A lawyer and judge before being elected to Congress in 1954, Griffiths was the first woman on the powerful House Ways and Mean Committee. She is also the woman most responsible for including women in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark piece of legislation which outlawed discrimination in voting, access to public education, employment, public accommodations, and in Federally-assisted programs on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or religion, opening the doors of opportunity to women throughout the United States and spurring women across the world to fight to have similar laws enacted in their home countries.

      With passage of the law, women had a legal tool to fight against discrimination, but getting the law enforced and the courts to rule in women's favor was another matter. In 1966, NOW (the National Organization for Women) was formed by women in the words of African American feminist activist Pauli Murray, as an "NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) for women" to force companies and the government to implement the law.

The second wave of the woman's movement dates from the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964. Here is a list of just a few of the landmark Supreme Court ruling to come from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and similar, later laws. The Equal Pay Act (1963) mandated that men and women performing the same jobs be paid the same. In US ex. rel. v. Robinson (1968), the Federal District Court struck down as unconstitutional a Connecticut statute requiring longer prison sentences for women than for men. In 1969, the US Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the EEOC Guidelines prohibiting sex-segregated help wanted ads and denied the appeal of the Newspaper Publishers Association. 3 Women gained a limited right to public accommodations in Seidenberg v. McSorley's Old Ale House (1969). Previously, women trying to eat alone in restaurants were assumed to be prostitutes soliciting customers and could be denied service. By 9-0, in a landmark decision in Reed v. Reed (1971), the US Supreme Court found an Idaho law giving arbitrary preference to men as executors of estates could not to be allowed to "stand in the face of the 14th amendment" and was unconstitutional. For the first time the US Supreme Court struck down a state statute as unconstitutional due to discrimination on account of sex. Mandatory pregnancy leave statutes, regulations, and policies were successfully challenged in Doe v. Osteopathic Hospital of Wichita, Inc, Bravo v. Board of Education, Heath v, Websterville Board of Education, LaFleur v. Cleveland Board of Education, Pocklington v. Duval County School, Williams v. San Francisco Unified School District, and Robinson v. Rand. (1972) p. 63 In Roe v. Wade (1973) and Doe v. Bolton (1973), the US Supreme Court struck down state laws restricting women's access to abortion. In Frontiero v Richardson (1973) the US Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional discrimination to deny benefits to husbands of military servicewomen. After a 5 campaign and 3 1/2 years of litigation, the US Supreme Court prohibited sex-segregated employment advertisements. (1973) In 1974, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was extended to prohibit discrimination based on sex. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 required financial institutions to consider women's income or savings in the same manner in which men's earnings are considered. Credit histories of "family accounts" had to be extended to women as well as men In Taylor v. Louisiana (1975), by an 8-1 vote, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for states to deny women equal opportunity for jury service, voiding a Louisiana statute that automatically excluded any woman from jury service unless she applied for it in writing. Only five years earlier, opinions issued by the New York courts upheld the exemption of women from jury duty as a reasonable practice. In 1970 the Ohio Supreme Court held that a wife was "at most a superior servant to her husband. . . only chattel with no personality, no property, and no legally recognized feelings or rights." The 1974 Georgia legislature approved a statute that defined the husband as "head of the family" with the "wife . . . subject to him; her legal existence . . . merged in the husband, except as so far as the law recognizes her separately, either for her own protection, her own benefit, or for the preservation of the public order." Until the early 1980s, a Louisiana statute gave husbands exclusive control over the disposition of jointly owned community property. In 1975 a Utah law requiring divorces fathers to support a son until age 21 but to support a daughter only until the age of 18 was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. In Weinberger v Weisenfeld (1975), the US Supreme Court held that a Social Security provision giving benefits to widows with minor children and denying benefits to widowers with children was unconstitutional. An equally divided US Supreme Court upheld a decision approving of sexually separate schools for academically superior boys and girls in Vorcjeimer v Philadelphia (1977). In Satty v Nashville Gas (1977), the US Supreme Court held that pregnant employees could be denied sick pay. The court ruled that seniority rights could not be taken away from a woman on leave to give birth. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 reversed the Supreme Court decisions in Gilbert v GE (1976), which denied "pregnant people" disability benefits, and Satty v Nashville Gas (1977), which denied women the use of sick leave during child birth. In Continental Can v Minnesota (1983), the Minnesota Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision which held employers responsible for the sexual harassment of female employees by their male co-workers. The Supreme Court strongly affirmed the right of women workers every where to be free of sexual harassment in the work place, whether by boss, supervisor, or co-worker. In 1984, a Federal judge ruled that the government must pay women in the US Civil Service system the same as men with the same duties and responsibilities, regardless of where they are located.

