CATHOLICS AND THE E.R.A.

...Women belonged in the home and were happiest in the home...

...His autobiography shows little interest in women, either in the concrete or abstract, though slightly more interest in contraception, in which argument he quotes Tertullian...

...It is true that he admitted that women must be paid equal wages for equal work only because to pay them less would encourage employers to hire women rather than men, and then urged that women be kept out of the lucrative industrial positions...

...It has been a good many years now since John A. Ryan left the helm of the Social Action Department...

...The Catholic position, however, is much older than the recent abortion struggle, and much more complicated...

...More significantly, the first three presidents of the Women's Trade Union League, which organized strikers and raised bail and strike funds, were women of independent means who devoted their time and energies to helping less fortunate women...

...Women had a long union history by the time in which Ryan worked...

...The right to the conditions of being the bead of a family, which is obvious, implies the right to a family Living Wage, because nature and reason have decreed that the family should be supported by its head...

...One reason is certainly that they were less educated, less skilled and thus far more vulnerable than their male colleagues...

...Ryan, however, carried the idea beyond Leo's formulations...

...In another section, "The Legal Minimum Wage," the bishops urged state legislation of wage rates guaranteeing a decent family maintenance in the case of all male adults and decent individual support for female workers...

...In 1919 the National Catholic War Council soon to become, the National Catholic Welfare Conference issued a "Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction," a document so advanced for its day that it was denounced by the president of the National Association of Manufacturers as "partisan, pro-labor union, socialistic propaganda...

...The Catholic Church of course was not alone in opposing the National Woman's Party and the ERA...

...That the bishops took the problems of women workers with some seriousness is indicated by an announcement that same year that the NCWC was offering "advice, information and assistance" to, among other groups, any organization developing short vocational courses: for women...

...The New York state Knights of Columbus group, 127,000 strong, was reported to have distributed several hundred thousand pieces of anti-ERA material asserting that the ERA would promote abortion and weaken the position of women and the family...

...The Women's Bureau of the U.S...

...The only solution to the pitifully small wages and the horrible working conditions of women in the early part of the century was protective legislation...

...In more cynical terms, he who wants to call the patriarchal tune must pay the bills...

...In his thesis he had presented the same idea: The right to the means of maintaining a family, therefore, is not finally derived from the duty of maintaining it from the needs of the family but from the laborer's dignity, from his own essential needs...

...To right the special difficulties of women at their work is a spiritual and corporal work of mercy," the book contends...

...He also stressed on a number of occasions that working men did not want legislation on such matters as a minimum wage: they felt that they could do much better tor themselves by working through their unions...

...equally important, its sole author was Father John A. Ryan, who one year later would become the first head of the Social Welfare Department of the NCWC and remain in that position until 1945...

...From this it followed that women were usually not to be thought of as permanent members of the labor force, and that as transients they neither could nor would take a serious interest in organizing themselves...

...Women are now prepared to seek jobs with skills equal to men's, and are gradually beginning to be taken as seriously by employers...

...For decades they had been members of the regular national trade unions, beginning with their admittance to the cigarmakers' union in 1867 and the printers' in 1869, and the Knights of Labor had begun admitting women on an equal basis in 1881...

...It is clear that the National Council of Catholic Women, as a mandated organization, has relied heavily on the advice and counsel of the NCWC, now the USCC...

...Women in Industry observed that if men made a living wage, few wives would work...

...Department of Labor, the League of Women Voters, the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the General Federation of Women's Clubs all came to support the ERA only as the years went by...

...The resulting lack of clout made protective legislation necessary...

...The Women's Bureau of the U.S...

...One staff member said that "The average girl regards industry merely as a stopping place between school and marriage...

...That lesson was apparently lost on John A. Ryan, for he often afterwards used divisive class arguments of the type still heard today to discredit the middle-class women of the feminist movement, despite the fact that he well understood that poor tired working women could not be expected to do their own organizing...

