a New York lawyer and early Nixon appointee, who had helped to craft the task force’s direction and goals and then served as a consultant to it, recalled:
FIGURE 21
An international lawyer, Rita Hauser was a consultant to the Task Force on Women’s Rights and Responsibilities and later served as U.S. representative to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (1969–1972). A Few Good Women Oral History Collection, Penn State University Archives.
We were women who were interested in professions and careers and taking our place. And obviously, there were very few women appointees; it was necessary to get more women. And then there was also a woman’s agenda in that at that time there were a lot of state commissions meeting to look at archaic laws. A married woman couldn’t get credit by herself. She couldn’t open loans or mortgages. In many states, everything she did had to be cosigned by her husband. There were all kinds of restrictions from 19th century law. So we felt this was something the commission ought to take a look at, what we called emancipating women.42
Pat Hutar added, “We’re talking about rights, but we’re also talking about the responsibilities that go along with that. We also said that whatever affected women and was unfavorable to men should be changed,”43 particularly relating to spousal benefits and pensions of working women.
Evelyn Cunningham, the journalist who was an assistant to Governor Rockefeller and head of the Women’s Unit in New York state government, recalled the tenor of the meetings: “We were all so different from each other. We came from different backgrounds. We had different goals. We had different experiences.… But all of that had no meaning when we relaxed and just talked and probed each other about what we were doing before we got there. The differences of opinion would emerge, of course. But they were honest differences of opinion. It was just not because somebody did not like somebody and wanted to take another side.”44
Most recall Allan exercising a calm but determined influence. Clapp noted: “She’s got a commitment and she moves toward it. And you know she is pleasant about it, but she is still moving. And it’s not easy for people to combat it, because she is so reasonable about it all but there she goes, you’ve got to keep watching.”45 Hutar concurred: “Virginia is a person of very gentle disposition, but very firm, and could move the agenda along. She’s also one of the fairest chairs I’ve ever seen in that all sides were heard.”46 Thanks to these traits, progress was made.
The task force reached nearly unanimous agreement on its recommendations and, after Vera Glaser did much of the organizing and editing of the justification language, forwarded them to the president on December 15, 1969. The report, with the eloquent title A Matter of Simple Justice, was released to the public the following June. The recommendations fell into five basic groups:
1. Create an Office of Women’s Rights and Responsibilities headed by a special assistant to the president;
2. Hold a White House conference on women’s rights and responsibilities in 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and the creation of the Women’s Bureau;
3. Send a broad legislative agenda to Congress for women, beginning with a ringing endorsement of the ERA, and for reforms in the areas of enforcement of civil rights; ending discrimination in education, public accommodations, Fair Labor Standards, and Social Security; provisions for child care; equal benefits for the families of working women; and support for state commissions on the status of women;
4. Through cabinet-level action, end discrimination by government contractors and in training and manpower programs; seek legal redress under the Civil Rights Act and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments in cases of sex discrimination; collect all social and economic statistics by gender as well as race; establish an office to specifically focus on discrimination in education; support training programs for household employment; and
5. End sex discrimination in the executive branch by appointing more women to positions of top responsibility and ensure that women were treated equitably in all matters of hiring and promotion.47
President Nixon’s State of the Union Address, on January 22, 1970, focused on peace, the need for a balanced budget, and “quality of life” issues, such as economic growth without inflation, reducing crime, and healing environmental degradation. “New Federalism” at home and the “Nixon Doctrine” abroad were presented. Women were not mentioned explicitly. However, among urgent domestic priorities, he noted: “We must adopt reforms which will expand the range of opportunities for all Americans. We can fulfill the American dream only when each person has a fair chance to fulfill his own dreams. This means equal voting rights, equal employment opportunity, and new opportunities for expanded ownership. Because in order to be secure in their human rights, people need access to property rights.”48
Task force members and some advocates would read into those remarks with optimism that the concerns of women as expressed in the task force report were heard and would be addressed; many others were more skeptical. White House staffer Charles Clapp, who had worked with the task force throughout its deliberations, assessed the reaction thusly: “I think that within the White House there was opposition to some of the recommendations, because they didn’t want anything to happen, you know, the old Ehrlichman crowd, those people. They would come to me occasionally and say, what are these people going to do, where did you find them. So given the state of the art at the time and the situation in which they [the task force] found themselves, I think that they pursued the right path and were more effective because of it.”
According to Evelyn Cunningham, there was a unique quality to the task force: “Women’s groups during that era—the ones that were trying to get something done were noisy. This was a calmer, cooler kind of modus operandi. And I think the women involved were much respected. Not that other women weren’t, but the technique was different. It was something Republican about the technique, about the way it was done. And here again … Republican men do things very differently from Republican women.”49
This sense of the task force bringing something new to the “revolution” could be seen in Ted Lewis’s New York Daily News column in response to the publication of the report’s contents. “Thanks to the Nixon task force report, the view of mature women—the establishment type—is now obtainable and it basically agrees with what the aroused girls of the younger generation have been shouting and screaming about. What this task force has done has set a middle-of-the-road course for the equal rights movement.… For too long American males have underestimated the power of women en masse, even though they have never underestimated the power of woman, singularly. For the first time to our knowledge, the danger of such thinking has been pointed out bluntly by a blue-ribbon presidential task force.”50
Pat Hutar had another perspective: “The task force did [build a foundation], because it certainly motivated President Nixon.… But I think the fact that the President did, in his administration, enact some of these things, saw that they were put in place in the White House, made a difference. Because people could see that we were having some movement forward.… So I think when women began to see results, that made quite a bit of difference in raising morale.”51
In fact, virtually all of the legislative and cabinet-level recommendations were eventually enacted. Although a White House Office of Women’s Rights and Responsibilities was not created, a significant step forward was achieved. New York business executive Barbara Hackman Franklin was appointed staff assistant to the president in April of 1971. In many ways, she was the model of the very kind of person the administration was looking for.
In the fall of 1958, Barbara Ann Hackman left her home in Landisville, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where she had graduated as class valedictorian from Hempfield High School, to attend Pennsylvania State University. Penn State’s main campus sits in almost the geographical center of the state, and like her home county, it is a productive farming area and has traditionally been moderately Republican in tone.
During her four years at Penn