On February 8, 1964, as the House of Representatives debated passage of the bill, Howard Smith, an ardent segregationist from Virginia, rose to propose changes to four pages of Title VII, the section of the bill barring hiring and firing “because of” race, creed, religion, or color. “After the word religion, insert sex,” Smith drawled, urging his colleagues to rectify “this grave injustice … particularly in an election year.”
The result was two hours of pandemonium on the House floor, because Smith’s amendment was seen by the frantic pro–civil-rights forces as a poison pill that might put the whole bill at risk—a bill that would end Jim Crow segregation in public accommodations, help ensure voting rights for long-disenfranchised populations, and just more or less win the Civil War, only a hundred years too late. It’s a story I recounted in my book An Idea Whose Time Has Come. Hard as it may be to fathom a half century later, the notion that women deserved protection from discrimination in employment was as controversial in some quarters as the idea that racial minorities did—and, even to some liberal Democrats, much more laughable.
The Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, an inveterate male chauvinist from Brooklyn named Emanuel Celler, was livid, warning that the language was “illogical, ill-timed, and improper,” that it would be an “entering wedge” to a constitutional Equal Rights Amendment (an idea he detested), and that it would lead, as indeed it eventually did, to the overturning of state laws aimed at protecting women with special, and lighter, working conditions and hours. (In fact, such an outcome would have pleased Howard Smith, because Virginia’s textile industry depended on cheap female labor). So worried were the bill’s supporters that Edith Green, an Oregon Democrat who nearly a decade earlier had proposed a bill to require that men and women be paid equally for equal work, now stood to read a letter from the American Association of University Women opposing the Smith amendment, and adding her own view, said, “I do not believe this is the time or the place.”