise and fall of protective leg- Library, Portland, Oregon [hereafter OHS West 25:4 (1986): 28–30; Rudy N. Pearson, Research Library, 71–72. islation that it both expanded and limited Research Library]. “African Americans in Portland, Oregon, 24. Federation Proceedings, 1954, OHS protections for men and women: it led to 15. Federation Proceedings, 1946, OHS 1940-–1950: Work and Living Conditions: A Research Library, 122–23; AFL-CIO Pro- the New Deal’s Fair Labor Standards Act Research Library, 63. Social History,” (Ph.D. diss., Washington State ceedings, 1958, 80; AFL-CIO Proceedings, (FLSA) of 1938, which established minimum 16. Federation Proceedings, 1947, OHS University, 1996), 20–38. 1960, 78–79, OHS Research Library. After wages and other job protections for many Research Library, 77–78. 20. Federation Proceedings, 1948, p. the AFL-CIO merger, many hoped that the male and female workers, but it also en- 17. Federation Proceedings, 1947, OHS 92–93 and Federation Proceedings, 1951, p. CIO tradition of auxiliaries would influence shrined women as a separate — and hence Research Library; Wood, “Distaff Doings.” 90, OHS Research Library; “Negroes Able the more reluctant AFL unequal — class. Nancy Woloch, A Class In 1933, Gianini helped organize Local 107 to Find Jobs in Varied Fields: Railroads 25. Fred G. Taylor, “Phone Walkout by Herself: for Women in Portland, Oregon. In 1949, as one of the Once Nearly Only Opportunity Here,” Sun- Calls 4700 Out in Oregon,” Oregonian, April Workers, 1890s–1990s (Princeton, N.J.: strongest laundry locals on the West Coast, day Oregonian, April 13, 1952. 8, 1947, p. 1, 16; “Phone Strikers to Resume Princeton University Press, 2015). Cobble Portland gained the second-highest wage 21. Fred G. Taylor, “Waitress’ Blast Mass Picketing Thursday,” Oregonian, May contends that union women did not see scale for laundry workers in the nation, at Stalls A.F. of L. Decision to Award Next 1, 1947, p. 17; “Strikers Use Stink Bombs,” contradictions in advocating both equal- one dollar an hour. “Launderers Win In- Convention to Baker,” Oregonian, June 15, Oregonian May 2, 1947, p. 15. ity and difference in order to eliminate crease,” Sunday Oregonian, May 26, 1946, 1946, p. 9; Federation Proceedings, 1946, 26. “Ballot Set for Oregon Agreement,” discrimination, in The Other Women’s 16; Sylvia R. Weissbrodt, “Women Workers in OHS Research Library, 99–100; Federation OLP, May 14, 1947, p. 1; “Strikers OK Wage Movement, 56–67. Power Laundries,” Bulletin of the US Dept. Proceedings, 1952, OHS Research Library, Rise,” Oregonian, May 16, 1947, p. 1. For more 11. Amy Kesselman, Fleeting Opportuni- of Labor Women’s Bureau (U.S. Government 52, 76–77; “State culinary alliance views on the independent National Federation of ties: Women Shipyard Workers in Portland Printing Office,1947 ), 1–5. The Women’s Bu- new legislation,” OLP, January 14, 1955, 3; Telephone Workers strike and its role in the and Vancouver During World War II and Re- reau reported that laundry workers held the Interview with LaRene Paul by Nellie Fox creation of the more centralized CWA, see conversion (Albany: State University of New dubious distinction of earning the lowest Edwards, September 26, 1986, SR 372, OHS John N. Schacht, The Making of Telephone York Press, 1990). For more on women’s salaries of twenty-four female-dominated Research Library. Unionism, 1920–1947 (New Brunswick, N.J.: wartime industrial work and the pattern of occupations. 22. For more on auxiliaries in the Rutgers University Press, 1985). gendered job segregation in the region, 18. Wood, “Distaff Doings”; Kesselman, Northwest, see Mercier, “Gender, Labor, and 27. “Emanuel Fires Union Workers; see Karen Beck Skold, “The Job He Left Fleeting Opportunities, 114–118. Place: Reconstructing Women’s Spaces in Violates all Decent Ethics,” OLP, August Behind: American Women in the Shipyards 19. “Unemployment Seen as Major Race Industrial Communities of Western Canada 18, 1950, pp. 1, 2; “Emanuel Pickets Still During World War II,” in Women, War & Problem,” OLP, May 18, 1945; “West Coast and the United States,” Labor History 53:3 Demand Decency and Fair Treatment,” Revolution, eds. Carol Berkin and Clara Wonders What is to