...A pamphlet issued from his office in 1938 listed one of the benefits of the family living wage as "earlier marriages and more of them...

...Ryan had finished his doctorate at the Catholic University of America in 1906 with a thesis on A Living Wage, probably the most important and most influential economic study to emerge from American Catholicism...

...This Family Living Wage could be defined with some precision: enough to support a wife and four or five children until they reached the age of sixteen, though, Ryan felt, it would be better if that age could be extended to twenty-one, so that the boys would have greater opportunities for education and training, and the girls "would necessarily be better equipped for and more willing to accept woman's true functions...

...If he urged protective legislation, it was because the women he saw had no other defense...

...Department of Labor had said that a woman's living wage should be based on the needs of both herself and any dependents, but Ryan disagreed...

...and Majority Report...

...The development of the Living Wage concept was Ryan's greatest contribution to American thought...

...Throughout his life he published profusely and fought politically for his goals, one of which was the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment bill...

...It is typical that Mother Jones, a Catholic and the foremost woman labor organizer in this country, always believed that woman should be free to remain in the home...

...Its rationale, in fact, is capsulized in a document that pre-dates the first introduction of the ERA into - the Congressional debate by several years...

...Another was their reluctance to break through the barriers of femininity imposed on them by society...

...the laywoman later entered the convent and, as Sister Miriam Teresa Gleason, earned her doctorate at Catholic University with a thesis on "Legislation for Women in Oregon," written under Prof...

...Among the optimistic proponents of the ERA to the federal constitution there Jiad been a feeling that once Congress had passed the bill it was merely a matter of time until the fifty-odd year battle was won...

...Leo had said that "the remuneration of the worker should be sufficient to enable him to live in reasonable and frugal comfort," but Ryan advocated a Family Living Wage...

...Among these were included such tasks as conducting street cars and cleaning locomotives...

...Barry organizing for the Knights of Labor complained of the "prudish modesty and religious scruples" which deterred the submissive ladies from joining the Union...

...Such a family required, for example, a house with three bedrooms one for the parents, one for the male children, and one for the daughters...

...Unmarried adult males would have to be paid the same as family men, according to Ryan, partly' on the assumption that they would later marry, and partly because if they were paid less they would obviously be more likely to get whatever jobs were available...

...The overall impression among ERA workers seems to be that the Catholic Church has been mobilized by the abortion issue, an issue which most constitutional authorities state is irrelevant to the Equal Rights Amendment...

...The reason which tended to be stressed by the Catholic anti-ERA forces was that women, forced into the job market against their will and nature, saw it only as an interim occupation and had no interest in putting their energies into organizing...

...Undoubtedly the two factors tended to reinforce one another: treated badly in the labor force, women were eager to retire, and knowing that they would leave as soon as they could find a man to provide for them, they neglected to turn political...

...Over the years we find Ryan talking to the Catholic women's annual convention about the National Woman's Party in 1929, and Linna E. Bresette representing both the women's council and the Social Action Department in testimony before the 1944 Resolutions and platform Committee of the Democratic Party against the inclusion of a plank favoring an ERA...

...The Catholic Church, however, is probably the largest and, since last November, perhaps the most feared opponent...

...It is noteworthy that Ryan denies that a dependent wife has a direct claim in justice to the necessities of life...

...Gleason saw her work as an attempt to save the women of the West from the evils of the industrial East by safeguarding them "from the greed and the passion of men...

...The "Program," signed by the Administrative Committee of the NCWC,.is important not only because of its great merit and foresight, but because, coming as it did just a few months before the formation of the National Catholic Welfare" Conference and the beginnings of a permanent staff for the American Cath- olic "Church, it pointed the future direction...

...Over the years he and members of his staff talked about the "enforced migration" of women from the home to the factory, wives being "compelled" to work, women "forced" to provide their own sustenance...

...a pamphlet put out in 1938 by Ryan's Social Action Department of the NCWC (Women in Industry) touches on the question several times...

