The Other Women's Movement by Cobble Dorothy Sue;

Author:Cobble, Dorothy Sue;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2004-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

“THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE”

With the battle over equal pay winding down, many labor women fastened their hopes on the release of the final report from the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. The twenty-six members of the commission, after their first meeting in the White House on February 12, 1962, had spent a year and a half deliberating. Under the guidance of Peterson and Ellickson, they had waded through technical reports from seven appointed committees and held four consultations, including one on the “Problems of Negro Women,” before reaching agreement on a final document in October 1963.106 At what was to be one of his last public presentations, President Kennedy released the commission’s report, American Women, at a White House ceremony the first week of November. It quickly became a best-seller, with 64,000 copies distributed the first year and a commercial version issued soon after.107

Later characterized by Peterson as an exercise in “the art of the possible,” the report’s recommendations provoked criticism when first released and continue to remain controversial.108 Yet set in the context of its time, it was a far-reaching document that sought a balance between opportunity and protection for men and women and, in historian Judith Sealander words, repudiated “the Progressive canonization of motherhood.”109 Although it ended up concluding that constitutional changes such as the ERA “need not now be sought,”110 it roundly condemned sex discrimination and offered a concrete set of recommendations aimed at achieving gender equality.

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