be Done about Negroes; (Fall 2012): 389–407; Mercier, “‘A Union OLP, September 8, 1950, 2; “Pressure Due Lovett (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), Jobs End, but They Stay On,” OLP, Decem- without women is only half organized’: Mine on Emanuel,” Oregonian, August 1, 1950, 55–75; Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: ber 21, 1945, p. 7. For more on employment Mill, Women’s Auxiliaries, and Cold War 26; “Hospital Raps Labor Charge,” Sunday Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status discrimination during this period, see Me- Politics in the North American Wests,” in Oregonian, August 6, 1950, 26; Fred G. of Women During World War II (Westport, lissa Cornelius Lang, “We were nothing but One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Taylor, “Portland Labor Council Calls for Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Heather rust”: Beatrice Green Marshall’s Wartime Women in the North American Wests, eds. Tax on Profits,” Oregonian, November 14, Fryer, “Race, Industry, and the Aesthetic Experience,” Oregon Historical Quarterly Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus 1950, p. 15; “Penalties Voted on Hospital of a Changing Community in World War 116:2 (Summer 2015): 220–33; Elizabeth (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, Picket Lines,” Oregonian, May 22, 1951, p. 10. II Portland,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly McLagan, Ethnic and Gender Discrimination 2008); and Steven C. Beda, “‘More Than a 28. “Hospital Strike Goes On; Church 96:1 (Winter 2004): 3–13; Amy E. Platt, “Go in Portland, 1844–1980 (Portland: Metropoli- Tea Party’: The IWA Women’s Auxiliary in Fights Unions,” OLP, April 13, 1951, p. 5; into the yard as a worker, not as a woman,” tan Human Rights Center, 1996), 2–21, 2–59; the Pacific Northwest,1937 –1948,” Pacific “Good Samaritan Dispute Referred to State Oregon Historical Quarterly 116:2 (Summer Alonzo Smith and Quintard Taylor, “Racial Northwest Quarterly 100:3 (Summer 2009): Conciliation: Hospital Won’t Arbitrate,” OLP, 2015): 234–48. Discrimination in the Work Place: A Study 134–45. On other union auxiliaries, see January 12, 1951, p. 8.

38 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 39 29. “After 11 Months, 4 Days: Hospital Workers Union Elevates Portland Officer,” 42. Maurine Neuberger interview by Issues, 1945–68 (Berkeley: University of Strike Settled; Union Wins Recognition,” Oregonian, May 18, 1957, p. 11; Gianini, Cynthia Harrison, SR 9037, December 15, California Press, 1988), 89–105; Cobble, OLP, December 14, 1951, p. 1; “After 581 Obituary, Oregonian, August 2, 1970, 38; 1978, OHS Research Library, 2–3. The Other Women’s Movement, 94–120; Days — Emanuel Signs Contract; Hospital “Vavrus Gets Union Post,” Oregonian, 43. Green had first run for political of- Deslippe, “Rights Not Roses,” 43–64; Kim Picketing Ends,” OLP, March 14, 1952, pp. March 30, 1958, 21. For more on the Laun- fice in 1952 as the Democratic candidate M. Blankenship, “Bringing Gender and Race 1, 3. dry and Dry Cleaning International Union, for Oregon secretary of state. Although in US Employment Discrimination Policy,” 30. “Emanuel Hospital Picketing to Start see Jenny Carson, “Laundry Unions and the incumbent Republican Earl T. Newbry Gender & Society 7:2 (June 1993): 212–13. Tuesday Morning,” and photo of “Pretty Legislation, 1900–1960s,” in Encyclopedia won, her strong electoral support led the 46. Nikkum interview by Greg Karnes, Pickets,” Oregonian, August 8, 1950, pp. of U.S. Labor and Working-class History, Democratic Party to back her 1954 cam- SR 11230, OHS Research Library. 