...We have come a long way since then...

...Even Leo Kanowitz, the author of the first textbook on women and the law, was urging women in 1969 not to waste time on working for the ERA instead of focusing on specific problems of inequality...

...Earlier that same year Father John J. Burke, C.S.P., the executive head of the entire NCWC staff, had addressed the New York archdiocesan women's council on the dangers of the bill, "that will practically sanction the separation of husband and wife, separate father and mother and children, and do away with all of the progressive legislation that has been enacted for the welfare and care of women and girls in industry...

...If he did not rely on women's unionizing themselves, it was because he knew empirically that they did not...

...General standards should not be based on an "abnormal situation," he argued...

...As Ryan's biographer, Francis L. Broderick, tells us, Ryan discovered that it was the middle-class reformers, the "club women," who could be relied on to insist on decent minimums for their working sisters...

...Beyond that, the new women's movement has shown the broad ramifications of the feminist quest...

...Yet then as now, women never were able to achieve the powerful organization that their male counterparts did...

...One of the conclusions that-emerged was that Catholic opposition was more intense and more organized than feminists had recognized...

...In a series of lectures on the "Bishops' Program" at Fordham University the following winter, Ryan acknowledged that this proposed limitation on women had probably "displeased" many people, but, he argued, it followed from a view of the "function of women in life according to traditional Catholic teaching and according to sound social doctrine...

...In 1909 large numbers of women in the clothing industry estimates go as high as 30,000 called their first large general strike, showing more gumption than was expected of them...

...Another "General principle" was that the proportion of women in industry should be kept as small as practical, the displaced female workers finding suitable work in other areas or in domestic occupations...

...In the following weeks feminists went back over their strategies in periodicals like Ms...

...In addition we have the word of the women's president in 1923 that cooperation with other groups would never be given "unless it be in line with the general directions of the National Catholic Welfare Conference...

...only in 1894, when Ryan was well into his seminary studies, that he first came upon it...

...The patriarchal ideal of every married woman removed from the labor market, the failure of women to prepare themselves with marketable skills, the belief that it is the highly unusual woman who has a family to support, the exclusion of women's concerns from labor unions' agenda, the unconditional desire for progeny: all of these are rapidly becoming things of the past, and with them the traditional Catholic bases for opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment...

...Already in 1909 Ryan had taken the position in his "Programme of Social Reform by Legislation" that except in cases of great financial hardship married women ought not be permitted to become wage earners...

...Ryan would have had several objections...

...They h'ate the kind of world in which they find themselves because it seems to be entirely a 'man's world...

...Rather there was an assumption and a hope that the situation would soon be so changed that women would no longer be working outside the home...

...Today of course we question whether uniform legislation for men and women might not be the best solution...

...Of course there is no substance whatever in either of these contentions...

...The necessity for union membership applied to women as well as men...

...it is clearly impossible to pay each woman according to her individual situation, and to pay all women a family living wage would be to "overturn the normal relation...

...Ryan himself had worked hard in his appointment to the Minnesota commission on minimum wage standards...

...Ryan...

...Behind this attitude was the fear that a legal minimum might be seized upon by an employer as a fair wage and thus become at the same time the maximum wage...

...The more vocal opposition has come from the National Council of Catholic Women, and it is the women's council which is more often and more bitterly attacked by the ERA proponents...

...Secondly, society itself has moved far along the road toward justice since the day when Ryan and his colleagues fought so hard for the protective legislation which helped to make life bearable for the poverty-level woman...

...There are new judicial traditions to take into consideration...

...Because women.work only because they must, the pamphlet says, and because they hope to leave the labor force, they are not interested in preparing themselves for skilled positions, and industry takes advantage of them...

...ARLENE SWIDLER Catholic opposition is intense and organized The defeats of the Equal Rights Amendments to the state constitutions of New York and New Jersey in the heart of progressive feminist territory in November of 1975 apparently came as a surprise to almost everyone...

