New book ‘Women Money Power’ chronicles long fight for economic equality

A new book by journalist Josie Cox charts women’s fight to close the gender pay gap and the legal and social hurdles faced along the way. “Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality” highlights the women who challenged norms in that quest for equality. Amna Nawaz sat down with Cox and one of the women still working to make sure her work is recognized.
William Brangham:
A new book by journalist Josie Cox charts the fight that women have waged to try and close the gender pay gap and the many hurdles they faced in that struggle.
“Women Money Power:
The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality” tells the story of the women who challenged the system.
Amna Nawaz recently sat down with one of those women and the book’s author.
Amna Nawaz:
These days, 98-year-old Anna Mae Krier is always on the move, often in her cherry red Chevy pickup truck. But her first big move eight decades ago was from her small town in North Dakota on a train to Seattle, Washington, where the teen joined the work force building B-17 bombers during World War II.
Anna Mae Krier, Built B-17 Bombers:
This was one of my pay stubs at Boeing. Can you imagine that?
Amna Nawaz:
The real-life Rosie the Riveter was inspiration for journalist Josie Cox’s book, in which she writes about Krier being paid just $0.83 an hour, half what the men made for the same job.
Anna Mae Krier:
I don’t think it’s fair. If you can do the job the same as a man, why should you get paid less? I don’t understand that. And I fought that for quite a few years.
Amna Nawaz:
All these years later, when you look back at the role that you played, do you feel you got the credit that you deserved?
Anna Mae Krier:
Oh, no. When the war was over, the men came home to flags, flying flags, the parades, everything. They got all the benefits, the G.I. Bills. They got to go back to school. They got everything. When Rosie came home, she came home with a pink slip.
We had so many widows and women who, now, when they were let go, they had no income, no place to go.
Amna Nawaz:
Josie I want to bring you in here. What did that war and that moment in time represent for women in the work force?
Josie Cox, Author, “Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality”: I mean, in a way, it was everything, because it was the first time that women in significant numbers had the opportunity, out of necessity, to come into the paid labor market.
And I think it was the first time that women and men actually realized and had to admit that many women were actually just as capable at doing all the jobs that had previously been reserved for men and had been the domain of men.
Amna Nawaz:
Cox’s book examines the many ways gender discrimination in America was long enshrined into law and features the barrier-breaking work of civil rights activist and legal scholar Pauli Murray. Murray graduated as the only woman in her law school class at Howard University, and first coined the term Jane Crow to describe the misogyny she endured.
Rosita Stevens-Holsey, Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice: I think in some ways she was very ahead of her time. And then in other ways, she really, as a female and as a Black female, did not have very many opportunities.
Amna Nawaz:
Rosita Stevens-Holsey is Murray’s niece and on the board of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice.
She says the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turned to Murray’s legal theories to argue her own cases and, in Murray’s boundary-pushing life, she rejected gender norms and forged an intersectional approach to equality.
Rosita Stevens-Holsey:
She would do things I thought other people didn’t do. For example, I have seen her smoke a cigarillo, and I had never seen — in fact, I had never seen anyone smoke a cigarillo. I saw her puff on a pipe once or twice.
Amna Nawaz:
I mean, she really challenged gender norms. It was in the 1930s. She was asking for hormone therapy. She was repeatedly denied by doctors.
For Pauli Murray to be making those kinds of requests, challenging those kinds of norms at that time, how big a deal was that?
Rosita Stevens-Holsey:
It was a very big deal. But, oftentimes, the general public did not know that. A lot of her challenging was directly with psychiatrists or doctors or psychologists, in which she was trying to determine what she was feeling and what it meant.
But when other people were just looking for civil rights for Black — basically, Black men, she was already thinking, well, women are being treated like secondhand citizens. And she decided that women actually needed the same kind of organizations or laws that would protect them.
Amna Nawaz:
Cox documents in her book how the signs of progress in the 1940s, followed by decades of legal steps, like the Equal Pay Act and Title IX protections, have yet to translate into the equality they promised.
The gender pay gap, for example, has narrowed, but still persists.
What is it about who we are or our culture, our society that ends up blunting the force of those laws? Why haven’t they delivered on the promise that they carried?
Josie Cox:
The way that I characterize it in the book is that I think of the law as this fishing net with really big holes.
And the most egregious offenses, firing a woman for getting pregnant, paying two people who are different genders different amounts for doing the same work, all of those really egregious offenses get caught in these fishing nets, but everything else can slip through.
And these things are still slipping through the cracks because they are so inextricably linked to culture and linked to the way that we think as a society.
Amna Nawaz:
Josie, you talk a lot about childcare in the book too. Why is this one piece of it so crucial when you’re talking about female economic empowerment?
Josie Cox:
Because women still are the default caregivers in America, in the societies in which we live. And so, as a result of that, there is still this very entrenched culture in this country that women are sort of the social security net that takes care of the childcare piece.
America has this approach where certain things are public utilities, and they are provided and they are accessible and they are available. And childcare is not one of them.
Amna Nawaz:
More than any other piece of the puzzle, does the childcare piece of it feel like, if we could somehow fix that, that would dramatically change the landscape?
Josie Cox:
Absolutely, yes.
It is a concrete, specific policy that can be introduced that would hugely impact the gender pay gap, the female labor force participation, the ability for women not to have to make these decisions, these choices between professional fulfillment and personal fulfillment, between reaching their full economic potential and being a present and good parent.
Amna Nawaz:
You have multiple generations in your family alone following in your footsteps. What is it that you want to be different for them than you lived through?
Anna Mae Krier:
I want people to be equal. I don’t want to be superior. For years, the men have always had control of everything, maybe not your lifetime, but in mine.
I always think of about mother said, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, but we have some work to do.
(Laughter)
Amna Nawaz:
And Krier’s not nearly done. She heads to Washington, D.C., next month to accept the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor, in recognition for the work she and millions of other women did decades ago.