1, 44. ed. Eric Arnesen, vol. 1 (New York: Rout- paign for the U.S. House of Representa- 47. Oregon Bureau of Labor, “Fifty Years 31. Wood, “Distaff Doings.” ledge, 2007), 781–82. Sweet had divorced tives. Green retained her support over of Progress,” (Salem: Oregon Bureau of 32. Gertrude Sweet, interview by her logger husband in 1920 and moved to the next two decades with the help of the Labor, 1952), 53, 56–57. Shirley Tanzer, 20th Century Portland to work as a waitress, depending Oregon labor movement, middle-class 48. Kathleen A. Laughlin, Women’s Woman Oral History Project, Institute of on her mother to care for her four children. women’s groups, and working-class voters Work and Public Policy: A History of the Labor and Industrial Relations (Ann Arbor: She immediately became active in the res- on Portland’s east side. Naomi Veronica Women’s Bureau, US Department of Labor, University of Michigan Press, 1978), micro- taurant workers’ local where she served Ross, “Congresswoman Edith Green on 1945–1970 (Boston: Northeastern University film; Cobble, Dishing It Out, 64–65, 141–46; as recording secretary. Women in the Federal Aid to Schools and Colleges,” Press, 2000), 40. Washington State had “Waitresses reply,” OLP, October 26, 1956, mixed-gender local rebelled and in 1921 (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, passed equal pay legislation a decade 12; “Waitress Union Studies Question of created their own separate Waitresses’ May 1980), 58–67; Philip Cogswell, “Edith earlier in 1943. Who is to Pay Cost of Providing Gay Cen- Local 305. Sweet interview by Tanzer in Starrett Green,” The Oregon Encyclopedia, 49. Minutes, Senate Labor & Industries tennial Garb,” Sunday Oregonian, March 1978; Robert Olmos, “Gertrude Sweet Still http://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/ Committee, January 18, February 2, Febru- 1, 1959, p. 14. Active in Union at 88,” Oregonian, April green_edith_starrett_1910_1987_/#.VwR- ary 15, February 16, and February 22, 1955, 33. “The Latest in Picket Styles,” OLP 27, 1978, p. E61; Sweet interview by Nel- dyXqxWwk (accessed November 1, 2015); Oregon State Archives, Salem, Oregon August 11, 1950, p. 1; O.D. Cook, letter to lie Fox Edwards, March 10, 1986, SR 376, U.S. House of Representatives Archives, [hereafter Oregon State Archives]; Public editor, June 22, 1951, 8; “Verboten?” OLP, OHS Research Library; Cobble, Dishing it “Women in Congress: Edith Starrett Green,” hearing, House Committee on Labor and June 29, 1951, p. 6; Gordon Swope, letter to Out, 178, 188. http://history.house.gov/People/Detail/1408 Industry, March 15, 1955, Oregon State editor, November 2, 1951, OLP, p. 8. 38. Wood, “Distaff Doings.” 0?ret=True#bibliography (accessed Febru- Archives. 34. See for example, “Union Maid,” OLP, 39. Klare, “Let me say this about that.” ary 1, 2016). 50. Public hearing, House Committee September 7, 1951, January 11 and June 20, By the 1950s, facing increased assaults 44. In the late nineteenth century, the on Labor and Industry, March 15, 1955, Or- 1952, and July 10, 1953. by employers, the two national labor fed- Knights of Labor called for equal pay, and egon State Archives. 35. Federation Proceedings, 1950, p. erations mended fences and combined in 1919, on the heels of progressive reform, 51. House Committee on Labor and 43, 89; Federation Proceedings, 1952, pp. in 1955. Michigan and Montana became the first Industry, March 15, 1955, Oregon State 76–77; Federation Proceedings, 1953, o. 54; 40. Nellie Fox Edwards interview, states to enact equal pay legislation. When Archives. Federation Proceedings, 1954, p. 122, all at February 6, 1986, SR 1602, pp. 21–32, OHS it was established in 1920 the US Women’s 52. “Equal Pay Bill,” OLP, April 8, 1955, OHS Research Library. Research Library, . Bureau advocated equal wages, and in p. 1. 36. Paul interview, September 26, 1986, 41. Sam St. John, “The Margarine Mak- 1923 it pushed the federal government to 53. For more on Green’s political OHS Research Library. er,” unpublished manuscript, 2014, vertical classify federal jobs according to duties legacy, see Louise Wides, “Edith Green: 37. In 1957 Gianini was elected gen- file “Maurine Neuberger,” OHS Research rather than sex. Robert D. Moran, “Reducing Democratic Representative from Oregon,” eral secretary-treasurer — and the first Library. Neuberger sometimes joined Discrimination: Role of the Equal Pay Act,” Ralph Nader Congress Project (1972), 1–29; woman in an executive position — of union members and housewives outside Monthly Labor Review 93:6 (June 1970): 30. and Marie Barovic Rosenberg, “Women in the 72,000-member international union, the statehouse on consumer issues, such In its post-World War II iteration the Equal Politics: A Comparative Study of Congress- when she defeated