      The story of Griffiths' fight to have women included in the Civil Rights Act is a story worth reading, remembering, and passing on to our daughters. The white men in Congress did not give women anything. Rather, Griffiths and other women used men's racial bigotry to forward their own agenda. The following excerpt from The Feminist Chronicles, 1953-1993, A History of the Second Wave of the Women's Rights Movement, by Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida, Women's Graphics, 1993 documents the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

      Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded to the Presidency after John Kennedy's assassination in late November 1963, had expressed strong support of the Commission on the Status of Women when he was Vice President. Now, anxious to demonstrate his commitment to completing Kennedy's unfinished agenda and transfer JFK's popularity with key constituencies to himself, he initiated efforts to win the support of women's organizations for his Administration.

      One initiative, particularly pleasing to Party-affiliated women, was the appointment of more women to his Administration. Though he did not appoint a woman to his Cabinet, by 1968 he had appointed 52 women, (compared with 30 serving in 1963), a significant number of them in positions that were firsts for women. He named Esther Peterson to serve as his special assistant on Consumer Affairs in addition to her post as Assistant Secretary of Labor.

      Peterson voluntarily gave up the directorship of the Women's Bureau, and Johnson replaced her with Mary Dublin Keyserling. Keyserling, an economist who had been active in the Democratic Party and with the National Consumers League, believed strongly that women workers required special protective legislation -- a philosophical commitment that would put her in conflict with many other activist women and women's organizations that had begun to see them as restricting opportunities for promotion and higher wages.

      In June 1963, Rep. Emmanuel Celler (D-NY), who had long opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, had introduced an omnibus civil rights bill, primarily directed at protecting Blacks and other racial, religious, or ethnic minorities against discrimination in voting, access to public education, employment, public accommodations, and in Federally-assisted programs. After 22 days of hearings, the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Cellar, had reported the bill out favorably on November 20, 1963, just two days before President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas.

      In December, 1963, the National Council of the National Woman's Party passed a resolution calling for an amendment to the Civil Rights bill to prohibit discrimination based on sex and protesting that, as the bill stood, it " would not even give protection against discrimination because of 'race, color, religion, or national origin' to a White Woman, a Woman of the Christian Religion, or a Woman of United States origin."

      As radical as National Woman's Party members appeared in the campaign for suffrage, there was strong inclination among many of its well-to-do members to a conservatism that abhorred interference in private enterprise, mirrored the racism of the majority of Americans and, even in the 1950s, led some of them to support Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist crusade.

      The reality was that racism and ethnic and religious bigotry were pervasive in American life and few organizations -- whether composed of women or men -- were free of all traces.

      It was also true that white, male politicians promoted prejudice by making minority groups compete against each other in the pursuit of civil and economic rights that should have been theirs as a birthright. The temptation to exploit a backlash to advance one's own group would be hard to resist, given the frustrations that blocked civil rights movements.

      With the Civil Rights bill headed for debate on the floor of the House, members of the National Woman's Party contacted Rep. Howard W. Smith (D-VA), chairman of the House Rules Committee, to suggest that a ban against sex discrimination be included in the legislation. Smith, a Southern archconservative who was also a longtime sponsor of the Equal Rights Amendment, told them he expected such an amendment to be offered on the floor, but did not commit to do it himself.

      Though he opposed the Civil Rights bill, he apparently agreed that if it was going to pass it should cover sex discrimination as well so that women would have the same rights as Blacks.

      During Committee hearings, Smith questioned Cellar about the absence of a provision banning sex discrimination and said he would correct the omission.

      On January 26, on the television show Meet The Press lifelong feminist May Craig, a member of the White House press corps and a regular on the show, questioned Smith about whether he would amend Title VII of the legislation to ban sex discrimination.(Craig had also long made it a practice at Presidential press conferences to query the incumbent President on what he had done for women lately).

      "Well, maybe I would," Smith replied. "I'm all strong for women, you know."

      "Amendment on the floor?" Craig persisted.

      "I might do that, " Smith replied.

      Both Congresswomen Martha Griffiths (D-MI) and Katherine St. George (R-NY), strong supporters of the ERA, had by now decided to back the amendment but to let Smith introduce it. They knew that Smith's sponsorship of the amendment, as part of a Southern strategy designed to defeat the entire bill, would guarantee the votes of 100 or more Congressmen from the deep South, who would otherwise vote against a feminist measure.