...The wdmea's official stand against the ERA seems to have begun in 1924, when the annual convention passed a resolution "protesting against the passage of the so-called Equal Rights Blanket Amendment because of the jeopardy in which it places the interests of women, and directing that representatives in Congress be informed of this protest...

...A Threat Thus, for a variety of reasons, all of them centering on the traditional view of the family, the Equal Rights Amendment represented a threat to Catholics like John A. Ryan...

...Women with dependents, on the other hand, ought not be paid a family living wage...

...To have state ERAs defeated later, and especially in the Northeast and by the voters themselves rather than merely their largely male representatives, was something of a shock...

...Reed's commentary begins, "Observe the emphasis on the dignity of woman...

...Then, having to some extent limited women to less lucrative areas of the labor market, this section concluded that those women doing the same work as men should receive equal pay for equal work...

...First, the fervent hope of Ryan and his male colleagues that women were mere transients in the labor force could no longer be sustained...

...Although Ryan may have been right in saying that, "If women are to compete with men on equal terms in all departments of life, they will have to abide by the rules of the game," he misjudged the future when he continued, "Now all experience and all the pertinent facts point to the conclusion that the rules of the game will continue to be made by men...

...Although in 1919 he claimed to have argued in favor of woman suffrage as "reasonable and expedient" in a class assignment some twenty-five years before, and although he favored equality of legal rights for women in matters concerning children, property, and residence, a reading of his opinions on women and this is pretty well true of all statements coming from national Catholic offices of that day shows a concern primarily for the family, with the assumption that the patriarchal family style is natural, proper, and in the woman's best interest...

...arlene swidler, author of Woman in a Man's Church (Paulist Press), is managing editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies...

...The first minimum wage law, in Victoria, Australia, had proved that wages were still a negotiable matter as well as that prices would not immediately rise and cancel out the advantage of the raise...

...Their first general principle was that "No female worker should remain in any occupation that is harmful to health or morals...

...He also spoke for, and worked for, a reasonable personal living wage for working women...

...Women had also begun in the 1860s to organize into their independent unions for particular industries and into the more general Working Women's Association...

...Their ideas and psychology are remote from the mental habits and attitudes of the majority of women...

...Technical training, encouragement for women in labor unions, voting for laws to protect women: all these are advocated, but apparently the Church neither sent people out to work with women laborers the way priests worked with men nor lectured the male unionists on the rights of their female colleagues...

...Ryan's sharp analysis of the social and economic facts of his day clearly did not extend to questioning the patriarchal structure...

...When the Wisconsin Equal Rights Amendment was passed in 1921 the first of its kind it was backed by, among other groups, the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Polish Housewives League...

...Despite his unthinking acceptance of some of the prejudices and situations of his day, Ryan was basically a social scientist...

...Unfortunately this kind of sisterhood has never been achieved, and it is the chief reason why Ryan and his colleagues and subordinates in the NCWC believed in the necessity of protective legislation and thus of the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment...

...a Mrs...

...In 1916 Ryan wrote of the adult male, "His right to this amount of remuneration is directly based neither upon the needs nor the rights of his family, but upon his own needs, upon the fact that family conditions are indispensable to his own normal life...

...But, unlike many of his contemporaries, he believed that a proper wage for a woman must assume that she will live alone, not within her father's or someone else's house...

...The place where laboring women most needed solidarity, however, was among themselves in the labor unions...

...The law is on their side...

...Catholic columnists like Joseph Breig denounced the ERA in diocesan newspapers, priests preached against it, Holy Name societies opposed it, and Catholic schools and churches distributed material against it...

...Ryan apparently liked this phraseology...

...On one occasion he related the "amusing" time that a representative of the Woman's Party, a member of the comfortable class, came to speak at a Women's Industrial Conference directly from a dinner party, "arrayed from top to toe in resplendent evening garments...