Eugene James after as in May 1951 when she helped organized Pay Act would have made it illegal to pay women Edith Green and Julia Butler Han- the AFL-CIO suspended the union for his the Oregon Consumers’ Emergency Com- women less than men for work of “com- sen (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, embezzlement of union insurance funds. mittee. The group protested high prices by parable quality and quantity,” a significant 1973). She was re-elected every year until her picketing grocery stores and handing out feature that was amended in the 1963 EPA 54. Ross, “Congresswoman Edith death in 1970. The embattled union was postcards to send to members of Congress. to apply only to jobs of “similar” conditions. Green,” 184–85. not able to re-enter the AFL-CIO, however, “Saturday Set by Housewives Group to 45. See for example, Kessler-Harris, In 55. Green address to convention, Sep- and Gianini’s influence in the statewide la- ‘Picket’ for Price Legislation,” OLP, July Pursuit of Equity, 234–38; Cynthia Harrison, tember 25, 1955, Oregon AFL-CIO Proceed- bor movement waned after 1957. “Laundry 13, 1951, 7. On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s ings, OHS Research Library, 29–30; “Strong

40 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 41 Union Support: Edith Green sponsors bill Mrs. Thomas Scales, Sandy, Oregon, April discrimination in employment based on Policy,” 214; Cobble, The Other Women’s to give women equal pay,” OLP, June 3, 10, 1957, Green Papers, box 18, file25 “Equal sex or race, and in 1966 an expanded FLSA Movement, 163–68; Kessler-Harris, In Pur- 1955, 1, 3. Pay for Women Correspondence,” OHS extended coverage to millions of formerly suit of Equity, 279. 56. Oral history interview with Green Research Library. Like many professional excluded workers in hotels, restaurants, 76. Bye to Green, April 26, 1963, Green by Cynthia E. Harrison, December 18, 1978, women’s groups, the BPW believed protec- laundries, hospitals, and agriculture (only Papers, box 92, file “Equal Pay,” OHS Re- OHS Research Library, 3; Memo to Speaker, tive legislation limited opportunities and domestic workers remained outside the search Library. December 5, 1958, Mss 1424, Edith Green pay by treating women as “different.” With legislation). 77. After winning passage of the law, Papers [hereafter Green Papers], box 45, over 150,000 members strong in 1956, BPW 68. Green interview by Harrison, De- Green continued to work to erase barriers file “Women — Equal Pay,” OHS Research chapters had strength beyond their num- cember 18, 1978, OHS Research Library. to girls and women in higher education Library, 3; “Edith Green Sponsors Bill,” OLP, bers as witnessed by the public activism In 1962 the PCSW encouraged state com- and in new federal programs such as the June 3, 1955, pp. 1–3; editorial June 10, 1955, of Oregon members. Laughlin, Women’s missions to study women’s status in their Job Corps. Green interview by Harrison, 4–5; “Women are Exploited: Edith Green Work and Public Policy, 55. Acknowledg- areas. By 1967, all fifty states had such December 18, 1978, OHS Research Library, Sponsors a Bill for Fair Play,” OLP, June 3, ing the important role of BPW, President commissions. For more on the PCSW, see 16. For more on Green’s role in passing 1955, pp. 4–5; “Labor backs pay equality Kennedy, in signing the1963 Equal Pay Act, Laughlin, Women’s Work and Public Policy, Title IX, which as part of the 1972 Higher for women,” June 24, 1955, 8; “Edith Green gave BPW/USA president Dr. Minnie Miles 79–86, 118–19, and Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit Education Act prohibited federally funded reports” column, OLP, July 8, 1955, 8. the first pen from the signing. Business and of Equity, 210–232. colleges and universities from discriminat- 57. Eric J. Weiss, The Self-Supporting Professional Women’s Foundation, “His- 69.Neuberger interview by Harrison, ing against women, see Deondra Rose, Woman in Oregon: Report on an Inquiry into tory of Business and Professional Women,” December 15, 1978, OHS Research Library, “Regulating Opportunity: Title IX and the Her Economic Living Pattern (Oregon Bu- http://bpwfoundation.org/about/history-3/ 20. Birth of Gender-Conscious Higher Educa- reau of Labor, c. 1958), 5–7, 93–95, 101–103. (accessed December 13, 2018). 