Multipurpose Legislation

Tish Sommers, a woman divorced at the age of fifty-seven after twenty-three years as a homemaker and volunteer, was responsible for both coining the term “displaced homemaker” and for generally bringing attention to this group of women whom she believed had largely been overlooked by the burgeoning feminist movement.^{Footnote 7} The early organizing work around displaced homemakers quickly coalesced around the goal of passing legislation in California. As fellow activist Laurie Shields later described the strategic decision to pursue a legislative goal, Sommers decided on “using legislation as a tool (not only to organize other older women but also to focus attention for the first time on the economic needs of older women).”^{Footnote 8} As Sommers explained later, the bill was motivated by a desire for “some do-able, win-able project that [could] in turn be an educational device and an organizing tool.”^{Footnote 9} The bill was, then, a goal in and of itself, as well as a tactic to advance the larger goal of organizing groups of women—women very much like Laurie Shields—who had never identified with feminism. Sommers believed that women who identified as “displaced homemakers” could begin to see their plight in feminist terms and that the legislative lobbying was in itself a form of consciousness raising that could produce many more “new caught” feminists.^{Footnote 10} More pointedly, Sommers believed that displaced homemakers were an “up-and-coming disenfranchised political group” and set about the task of creating a “political base” for the identity she had labeled.^{Footnote 11}

The decision to pursue this strategy was made by Sommers and Barbara Dudley, a young attorney with California Rural Legal Assistance, who contacted Sommers after seeing the news accounts of a protest that Sommers had led with her group, Jobs for Older Women. Dudley drafted the California bill, which would come to be known as the “Displaced Homemaker Employment Act.”^{Footnote 12} She was tasked with drafting the legislation that Sommers later described as a “Christmas tree” because it included every item on the nascent group’s wish list.^{Footnote 13}

After Sommers came up with a new moniker for the constituency targeted by the draft legislation—displaced homemakers—she, Dudley, and a group of interested women established the Alliance for Displaced Homemakers (ADH) to do the political work necessary in passing the bill that Dudley had drafted.^{Footnote 14} Laurie Shields—a more traditionally minded, Catholic housewife widowed several years before who still preferred to keep her married name, “Mrs. Arthur Shields”—led the lobbying effort and was remarkably successful in rallying support for the legislation, particularly from “a large group of women who had not been involved at all in the feminist movement—the church women, the very conservative women’s groups.”^{Footnote 15} Shields recounted receiving assistance from “NOW chapters, local YWCA staff, and church women’s groups” as she set about traveling up and down the California coast encouraging women to go visit their state legislators to urge them to vote for the bill.^{Footnote 16}

The draft legislation did several important things, the first of which was to define the “displaced homemaker.”^{Footnote 17} It identified the person eligible for the services of the Act as an individual who:

1. (a) Is over 35 years of age;

2. (b) Has worked without pay as a homemaker for his or her family;

3. (c) Is not gainfully employed;

4. (d) Has had, or would have, difficulty finding employment; and

5. (e) (1) Has depended on the income of a family member and has lost that income; or (2) Has depended on government assistance as the parent of dependent children, but who is no longer eligible for such assistance.^{Footnote 18}

It also listed the myriad problems that “displaced homemakers” faced and declared the intention of the legislature to provide “the necessary counseling, services, and health care for displaced homemakers” in acknowledgment that “homemakers are an unrecognized part of the work force who make an invaluable contribution to the welfare of the society as a whole.”^{Footnote 19}

The centerpiece of the legislation was a two-year demonstration project in Oakland funded with $200,000 designed to provide multiple services to women who fell under the “displaced homemaker” rubric.^{Footnote 20} While the center would offer “supportive services” for the self-esteem issues that plagued these women and the health issues that were likely to arise in the coming years, the focus was on job training and job creation. Laurie Shields explained that the centers were designed to take a two-pronged approach to the challenges facing displaced homemakers in the labor market. “Efforts have been made in the past to tackle the problem of jobs for the mature woman. They failed because they were limited to preparing women (through education or counseling) for an unreceptive job market. Such services are essential, but they are only half the solution. The other half,” Shields explained, “calls for defining and developing new jobs which are not in competition with others who need to work also. There is little, if any, social value in splitting the pie into even smaller pieces.”^{Footnote 21}

These twin goals took shape in the bill in the form of targeted job counseling for the unique needs of displaced homemakers,^{Footnote 22} as well as targeted job training, the latter of which provided a stipend to participants.^{Footnote 23} Participants were able to receive their stipends while working as interns at the center, after which the goal was to place them in fields such as marital-dissolution counseling, which added to the services offered to the community. More specifically, the legislation instructed centers to direct their efforts toward three types of job training: (1) lay advocates (“trained for employment in social service agencies”), (2) home health technicians (“trained for employment by persons who are homebound through illness or disability and unable to care for themselves and their own households”), and (3) health care counselors (“trained for employment in community and hospital outpatient clinics”).

