Women, President's Commission on the Status of

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WOMEN, PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF

WOMEN, PRESIDENT'S COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF, was established by executive order of President Kennedy on 14 December 1961 after intense lobbying by the Women's Bureau director Esther Peterson and Dollie Lowther Robinson, an African American union worker. Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the twenty-six member commission that included Peterson, officers from the National Councils of Jewish, Catholic, and Negro Women, two labor leaders, two college presidents, the historian Caroline Ware, the attorney general, the secretaries of the departments of commerce, agriculture, labor, and health, education and welfare, and two Republican and two Democratic members of Congress.

President Kennedy charged the commission to review women's progress and make recommendations for further equality in six areas: federal civil service employment policies and practices; employment policies and practices of federal contractors; labor legislation; social insurance and tax laws; political, civil, and property rights; and new and expanded services women needed as wives, mothers, and workers. The commission report was due 1 October 1961. The commission members were reluctant to abandon the idea that women's family role meant different life patterns for women and men, so it compromised between complete equality and recognition of gender difference. It endorsed the principle of employment equality, but allowed for possible justifiable gender discrimination. For example, in order to protect women's "maternal functions" it did not seek to outlaw protective hours legislation for women. It called for equal access to education, but wanted girls also to be educated in caring for homes and families. Assuming male responsibility to support the family, it recommended no changes in the social security system. It did recommend abolishing existing state laws entitling the person who worked for pay to all family assets.

Betty Friedan, author of The Feminist Mystique, contended that even the tepid recommendations of the commission

were buried in the bureaucracy. But the commission drew national attention to the status of women, gathered an enormous amount of data, and became, in the words of the African American activist Pauli Murray, the "first high-level consciousness group" (Hartman, p. 53) of a renewed women's movement.