70. Green credited the new chair of tion Policy,” Journal of Policy History 27:1 58. Weiss, The Self-Supporting Woman, 64. Green to Willis, April 21, 1958, the committee, Adam Clayton Powell, who (2015): 157–83. 14–15, 41. Green Papers, box 45, file “Women — Equal “brought a new inspiration” and made the 78. In 1950 the CIO moved closer to the 59. Weiss, The Self-Supporting Woman, Rights,” OHS Research Library. issue a priority. Green interview by Har- AFL’s anticommunism by expelling eleven 44–45. 65. Cobble, The Other Women’s Move- rison, December 18, 1978, OHS Research left-leaning unions, almost 20 percent of 60. Robert Brown to Edith Green, May ment, 67. Green switched her position to Library, 3. its membership, many of which included 16, 1959, and Green to Brown, May 16, 1959, support the ERA in 1970, when together 71. Stevens to Green, July 18, 1962, women, people of color, and service sec- Green Papers, box 45, file “Women – Equal with long-time Republican supporter of the Green Papers, box 87, file “E Green Leg- tor workers, the segment that would come Pay,” OHS Research Library. amendment, Rep. Martha Griffiths, she tried islation Equal Pay,” OHS Research Library; to dominate the workforce in the late 20th 61. Roy Hill to Edith Green, May 21, to bring the ERA to the House floor for a Brookhardt to Green, August 4, 1962, box century. See for example, Harvey Leven- 1959 and Memo from Cecil Harden, Green vote. Ultimately the House voted 352-15 in 87, file “E Green Legislation Equal Pay,” stein, Communism, Anticommunism, and Papers, box 45, file “Women – Equal Pay,” favor of the amendment, and in March 1972 OHS Research Library; Irwin to Green, the CIO (Westport, C.T.: Greenwood, 1981); OHS Research Library. the Senate passed it 84-8. Cynthia Opheim, August 8, 1962, box 87, file “E Green Leg- Robert Zieger, American Workers, Ameri- 62. The proposed ERA would guaran- “Equal Rights Amendment,” in Encyclo- islation Equal Pay,” OHS Research Library; can Unions, 1920–1985 (Baltimore: John tee equal rights for all citizens regardless pedia of the United States Congress, ed. McMillin to Green, March 10, 1963, Green Hopkins Press, 1986); Steve Rosswurm, ed., of sex and end legal distinctions between Robert E. Dewhirst and John David Rausch Papers, box 92, file “Equal Pay,” Green The CIO’s Left-Led Unions (New Brunswick, men and women. Since 1920 women’s (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2014), 199. Papers, OHS Research Library. N.J.: Rutgers, 1992); Robert Asher and groups divided over whether to support it 66. Neuberger served only one term 72. Bob Dove, July 21, 1963, Box 92, File Charles Stephenson, eds., Labor Divided: depending on their class interests — many in the Senate, having distinguished herself “Equal Pay,” Green Papers, OHS Research Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor labor feminists believed working-class by supporting a variety of consumer and Library. Struggles, 1835–1960 (Albany: State Uni- women would lose more than gain by the women’s issues, but discouraged by the 73. K.D. Flesichman to Green, April 18, versity of New York Press, 1990). The Cold amendment. For more on their support for role of money in politics and having to 1963, and Green to Flesichman, May 1, 1963, War damaged labor solidarity in the Pacific state protective legislation and opposition raise enormous sums to run again. “Retiring Green Papers, box 92, file “Eq Pay Clippings Northwest, splitting left-leaning activists in to the ERA, and how they came to support Lady Senator Tells Lady Politicians; Always and Reference,” OHS Research Library. unions and auxiliaries from the labor move- the ERA by the 1970s, see Cobble, The wear the same hat,” Oregonian, October 74. Neuberger interview by Harrison, ment’s mainstream. See Mercier, “Instead Other Women’s Movement, 60–68, 190–95. 30, 1966. December 15, 1978, OHS Research Library, 1. of Fighting the Common Enemy: Mine Mill 63. Green to Newport BPW, Novemver 67. Cobble, The Other Women’s Move- 75. Laughlin, Women’s Work and Public v. the Steelworkers in Montana, 1950–1967,” 10, 1960, Green Papers, box 54, file16 “Equal ment, 145. The EPA passed in 1963, Title Policy, 86; Blankenship, “Bringing Gender Labor History 40:4 (Fall 1999): 459–80; and Rights,” OHS Research Library; Green to VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited and Race in US Employment Discrimination Beda, “‘More Than a Tea Party.’” Like the

