June 10, 1963: President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, mandating equal pay for equal work without gender discrimination. While a major victory, it was a qualified one. Women’s rights activists pointed out that in using “equal” instead of “comparable,” this legislation failed to address job segregation. As historian Alice Kessler-Harris writes, “Given the sex segregation of occupations that sharply defined men’s and women’s jobs, and the tendency of entire job categories to become the province of one sex or the other, demanding equal pay only if men and women did exactly the same work offered greater symbolic consolation than practical benefit. Nor did it speak to issues of sex discrimination, for if putting women in the same jobs as men would require employers to pay them equally, their tendency would be to maintain sex barriers rather than reduce them, to protect women in jobs they already filled, not to open new categories of work for them.” In other words, equal pay “could be and often was construed as protecting men’s jobs by ensuring that women would not undermine male wages.”
Citations: Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 234-235; Warren K. Leffler, “[Men and women workers leaving Convair missile plant, California],” photograph (California, June 22, 1960), https://www.loc.gov/item/2023631044/.
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