The Rise of Corporate Feminism: Women in the American Office, 1960–1990 by Allison Elias

Author:Allison Elias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

7

A FEMINIST “BRAND CALLED YOU”

On January 31, 1986, U.S. District Judge John Nordberg ended twelve years of legal wrangling between the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Sears, Roebuck & Company. At issue in the case was whether Sears had demonstrated a pattern of discrimination against women in the hiring and promotional process for commissioned sales employees. The EEOC argued that although women constituted just 27 percent of full-time commission sales hires in the 1970s, they were 61 percent of the applicant pool for these relatively high-paying jobs. It further claimed that Sears had highly subjective hiring processes that pushed women toward noncommission jobs. Challenging the validity of the EEOC’s statistical analysis, Sears contended that no proof of discriminatory intent existed. In a decision that was sharply critical of the EEOC’s case and quite complimentary of Sears’s practices, Nordberg claimed that Sears was not to blame. In fact, he noted that as the second-largest employer of women, Sears was a model for affirmative action.1

Given that the Sears-EEOC legal conflict lasted more than a decade, academics and activists had plenty of time to discuss the extent of Sears’s culpability—if, in fact, the business was culpable at all. The expert testimony of two feminist historians—one on behalf of Sears and the other on behalf of the EEOC—epitomized this tension about the merits of the case. In support of Sears, Rosalind Rosenberg, professor of history at Barnard College, contended that women preferred certain jobs over others and traditionally had approached their career choices differently from men. Pay disparities and occupational segregation did not necessarily reflect the presence of employer discrimination.2 Alice Kessler-Harris, then professor of history at Hofstra University, took offense at this reasoning. In her testimony for the EEOC, she claimed that systemic discrimination against women accounted for their underrepresentation in commissioned sales jobs and other higher-paying jobs throughout history. Kessler-Harris did not believe that occupational segregation reflected women’s preferences but rather that it resulted from economic, political, and social forces that pushed women out of higher-paid work.3 Feminist academics and activists tended to align more closely with Kessler-Harris’s worldview. A number of scholars criticized Rosenberg in academic and popular pieces, writing in the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Nation, Ms. magazine, and Feminist Studies that her testimony betrayed to the cause of women’s rights.4 Rosenberg responded that “scholars must not subordinate their scholarship to their politics.”5

After the trial ended, Rosenberg and Kessler-Harris continued the debate about women’s careers in academic journals and the mainstream media. Should Sears have been held liable for the lower representation of women in commission sales jobs? Rosenberg thought that many factors beyond Sears’s control accounted for the lack of women in commission sales jobs. She had testified that, from birth, women learned to internalize feminine values, which led them to pursue certain types of work relative to other types.6 Kessler-Harris, on the other hand, thought that fewer women in certain jobs “can thus only be interpreted as a consequence of employers’ unexamined attitudes or preferences,” which constituted “the essence of discrimination.

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