42 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 43 national federation, the Oregon AFL-CIO Library; Yvonne Rothert, “Labor Commis- Women (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003); with Her Own Wings: Women in the 1973 continued to support the Vietnam War into sion Has Final Hearing on Job Discrimina- Edwards interview, tape 6, 45, OHS Research Oregon Legislative Session,” Oregon His- the late 1960s. tion Against Women, Oregonian, November Library; Edwards interview, tape 11, 79, OHS torical Quarterly 111:1 (Spring 2010): 38–63. 79. AFL-CIO Digest of Proceedings, 15, 1969, 18; “Impact of Equal Pay Policy Research Library; Gene Klare, “Let me say Oregon was at the forefront of establishing 1957, 61–64; AFL-CIO Digest of Proceed- Cited,” Oregonian, April 14,1971, section 2 this about that,” NWLaborPress.org, May 16, pay equity in the public sector in the 1980s. ings, 1958, 42–43; AFL-CIO Digest of Pro- “Home and Family,” p. 10. 1997, https://nwlaborpress.org/klare/0516. For more on the achievements and failures ceedings, 1959, 79–80; AFL-CIO Digest of 85. AFL-CIO Proceedings, 1962, 66, html (accessed December 12, 2018); “Nel- of Oregon’s comparable worth efforts, see Proceedings, 1961, 56–58; AFL-CIO Digest OHS Research Library. Structural changes lie Fox-Edwards, a pioneer for women in Margaret Hallock, “Pay Equity: What is the of Proceedings, 1965, 87, 90, all at OHS in the economy and managerial resistance labor,” NWLaborPress.org, October 16, Best Union Strategy?” Labor Studies Journal Research Library. explain the decline of organized retail work- 2017 https://nwlaborpress.org/2017/10/ 25:1 (Spring 2000): 27–44; and Joan Acker, 80. Oregon Commissioner of Labor, ers, as outlined by Susan Porter Benson, nellie-fox-edwards-a-pioneer-for-women- Doing Comparable Worth: Gender, Class, “Report and Recommendations of the Ad Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, in-labor/ (accessed December 13, 2018). The and Pay Equity (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple Hoc Committee on Sex Discrimination in and Customers in American Department national AFL-CIO did not elect a woman to University Press, 1989). Employment,” 1969, box 1, file “Reports, Civil Stores, 1890–1940 (Champaign: University its 34-member executive council until 1980. 95. Regardless of race, union women Rights, Women, History,” Fox collection, of Illinois Press, 1988), 269–71, 292–93; 91. Rosemary Maynard, “Coalition nationally earn 88.7 cents on the dollar OHS Research Library. and Daniel J. Opler, For All White-Collar Promotes Union Involvement,” Oregonian, compared with their male counterparts, 81. See for example, “Mother’s Burden,” Workers: The Possibilities of Radicalism in February 20, 1976, p. 29; “Program for considerably more than non-union female Oregonian November 23, 1968, p. 22; “Male New York City’s Department Store Unions, Women’s Equal Employment Opportunity workers. Institute for Women’s Policy Re- Unwanted, Too,” Sunday Oregonian, Janu- 1934–1953 (Columbus: Ohio State University Proposal,” to Oregon Commissioner of search, “Status of Women in the States,” ary 25, 1970, p. 2F; and “Long, Long Way…” Press, 2007), 180–214. Labor Norman Nilsen, December 1970, 2015, statusofwomendata.org, 1-4. Non- Oregonian, June 15, 1970, p. 24. 