The bill thus pursued many ambitious goals. Perhaps first among them was state recognition of the value of homemaking as work and the acknowledgment of the difficulties faced by the individuals now known as displaced homemakers, a goal reflected in the language of the bill itself, as well as the rhetoric surrounding its passage and signing. Yet it also sought more concrete goals, as articulated by Shields above. Namely, the bill sought both to train women for the job market and to “defin[e] and develop[] new jobs which are not in competition with others who need to work also.”^{Footnote 24} This statement from Shields undoubtedly reflected her awareness not only of the plight of displaced homemakers, but of the larger economic context and social anxieties in which their activism was emerging. Quite simply, the economic climate of the 1970s was a brutal one for many American workers. Earnings for male workers peaked in 1972, beginning their stagnation and then decline the following year.^{Footnote 25} Even the generally celebrated narrowing of the gender pay gap in the coming years was a mixed blessing; it was “greatly attributable to the decline in male earnings.”^{Footnote 26} As a new group of workers entered the paid labor market and sought government assistance in that effort, displaced homemakers were forced to contend with this bleak economic reality when trying to advance their political agenda. Fighting for the same jobs, Shields argued, would not do anyone any good.

As an alternative, the bill sought to place its trainees in work that had traditionally been considered “women’s work.” These fields reflected the experiences and training of former homemakers and (though supporters of the programs probably did not know it at the time) the jobs were in occupational fields that would expand rapidly in the coming decades. Yet these growing fields also became defined by low-wage and difficult work, labor that was often both physically and emotionally demanding and with a meager paycheck to accompany it. The same social and economic factors that made it so difficult for the labor of displaced homemakers to be treated as “real work” by the government ensured that this labor would not be highly compensated. The mismatch between care work and the capitalist labor market defines the limits of the value of care both inside and outside the family. Sommers admitted years later that the “vision [of the first center in Oakland] was very difficult to implement,” an analysis echoed by Cindy Marano, the first head of the second center for displaced homemakers in the country in Baltimore. Sommers’s biographer explained that Marano felt “their desire to keep women out of dead-end jobs was too often unsuccessful. ‘I think we were economically naïve.’”^{Footnote 27}

The Politics of Passage in California

The California bill was introduced by State Senator Jerry Smith on April 15, 1975.^{Footnote 28} Senator Smith explained in a news article that the bill “acknowledges homemakers as a part of the work force who make an invaluable contribution to the welfare of our society.”^{Footnote 29} The Senate Health and Welfare Committee raised a few minor issues with the bill, including a desire to clarify the definition of “displaced homemaker” and concerns about the details of administering the program within state government. The staff report recommended passage with only minor amendments after a committee hearing on May 14, 1975, which included testimony from Tish Sommers that described “a new social problem, the DISPLACED HOMEMAKER.”^{Footnote 30} That committee hearing was preceded by a press conference with Senator Smith and Sommers.^{Footnote 31} Smith’s files on the bills include supportive letters from individual women, as well as letters of support from dozens of organizations calling for its passage.^{Footnote 32}

The Assembly Committee on Human Resources was less enthusiastic about the bill:

Similar issues were raised by the Assembly Committee on Ways and Means. That committee’s analysis noted that “three specific types of job-training must be offered (lay advocate; home health technician; health care counselor)” and then asked, “What employment prospects are available in this field?”^{Footnote 34}

The bill ended up being cosponsored by a number of other state senators, including members of California’s Joint Committee on Legal Equality. That committee was established after California ratified the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in an effort to make the state’s laws comply with the ERA mandate. The displaced homemakers’ bill was identified by that committee as a way to help homemaking “gain long-deserved recognition” by “correcting society’s neglect of women who years ago made a commitment to serving their family’s needs at the expense of gaining marketable experience.”^{Footnote 35}