...It must be added that quite often a testy tone of male chauvinism is audible...

...Would he find the facts any different today...

...It was a Catholic priest and a Catholic laywoman who led the fight in Oregon for the first protective laws in this country with any teeth in them...

...First, he did not want women and men earning the same wage one was a family bread-winner, the other, at least in theory, was not...

...And in 1927 he suggested that the Woman's Party members probably didn't care much what happened to their laboring sisters...

...There has been another war to adjust to since the 1919 statement...

...The feminists of 1976 who lash out against the whole idea of protective legislation without taking into account the great amounts of time, energy and emotion that socially-conscious women and men poured into these legal battles when they were the only hope for the poor and downtrodden unfortunately endanger the unity of the women's movement with their oversimplifications...

...The concept of housewife as productive laborer, of course, does not enter into his system...

...Ryan, for example, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the ERA in 1938 by describing the feminist movement in fairly realistic terms: the leaders, he said, resent the male sex, "they believe that men have forced women into an inferior social position and an inferior position in all important departments of life...

...The Catholic vote,'according to one feminist analyst, was especially strong in New York state because the right-to-gambling law on the "ballot, important to parish, finances, brought the Catholics out to the poles...

...He had then taught for some years in the St...

...But what of the other categories...

...Back in 1913, before Ryan came to Washington to teach at Catholic University, he had chaired the first Minnesota advisory [ committee- on a minimum wage for women...

...Actually women seem usually to have overcome their divisions and worked together across class lines better than, their male counterparts...

...Ryan could not say today as he did in 1927: These women (of the National Woman's Party) seem to think that they are restrained by the law from entering executive positions in industry and the profitable places generally...

...As late as 1945 the NCWC publication Social Action printed an article by George E. Reed of the Social Action Department on "Spurious Equality," in which the final and culminating argument against the Equal Rights Amendment begins with a long quotation from Pius XI: The false liberty and unnatural equality with the husband is to the detriment of the woman herself for if the woman descends from her truly regal throne to which she has been raised within the walls of the home by means of the Gospel, she will soon be reduced to the old state of slavery and become as among the pagans the mere instrument of man...

...The difference, of course, between the life style and intellectual habits of the male factory workers and those of their champion John A. Ryan was never adverted to...

...On another occasion, although he approved of woman suffrage, he wrote that "Most of the leaders are exceptional rather than typical...

...The concept had first been proposed by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891, but it was...

...In this 1919 "Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction," the bishops, adopting Ryan's draft, devoted one section, titled "Women War Workers," to the problem of the large number of women who had replaced the men in industry during the war years...

...Ryan himself pointed out that this was not a probable result...

...He then concluded that feminism is female anarchism, and like all anarchism, "it is incompatible with social order, social welfare, or social progress...

...The .conjecture of such historians of the first great feminist battle as Eleanor Flexner that the birth-control issue may have influenced the Church to oppose women's suffrage fits the same pattern...

...Unfortunately that advice has not always been based on a solid analysis of the facts...

...Paul Seminary in his native Minnesota before being called to teach at Catholic University...

...this is neither the first nor the last time it appears...

...Ryan's position was that women should receive a wage based on the assumption that the woman lived in a home of her own, rather than with a family...

...Yet the working men themselves had doubts...

...Salvatore Adamo, the editor of the Catholic Camden Star-Herald, could see no reason for the deviation from the usual conservative pattern except for the pro-ERA stand of his diocesan newspaper...

...But the working women who represented the employees on the advisory committee were far too naive and impressionable...

...In New Jersey, where the, state ERA unexpectedly found voter support in the.generally conserva-tive part of the state, Msgr...

...On the other hand, there seems never to have been a concerted effort by the Church to work with women unionists...

...The importance of unionizing women was recognized...

...With equal lack of clearness and logic, they seem to indulge the hope that this sort of discrimination would be prevented by their equal rights amendment to the Constitution...