86. Sweet interview by Tanzer. Eleanor R. Davis Collection, Oregon Po- union women in Oregon are paid 82 cents 82. For more on the struggle to pass 87. Jan Newton and Sandy Gill, Women litical Leadership Archive, http://cwldigi- for every dollar that male workers earn, Title VII and later enforcement measures, Workers in Oregon: A Portrait (Eugene: talexhibits.com/decade/1970s/#eleanor- only slightly more than women nationally see Harrison, On Account of Sex, 176–91; University of Oregon Labor Education & davis-04-program-for-womens-equal-em- who earn just 80 cents; women of color and Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Research Center, 1978), 5–10, 23, 56. The ployment-opportunity-proposal (accessed earn even less. Oregon Center for Public Enough: The Opening of the American authors emphasize the gendered division December 13, 2018). The optimism about Policy, “Women Still Paid Less Than Men: Workplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard of labor in the 1960s, with 78 percent of expected gains in the decade is expressed Oregon’s Gender Pay Gap,” (April 11, 2016) University Press, 2006), 120–54. Women clerical workers female and 87 percent in Newton and Gill, Women Workers in http://www.ocpp.org/2016/04/11/fs20160411- who dissented against the EEOC’s slow of blue-collar workers male. Oregon had Oregon, 71–72. oregon-gender-pay-gap-women/ (accessed progress in eliminating discriminatory state a higher percentage of men and lower 92. Paul interview by Fox-Edwards, December 13, 2018); AAUW, “The Simple labor laws formed the National Organiza- percentage of women in its blue-collar jobs September 26, 1986. See for example, Jef- Truth about the Gender Pay Gap,” (Fall tion of Women (NOW) in 1966, electing than the national average. Women made up ferson Cowie, Stayin’Alive: The 1970s and 2016), http://www.aauw.org/research/the- former labor journalist as only 2–4 percent of longshore and wood the Last Days of the Working Class (New simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/ president and several women labor lead- products jobs. York: The New Press, 2010), and Nelson (accessed December 13, 2018). ers as officers. Cobble, The Other Women’s 88. Eric J. Weiss, “’They Carry the Bur- Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century 96. See for example, Turk, Equality on Movement, 178, 185. Katherine Turk outlines den Alone’: The Socio-Economic Living Pat- of American Labor (Princeton: Princeton Trial, 2, 10, 202–208; Boris, “Ledbetter’s the national explosion of EEOC cases dur- tern of Oregon Women with Dependents: A University Press, 2002). Continuum,” 241, 251–53, and “Where’s the ing the 1970s, in Equality on Trial. Research Report,” Oregon Bureau of Labor, 93. The Oregon Nurses Association Care?” Labor 11:3 (2014): 43–47; Milkman, On 83. Governor’s Committee on the Status 1968, 2–3, 39, 43–45, 58–60, 65, 83–91. won its first contract at Providence Hospital Gender, 2–3, 10, 205–206, 289–293. of Women in Oregon, “Year End Report,” 89. AFL-CIO Proceedings 15th annual in Portland in 1962 and by the mid 1970s 97. Women’s Foundation of Oregon, November 1968, 57; Holland, “Oregon Civil convention, September 1970, Mss 1505, had organized two-thirds of the state’s Count Her In: A Report about Women and Rights Litigation,” 32. Labor Collection, box 2, file1 “AFL CIO,” hospitals. Patricia Schechter, “The Labor Girls in Oregon (September 2016) https:// 84. “Food Store Clerks Strike,” Orego- OHS Research Library; AFL-CIO Proceed- of Caring: A History of the Oregon Nurses womensfoundationoforegon.org/count- nian, July 22, 1965, p. 16; “Coos Area Food ings Digest, 15th convention, Roseburg, Association, Oregon Historical Quarterly her-in (accessed December 13, 2018), 41–42. Clerks Accept New 4-Year Pact,” Oregonian, September 14–17, 1970, p. 5, OHS Research 108:1 (Spring 2007): 16, 18. An estimated 33 percent of single working August 4, 1965, p. 10; Flyers for Safeway Library; AFL-CIO Digest, 16th convention, 94. Melody Rose and Tara Watson argue mothers in Oregon live below the poverty strike, Mss 2768, Nellie Fox Edwards col- Eugene, Oregon, August 30 to September that the 1973 Oregon Legislature advanced line. Oregon Council on Civil Rights, Pay lection, box 1, file “Job equality for women, 3, 1971, pp. 19, 82, OHS Research Library. historic feminist legislation, surpassing other Inequality in Oregon: Recommendations sex bias, etc,” OHS Research Library; Fox- 90. Silke Roth, Building Movement states due to the previous work of women (Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, Edwards interview, tape 6, OHS Research Bridges: The Coalition of Labor Union legislators, activists, and allies, in “She Flies January 2014), 2–3, 11.

44 OHQ vol. 120, no. 1 Mercier, Breadwinning, Equity, and Solidarity 45