The intense organizing effort recounted above proved remarkably successful; the bill passed the Senate on June 24 and the Assembly on September 10.^{Footnote 36} The votes were overwhelmingly supportive in both chambers: 29–1 in the Senate and 58–7 in the Assembly.^{Footnote 37} Sommers attributed the bill’s remarkably speedy passage through the legislature in part to the fact that it was “like motherhood and apple pie” and thus was able to attract support from a broad base of constituencies.^{Footnote 38} The appeal of the bill itself was complemented by intense and speedy on-the-ground organizing led by Shields and the other activists with the Alliance for Displaced Homemakers.^{Footnote 39} Legislators found little to object to in the bill itself and these groups mobilized quickly to capitalize on that support.

When the bill reached the desk of Governor Jerry Brown, however, activists encountered stiff and unexpected resistance. Governor Brown had campaigned as the anti-Reagan (who preceded him in office), but also as something of a fiscal conservative. In addition to his general hesitancy to fund a new spending program, the report from Human Resources Development within the Health and Welfare Agency initially recommended that the governor veto the bill, noting that a staff member had visited the demonstration center in Alameda County and “found very little potential, even with funding, for a labor exchange or training program.”^{Footnote 40} The administration had previously testified in opposition to the bill in front of the Senate Finance Committee.^{Footnote 41}

Until shortly before the midnight deadline, Governor Brown was still vacillating between signing the bill or letting it pass into law without his signature. When he finally gave in to the immense public support for the bill (including a vocal supporter among his advisors, as well as activists who were threatening to stage a sit-in at his office until he signed it) and signed it into law, he expressed sympathy with the “widows and divorced homemakers set adrift in our uncertain economy.”^{Footnote 42} Yet he also expressed skepticism that government had any role to play in solving the problems generated by “the increasing break-up of the family and the separation of generations from each other,” arguing that these changes portended “big trouble.” He went on to say: “This bill appropriates a modest sum for one project in one county in one state. Out of it, I expect we will all learn. But I don’t want to delude anyone into thinking that mere money or government programs as presently constituted will get at the roots of the economic and moral dilemma facing this country.”^{Footnote 43} Senator Smith sent Governor Brown a handwritten note after the bill was signed, thanking him for his signature, acknowledging that he knew “it was a difficult decision,” and promising to follow the program’s implementation.^{Footnote 44}

Governor Brown’s hesitancies about the bill had been overcome by furious organizing on the part of ADH and other supportive groups, as well as the generally nonobjectionable goal and relatively small price tag of the legislation, as conceded much later by Sommers. At the moment, any lingering concerns over Governor Brown’s hesitancies were set aside as states across the country began to follow California’s lead in implementing their own programs for displaced homemakers.

Displaced Homemakers on Capitol Hill: Describing the Group and Drafting the Bills

At the same time the bill was being introduced and debated in California, Representative Yvonne Braithwaite-Burke was working on drumming up support for a bill she introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on May 14, 1975.^{Footnote 54} Like the California bill, this one had also been drafted by Barbara Dudley and Tish Sommers, who personally brought the draft to Representative Burke’s office in Washington, D.C.^{Footnote 55} Dudley recalls drafting the federal legislation first, because she and Sommers were convinced that solutions for the problems facing displaced homemakers necessitated federal intervention. The original draft of the original federal bill was modeled on the Social Security Act and focused on revisions to Social Security and existing job-training programs in ways that Dudley believed necessitated specifically federal legislation. Burke was approached by Dudley and Sommers because she was a woman, she was African American, she was progressive, and—crucially—she was from California.^{Footnote 56}

Yet it quickly became apparent to Dudley and Sommers that the federal bill was not on a fast track to implementation. Some of that slow pace might have derived from Representative Burke’s personal dislike for the way the bill was framed in its initial drafting by Dudley and Sommers. In November 1975, Representative Burke told a congressional committee that she had concerns about the initial version of the bill: “Quite frankly, when the legislation was brought to me originally it was with the idea of working in the Social Security system and having some provision for lowering the age eligibility for Social Security on a temporary basis for the displaced homemaker. I did not particularly care for that approach.”^{Footnote 57} This initial version of the bill was a more accurate reflection of what Sommers, Dudley, Shields, and other activists within the displaced homemakers movement believed to be real crux of the issue: the treatment of housework as something other than work. Dudley recounted that the initial drafts of the legislation—the ones incorporating homemakers into Social Security—were inspired by the “Wages for Housework” campaigns that were then popular in many feminist circles, but never became particularly prominent within the U.S. women’s movement.^{Footnote 58} Yet Sommers and Dudley were frustrated by the lack of movement on the draft legislation in Washington and both believed that passing a bill in California would help push along federal activity.^{Footnote 59}

