The Labor Feminists Behind NOW

Before “second-wave” feminism, the nation’s workforce was rigidly sex segregated. Laws in all fifty states separated the sexes at work and consigned women to a handful of dead-end, low-paid service sector and clerical occupations, with women of color faring the worst. Sexual harassment was an everyday occurrence. And women had limited routes to address these problems, because even union leaders — almost exclusively male — were often reluctant to permit women to participate on equal terms.

Beginning in the 1960s, some women argued they needed their own structures to topple sexist hierarchies. Dollie Lowther Robinson, a black labor lawyer and former union activist, told the Women’s Department of the United Auto Workers that federal officials were refusing to enforce a new law on workplace sex equality. “What we need,” she insisted, “is an NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] for women.”

Pauli Murray, Robinson’s fellow attorney and labor activist, agreed. Black women like them, she claimed, “can no longer postpone or subordinate the fight against discrimination because of sex to the civil rights struggle, but must carry on both fights simultaneously.” Perhaps women should hold their own “March on Washington” to demand “equal job opportunities for all.”

Labor union women around the country were coming to similar conclusions. Catherine Conroy had worked as a long-distance operator for the Wisconsin Telephone Company in the early 1940s, where she and dozens of other women were tethered to heavy headsets and toiled on exhausting and inflexible shifts under “paternalis[tic]” supervision. In 1951, she was elected president of her union local, an outpost of the Communications Workers of America, where she sought to improve conditions for women operators, “the most abused employee[s] in the system.”

Seven hundred miles east, Min Matheson was organizing women textile workers in rural Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. New York City’s “runaway shops” had relocated there as the coal industry foundered, escaping unions and paying meager wages to the desperate wives and daughters of former miners. Matheson was the daughter of a Communist-inspired cigar maker and trade unionist in Chicago whose home police had raided in 1919, and she recalled that even as a teenager, “if there was any kind of radical meeting or a trade union meeting, you could always be sure I’d be there.”

In her work for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), Matheson found that employers ignored labor laws and pressed women to work double and triple shifts. The workers grew to trust her because she “was right on the picket line with us . . . most every morning.” Over two decades, she helped boost union membership from 650 to 11,000.

Out west, the Brooklyn-born Aileen Hernandez was organizing for the ILGWU in Los Angeles. In the union, women’s role was “very simple,” she observed. “They did certain kinds of jobs and the men did the other jobs,” and “the jobs that the women did got paid less and the ones that the men did got paid more.”

After a few years in California state government, Hernandez accepted President Lyndon Johnson’s appointment to be one of the first five members of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1965. The commission was empowered to field women’s sex discrimination complaints, but the other commissioners tended to treat their claims as a joke. She found that most of her fellow commissioners “were dealing with the race issues that they were familiar with” while women’s complaints were “going down the drain.” The men’s attitude was “totally frustrating.”

“True Equality for All Women”

In 1966, Conroy, Matheson, and Murray cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) to bring about what its Statement of Purpose called “true equality for all women in America.” While NOW also included women from government, education, business, journalism, and health care, it was the labor women, more than those from any other perspective, who laid NOW’s foundation. They knew how to build a strong and durable organization that could hold power brokers accountable.

At NOW’s founding meeting, Conroy “pulled out $5, plunked it down and said to us, in essence, ‘Put your money where your mouth is,’” recalled a fellow Wisconsin feminist. Conroy intended to finance the new group and to secure people’s commitment. She also understood the need to broker consensus. When NOW’s 1967 conference voted on the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, some members quit in protest. Conroy’s mentee “wondered if there would be anybody left by the time we got done.” Conroy shook her head at the defectors, explaining that to nurture an organization, “You have to keep your eye on the ball” and compromise.

Hernandez, NOW’s second president, drew from her union experience the need for democratic governance, clear lines of authority, and broad participation. She pushed to resolve what was “a great deal of duplication and a fuzziness about who has responsibility for what” in NOW, she wrote to the national board in 1968. The former ILGWU organizer spent the next decade helping NOW “find ways of getting more varied in our membership ranks.”

Many of these labor women departed NOW within a few years, but the groundwork they laid positioned the organization to pursue the gender equality many now take for granted. Across the late 1960s and 1970s, NOW turned “on paper” entitlements into concrete, enforced rights. Its lawsuits ended sexist state laws for working women and sex-segregated job advertisements.

The group’s members targeted discriminators, then testified at hearings, picketed and boycotted, and used the law to force them to reform. NOW helped pass the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and secured nondiscrimination provisions in public accommodations and housing. In addition, the organization broadened reproductive rights, nearly won ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and pursued maternity leave and subsidized childcare. NOW’s efforts transformed American culture, so gender equality was no longer a punch line.

Along the way, several of NOW’s founders established the Coalition of Labor Union Women, which drew union women together to forge a common agenda across employment sectors. They also reformed their own unions, ensuring that pay equity, parental leave, and anti-harassment provisions were written into contracts.

The pre-“second wave” landscape of unyielding gender hierarchy, widespread sexual harassment, and help-wanted ads separated by sex had been utterly remade.

Labor Women Today

Labor feminists’ accomplishments and tactics live on today. As just one example, they are on the front lines of attacking the assault on abortion rights. In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, which reversed Roe v. Wade, unions affirmed abortion access as a core labor demand. “Reproductive rights are human rights,” the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) declared, framing Dobbs as “part of a larger campaign to deny us security and control over our own destinies.”

Pregnancy could have “devastating economic effects due to pervasive discrimination and the lack of affordable healthcare or paid parental leave,” pointed out the Women’s Committee of the Communications Workers of America — Conroy’s former union. Trade unionists link abortion rights to the fights to strengthen the welfare state and secure comprehensive medical benefits.

Amid eroding government protections, unions can step in. A recent United Electrical Workers publication urged members to bargain for “abortion pill” coverage in prescription benefit plans and paid time off for out-of-state travel to secure abortion care or to accompany someone else who needs it. Unions have also showed up for LGBTQ workers, especially in recent years. As then-AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka wrote in 2018, “For many LGBTQ Americans, a union card is their only form of employment protection.” The US Supreme Court has since extended queer workers’ rights, but unions can press further.

Labor union women will be central to stopping the backsliding in our democracy and regaining what we’ve lost. They have the structures and the muscle to move on many fronts: in courts, in their organizations, in popular culture, and at the bargaining table. They know that gender-based rights cannot be separated from struggles related to race, class, and sexuality, and they understand the enemies of working people.

“Forces against women work twenty-four hours a day and are paid full-time salaries to keep the status quo,” feminist organizer Heather Booth said in 1974. She pointed to the “sophisticated government and corporate combination” that was “designed to keep women where they are.” Still, Booth claimed, “there’s room to maneuver.” Her comments are just as true today.