Public Employee Press

Local 375 Women’s Committee speaker focuses on equality at work

“The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker” — throughout history, jobs in every culture have been segregated by sex, said eminent historian Alice Kessler-Harris May 10 as she held the rapt attention of her audience at DC 37.

The Women’s Committee of Civil Service Technical Guild Local 375 sponsored Kessler-Harris’s talk on “the working women’s movement and the struggle for racial and sexual equality in the workplace.”

Committee Chair Liz Eastman welcomed the group and Co-chair Cheryl Couch introduced Dr. Kessler-Harris, who is the Chair of the Columbia University History Dept. and a prolific author on women and work.

Kessler-Harris outlined the development and the enduring power of the ideology that sustained sex segregation in the workplace. She traced the movement to eliminate job barriers for women back to the 1800s and explained how after World War II, many working women turned to their unions in the fight for equality. Their activism played a part, together with the civil rights movement, in winning legislative gains such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These laws prohibited job discrimination based on race, sex, religion or national origin and gave women a “wedge” with which to challenge inequality.

In a lively question and answer session, Kessler-Harris was questioned about the slow progress of the effort to achieve equality in “nontraditional” jobs such as firefighting, construction and other blue-collar work and about the reasons for the strong child care support for families in European countries and the paltry support in the United States.

Dr. Kessler-Harris said the importance of knowing history is to learn from it. She said the legacy of the women’s movement was that women took the initiative to organize in order to change the circumstances of their lives. While much has improved, there are still many frontiers that need to be challenged.