This is an excerpt from my book-in-progress, You Would Choose Now: Measuring America’s Progress Toward Fairness and Tolerance. It’s a data-driven exploration of progress (or not) in public opinion and civil rights. The completed chapters are available as an Early Access edition on LeanPub.
This excerpt, from Chapter 3, is about women’s rights in the workplace.
When my grandmother was born, women in the United States couldn’t vote. She was four years old in 1920 when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. In typically convoluted language, it says, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”
When my mother was born, women couldn’t serve as regular members of the U.S. armed forces. She was nine years old when the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act removed that restriction — but even then, women’s roles were limited and they could not comprise more than 2% of the force. It wasn’t until 2015 that women were eligible for all military occupations, including combat roles.
And when my sister was born, employers could openly hire only men or women for certain jobs. And it was legal to pay women less than men for the same work. She was one year old when the Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibited wage discrimination, and two years old when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in hiring, promotion, and firing.
The point of these examples is that these events are not ancient history — they are within the lifetimes of people alive today (although not too many are older than the 19th Amendment).
And for my family, the lack of workplace protections was not just theoretical. In 1961, my mother was a math teacher at Jamaica Plain High School in Boston. It was her third year on the job, and she was in line to become the head of the math department when the current head retired. But she was pregnant and due to deliver in late May, just a few weeks before the end of the school year. So she thought it would be a good idea to let the headmaster know.
The headmaster wasn’t sure what to do because, until recently, they had not hired married women as teachers — the question of what to do with a pregnant teacher had never come up. So he called the Superintendent of Boston Public Schools, Frederick Gillis, who told the headmaster that for “insurance reasons” he would have to fire my mother immediately — which he took to mean that she should be fired on the spot and escorted out of the building.
For my mother, losing her job was devastating — and it permanently derailed her career. She worked occasionally as a substitute teacher after my sister was born, but she never returned to teaching at a high school. Years later, she taught computer science at Wellesley College (and then years after that, so did I).
If all of this had happened a decade later, she might have had legal recourse. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited sex discrimination in employment, but it did not apply to state and local governments, including public schools, until Congress extended it in 1972. Then in 1974, the Supreme Court struck down policies that forced pregnant teachers out of the classroom. And in 1978, Congress amended the Civil Rights Act to say that discrimination on the basis of pregnancy is prohibited as a form of sex discrimination.
But in 1961, there was nothing my mother could do. So there’s at least one reason you might not choose the 1930s as the time to be born, or the 1960s as the time to have children.
This excerpt is from You Would Choose Now, a work in progress I plan to publish in 2027. What follows is additional material that’s not in the book.
Ten years later¶
My mother’s experience was not unusual, and even a decade later, many school districts still had policies that forced pregnant teachers out.
While I was researching this chapter, I found a remarkably similar case from 1971. Sharon Demkowicz was teaching English and journalism at Reynoldsburg High School, outside Columbus, Ohio. During the first week of the school year, she informed the principal, Joseph Endry, that she was pregnant.
Endry read her the school board’s maternity policy, adopted in 1963, which said that “the employment of any pregnant female employee will be terminated ninety days before the expected date of delivery.” Teachers who had been in the system for three or more years could request a leave of absence. Everyone else could only “apply for re-employment”.
Demkowicz had been there for two and a half years. So Endry told her that she was “in effect required to tender her resignation [...] or be terminated.”
She resigned and applied to be rehired for the following year, but she was not. In 1973, she sued the principal, the superintendent, and the members of the school board.
In 1974, while Demkowicz’s case was pending, the Supreme Court ruled on a similar case: in Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur, it held that rules requiring pregnant teachers to take unpaid leave violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In 1975, Demkowicz got her day in court: in Demkowicz v. Endry, a federal district court ordered the school district to reinstate her with back pay and the seniority and pension rights she would have had.
Reynoldsburg’s policy was not unusual. In a 1966 national survey of school systems, 14 of the 129 that responded did not grant maternity leave at all. Of those that did, most required pregnant teachers to stop working at a fixed time before the expected birth, most often three or four months.
A 1970 study of 56 school districts in Pennsylvania found that 35 had no maternity leave: they “required pregnant teachers to resign, with no assurances that they would be rehired later if a vacancy existed.”
And in Malden, Massachusetts, a few miles north of Boston, a school committee rule said that “No married woman employee of the Public Schools shall be permitted to teach or perform her duties after the end of the fourth month of pregnancy but must resign from her position.” In 1968, when two teachers in Malden asked for maternity leave, the school committee voted instead to accept their “resignations”. In 1974, citing LaFleur, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that the rule was unconstitutional — both the required “resignation” and the rule that a teacher could not return until six months after the birth.
These decisions were based on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They did not establish that discrimination based on pregnancy is discrimination based on sex — and in two other cases, the Supreme Court ruled that it was not.
In 1974, in Geduldig v. Aiello, the Court upheld a California disability insurance program that excluded pregnancy. The Court reasoned that the program divided people into two groups, “pregnant women and nonpregnant persons”, and while “the first group is exclusively female, the second includes members of both sexes.” In 1976, in General Electric v. Gilbert, it applied the same logic to the Civil Rights Act, concluding that excluding pregnancy from a company’s disability plan “is not a gender-based discrimination at all.”
If you think that conclusion sounds fishy, Congress felt the same way. In 1978, it passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which amended the Civil Rights Act to say that discrimination “because of sex” includes discrimination “because of or on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.”
So for a public-school teacher like my mother, protection came in three steps: in 1972, when the Civil Rights Act was extended to public schools; in 1974, when LaFleur limited mandatory maternity leave; and in 1978, when Congress made it explicit that pregnancy discrimination is sex discrimination.