Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg

Author:Rosalind Rosenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

Adding “Sex” to Title VII

Murray faced not just divided women’s and civil rights movements but also a problem inherent in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Equal Protection Clause covered only state action, that is, discriminatory laws and official behavior that stemmed from state laws. Far more pressing to most women were the barriers they faced in private employment. Murray had experienced private job discrimination all her life, though she could rarely be sure whether race or gender played a larger role in holding her back. She had suggested possible legal remedies for both as far back as 1945 in correspondence with Ware and in her California Law Review article on employment law. That article focused on ways to combat race discrimination in hiring, but Murray suggested parallel action against gender discrimination at every opportunity.24

Thacher Clarke, Murray’s young friend from Paul, Weiss, homed in on the problem of private employment discrimination when Murray sought her comment on Murray’s Fourteenth Amendment proposal. Thacher was by then married to the Reverend John Anderson, whom she had met in 1959 at the founding conference of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU), an organization aimed at ending race discrimination in the church. By 1962, Thacher was a mother on unpaid leave from a job she had taken at the New York State Division of Human Rights. She agreed with Murray’s arguments in her Fourteenth Amendment memorandum, but her work at the Division of Human Rights persuaded her that the bigger problem was private employers. New York, along with more than a score of northern and western states, had passed a Fair Employment Practice law in the years since World War II. As of 1964, however, the state still allowed discrimination in employment on the basis of gender; indeed, only two states—Wisconsin and Hawaii—barred private businesses from discriminating against women. Anderson urged Murray to broaden her equal rights efforts to encompass sex discrimination in the private sector.25

Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party, agreed. Although Paul continued to believe that women needed an Equal Rights Amendment above all else, she turned her attention to the civil rights bill pending in Congress, when the PCSW declared in its final report on October 11, 1963, that the ERA “need not now be sought.” If the ERA remained out of reach, Paul reasoned, then the NWP might at the very least seek equal rights to jobs in the private sector. As initially drafted, the civil rights bill proposed only to protect voting rights and to end racial segregation in public accommodations. Under pressure from civil rights organizations, however, Brooklyn Democratic Representative Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (which was holding hearings on the bill), added Title VII to grant equal access to private employment without regard to national origin, religion, race, or color. Paul vowed to add “sex” to that list, and on December 16, 1963, the NWP unanimously adopted a resolution to do so. In language notable for its implicit racism, anti-Semitism, and

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