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Dec 6, 2023

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Sara Olson HIS 200: Applied History Southern New Hampshire University June 3rd, 2023 Historical Analysis Essay In the early 1960s, white women made 59 cents for every dollar earned by a white man. The average wage was even lower for women of color. The Women's Equal Pay Act, which was proposed by the U.S. Congress in 1945 and would have prohibited paying women less than men for work of "comparable quality and quantity," was unsuccessful, and despite campaigns by women's organizations, little progress was made on pay equity during the 1950s. Despite the tireless efforts of advocates scenes 1945, it took Congress until 1963 to enact a law requiring equal pay (Mutari et al., 1998). President Kennedy publicly showed his support for the Equal Pay Act by enacting the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, which focused on women’s employment, health, education, and legal status. The Equal Pay Act was passed by Congress in 1963 as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, despite the opposition of significant business organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and the Retail Merchants Association. During World War II the National War Labor Board supported policies that provided equal pay in instances where women were directly replacing male workers. The passage of this Act into federal law was necessary for the economic growth of society just as much as it was for the working force itself because a recession or depression could result from insufficient wages leading to insufficient consumption, similar working conditions deserve equal compensation, and Opponents’ believed that as providers for the family, men would need a larger income, however at least 1/5th of the working women were already making most of the income within the households.

Having promoted equal pay since its founding in 1920 and contributed to the major legislative breakthrough in the 1960s with the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Women’s Bureau was a major supporter. Representatives Katharine St. George and Edith Green helped lead the proponent’s side for a bill in Congress. Both former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who served as chair of Kennedy’s Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. and Esther Peterson, director of the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau, were outspoken supporters of the proposed legislation. The bill also required every employer to keep and maintain records of persons employed by sex, job classification, wages, and other terms and conditions of employment. It would have applied to any employer with eight or more employees who engaged in interstate commerce (Mutari et al., 1998). Working alongside the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, the president had selected the 20 members of the Commission on the Status of Women from a group of lawmakers and philanthropists involved in women's rights issues. The group discussed several issues, including the quality of women's legal representation, the lack of education and counseling for working women, and federal insurance and tax laws that had an impact on women's incomes. According to economists, closing the pay gap would increase the GDP by at least 2% and possibly as much as 9%, thereby boosting the economy (Causevic, 2018). While proponents of wages as a price argue that wages allocate resources and are primarily the result of supply and demand forces, arguments for wages as a living emphasize that the goal of the wage is to provide an adequate level of support for the worker (Mutari et al., 1998). While opponents argued that men's and women's work was unequal and justified wage differentials based on unique productive characteristics, the goal of wage regulation was to ensure this standard when market forces failed. Pay encompasses all forms of compensation, including the stated wage or salary, as

well as fringe benefits like vacation time and medical coverage, as well as deferred compensation like pensions (Moran, 1970). Equal pay maintains wage standards and consumer purchasing power, which in turn helps the economy run at full speed. Wages served as the basis for consumption and living standards but pay is for work done rather than the number of dependents the worker supports (Mutari et al., 1998), this argument gained a lot of traction with individuals that remembered the Great Depression. During the eighteen years that proponents fought for this legislation, academics, regulators, and social reformers had extensive discussions about how to define a fair wage for women and men. Under this law, an employer is still free to discriminate against women employees, refuse to hire them, assign them to "women's jobs," and harass or fire them for no other reason than that they are female. More specifically, the Act forbids a covered employer from paying a person of one sex less than a person of the other sex for the same work performed under comparable working conditions and requiring equal skill, effort, and responsibility, unless the pay difference is based on seniority, merit, the volume or quality of production, or any other factor other than sex (Lerner et al., 2006). The Equal Pay Act's regulations, which give employees who feel they are being treated unfairly the option of directly suing their employer in court or filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, have been credited with helping to reduce the gender wage gap in the United States, along with increased opportunities for women in education and the workforce (Gold, 2001). Seniority, merit, and piece rates are three legal reasons why men and women should be paid differently for the same work (Lerner et al., 2006). The Act also directly addressed concerns the Chamber of Commerce and the Retail Merchants Association had consisting of absenteeism being higher for women due to things like childcare issues, pregnancy, and medical concerns. In the following excerpt from

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