From the Experience to the Legally Actionable: Women's Workplace Caucuses and Class Action Lawsuits, 1968–76

Although the workplace of the 1960s and 1970s was a key site where women challenged patriarchal relationships, scholars have looked primarily at feminist and labor organizations to find women's rights consciousness at work. However, thousands of unaffiliated women workers formed caucuses and filed class action lawsuits that forced even the largest American corporations to alter their policies and to pay restitution. This paper studies workplace rights campaigns by women journalists at the New York Times, clerical workers in the Chicago insurance industry, and factory workers at Kraft Foods to reveal women's everyday rights consciousness and cross-class activism. It shows that otherwise apolitical women were empowered by new legal protections and government enforcement agencies even as their rights claims were channeled and delimited by legal processes and bureaucratic constraints. The paper argues that these sites of activism, in all their complexity, were crucial in establishing the meaning of sex equality in the age of Title VII. Further, women's experiences at work, which spurred their self-directed, local activism, suggest that scholars should cast a wider net in seeking second wave activism and movement actors.