Envisioning Equal Opportunities in the Civil Claims, Voluntary Associations, and Citizen Science of the Modern United States

This issue considers the fragile alliances that have nourished reform efforts across the modern United States. Over the past two hundred years, an array of institutions and associations provided the mechanisms through which individuals might challenge inequalities rooted in sex or gender biases alongside those steeped in racial or class prejudices. But time and again, these movements' supporters leveraged one identity over another, required individuals to amplify gender over race, or race over class, and left legacies of injustice in their wake. In government offices dedicated to protecting equal employment opportunities and in civil courtrooms, in labor union auxiliaries and brigades, in voluntary associations that provided for migrants' needs, and in citizen science projects, women found tools to demand greater equity for themselves or resources for their families, but often deployed these at the expense of their neighbors or coworkers.

Traci Parker restores race as a category of analysis to the Sears sex discrimination case of 1986. Tapping a rich cache of trial records and depositions maintained by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Parker observes that the Sears campaign had initially gathered data to document how prejudice on the basis of sex, race, and class worked together in hiring and promotion practices. African American working women testified to the intersectional nature of the discrimination they encountered during their careers with the retail chain. However, lawyers at the EEOC developed a strategy that separated out forms of prejudice in 1979, filing one suit on the basis of sex and four suits on the basis of race and national origin. When only the sex discrimination case went to trial in 1984, the US government's attorneys elided racial and class differences between women in order to present a convincing narrative of sex discrimination supported by statistical data rather than individuals' testimonies. That strategy failed, and the EEOC lost its suit against Sears with injurious results for all women workers, but especially Black women who remain vulnerable to the doubled weight of sex and race discrimination. In restoring the testimony of African American working women to the Sears case, Parker reminds us to ask whose silence is demanded in the name of equity. She finds reason for cautious optimism, however. Recently, legal strategists working with coalitions that adopt an intersectional approach to contesting discriminatory practices in hiring, evaluation, and promotion in the workplace have achieved a measure of success.

Adam Cilli's research documents how Black women reformers in interwar Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania mobilized racial identities and educational accomplishments to claim leadership roles in African American voluntary associations that transcended class divisions. These women recognized that this northern industrial city's structures posed unique challenges for Black families recently arrived from homes in the South and strived to provide for the newcomers' material and social needs. As leaders in the Pittsburgh Urban League, Travelers' Aid Society, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), women's reform efforts typically focused on children's and family issues including education, healthcare, and hygiene. Local archives provide granular evidence of Black women's community leadership in initiatives such as the "Better Baby" children's health campaign, or to bring African American teachers into Pittsburgh's public schools. Such efforts were not incidental to the work of African American voluntary associations, but essential to the movement's success in forging resilient community alliances that transcended class divides.

The challenge of intersectional organizing emerges as a central theme of Tiffany Baugh-Helton's article as well. Workers from the men's Union of Automobile Workers (UAW) who went on strike at the Flint, Michigan, automobile plant in 1936–1937, succeeded in part because of the women in the UAW auxiliary and Emergency Brigade. The wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers who organized community kitchens and childcare to provide for the striking families' immediate needs testified to the larger communities at stake in the strikers' demands. White women and men brought reproductive labor into the public sphere, thus making the argument that men on strike represented patriarchal and family interests. Baugh...