      On February 8, 1964, Smith introduced the amendment to add the word "sex" to the provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The debate that followed has been characterized as "Ladies' Day in the House."

      Though Smith later denied he was insincere in introducing the amendment, Griffiths has said that it was Smith himself who told her he had proposed the amendment as a joke. The fact that he began his own arguments in its favor by reading a letter from a woman complaining that the 1960 Census had reported 2,661,000 "extra females" in the U.S. and asking that he introduce legislation to remedy the shortage of men for women to marry certainly set the tone.

      His reading of the letter brought down the house and, though Smith had to repeatedly ask for quiet, he concluded, "I read that letter just to illustrate that women have some real grievances."

      Cellar, the leader of the coalition handling the bill, responded in kind: "I can say as a result of forty-nine years of experience -- and I celebrate my fiftieth wedding anniversary next year-that women, indeed, are not in the minority in my house. . . . I usually have the last two words, and those words are, 'Yes, dear.' "

      On a more serious note, he also quoted Esther Peterson, who insisted that adding sex to the Civil Rights bill would "not be to the best advantage of women at this time."

      Liberals in Congress were reluctant to add the sex provision to the Civil Rights Act because they feared it would endanger its chances of passage, jeopardizing this historic opportunity to advance the civil rights of Blacks. For them it was, as it had been with passage of the 14th Amendment in 1866 which also excluded women, once again "the Negro's hour." Many conservatives were blind or indifferent to discrimination against women or believed that such discrimination was reasonable to protect women's traditional role.

      But, as the ribaldry of the debate swelled among the male representatives, it seemed to betray not a patriarchal gallantry but a deep-rooted contempt for women. And regardless of the many reservations expressed by some of the women representatives, every Congresswoman but one abruptly rallied to support the amendment in defiance of party discipline.

      Martha Griffiths, who had planned to support it and had come prepared, rose to point out that the laughter of the men at the introduction of the amendment only underscored women's second class citizenship. The bill as written, she said, would leave white women without the protection it would provide Black women. The main function of protective labor laws for women, she said, was to protect men's rights to the best paying jobs. She ended her speech declaring that a white man's vote against the amendment was a vote against his wife, his widow, his sister, and his daughter.

      Only Rep. Edith Green continued to oppose it, but not without a feminist awareness, as her statement indicated.

      "As the author of the Equal Pay bill, I believe I have demonstrated my concern and my determination to advance women's opportunities, "she said. "But I do not believe this is the time or place for this amendment. At the risk of being called an Aunt Jane, if not an Uncle Tom, let us not add any amendment that would get in the way of our primary objective. . . . For every discrimination I have suffered, the Negro woman has suffered ten times that amount of discrimination."

      The Southern strategy backfired and on February 8, 1964, the prohibition against sex discrimination passed by a vote of 168 to 133. As the teller announced the vote count, a woman's voice from the gallery cried, "We made it! God bless America!"

      The provision stayed in Title VII of the version of the whole Civil Rights Act that passed the House two days later by a vote of 290 to 130. It's worth noting that every man who had spoken in favor of the sex discrimination amendment, except Rep. Ross Bass (D-TN), voted against the Civil Rights Act.

      The National Woman's Party, which had already been lobbying intensely for passage of the amendment, now set up an emergency committee to work on keeping it in the Senate version of the bill. Pauli Murray, a Black woman attorney and one-time protégé of Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote a forceful "Memorandum in Support of Retaining the Sex Amendment," which the lobbyists of the Business and Professional Women, by then also actively campaigning, distributed to members of the Senate.

      The Administration also dropped its opposition to the amendment in order to expedite passage of the same version of the bill in the Senate. On June 17, the Senate, in fact, passed a substitute bill, with the sex discrimination provision included, by a vote of 76-18. Two weeks later, on July 2, the House adopted the Senate version by a better than two-thirds vote. On the same day, President Johnson signed the bill into law.

      By coalescing with the reactionary Southern strategists, and in the absence still of a widespread national women's rights movement, a handful of feminists had succeeded in pulling off a major political coup.

      But the struggle was far from over.

References

      Toni Carabillo, Judith Meuli, and June Bundy Csida, The Feminist Chronicles 1953 - 1993 : A History of the Second Wave of the Women's Rights Movement, Women's Graphics, 1993

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