That assessment proved accurate. By the fall of 1975, Senator John V. Tunney (D-Calif.) had introduced a companion bill, also titled the Displaced Homemakers Equal Opportunity Act.^{Footnote 60} The bills were very similar, with some differences in organization and funding. Senator Tunney’s bill would have limited funding for the program to $2 million a year and established up to thirty “model programs” to aid displaced homemakers through existing services, while Representative Burke’s bill included no funding limit and explicitly called for the establishment of new “multipurpose service centers,” which were at the heart of the California model. Both bills called for congressional reports on the new programs, as well as the feasibility of including displaced homemakers within existing social welfare programs like Unemployment Insurance and Social Security.^{Footnote 61}

The first committee to hold a hearing on Burke’s bill was the Subcommittee on Retirement Income and Employment of the House Select Committee on Aging. That relatively short November 1975 hearing (not quite two hours) included only four speakers (one of whom was Representative Burke) and centered on the challenges facing older women who had spent most of their adult lives as homemakers. The members of the subcommittee were uniformly supportive of the bill and raised questions only about the particulars of implementation.^{Footnote 62} But most of the conversation focused on highlighting the need for the bill and its usefulness in preventing displaced homemakers from having to make use of welfare, since they fell through the cracks of other social service programs. Representative Burke explained this aspect of the legislation’s appeal to lawmakers: “I think what you are doing here . . . is balancing where you are going to spend the money. Do you want to put this person in the welfare system? . . . She doesn’t qualify for unemployment compensation. She doesn’t qualify for Social Security. The only way she qualifies is to go into the welfare system. That is what we are trying to avoid.”^{Footnote 63}

Unlike the women who were the caricatured face of “welfare” in the second half of the twentieth century, displaced homemakers were uniformly praised for their decision to follow a traditional path of homemaking and for their work in the home raising children. The rhetorical comparison to welfare was significant, because Representative Burke and other advocates for displaced homemakers were using it to distinguish displaced homemakers from other groups of individuals who had not earned their support in the ways these women had. In the early stages of her organizing efforts, Tish Sommers articulated an entitlement approach to pay for displaced homemakers, when she argued that displaced homemakers “deserve help because we have earned it, not because you feel sorry for us.”^{Footnote 64} And indeed, a sense that displaced homemakers had earned something was prevalent throughout all aspects of the issue: in the popular press, in the Congressional Record, and in committee hearings. The discussion of displaced homemakers on Capitol Hill and in newspapers around the country reflected a curious combination of political characteristics for this type of activism: these women were pitied and entitled. This rhetorical frame is quite different from the frame used for the women who relied on welfare, as Linda Gordon has so persuasively argued.^{Footnote 65} Yet the central question remained: Entitled to what?

One year later, Congress took up that question yet again with another committee hearing on the proposed legislation. This time, the hearing was convened by the subcommittee on Equal Employment Opportunities of the House Committee on Education and Labor and the focus of the committee hearing had shifted from old age to a much broader discussion about the logistics of the bill, the need for job creation, troubles with existing programs, and many other topics. It was a much more comprehensive hearing, which included seventeen speakers (including Representative Burke, as well as Shields and Sommers) and supportive material entered into the record from an additional fourteen individuals or organizations, as well as a fact sheet on the bill and a list of endorsements, both entered into the record by Representative Burke.^{Footnote 66} The upshot of all this testimony and material was a less focused discussion, but one that indicated the bill continued to receive support from key members of Congress. The comparison to welfare remained a consistent theme,^{Footnote 67} but the logistical questions were more likely to focus on the estimated cost of the program, as well as the definition of who would count as a “displaced homemaker.” Notably, the age factor was not only downplayed, but was a matter of disagreement among those testifying, with some witnesses believing that any woman who had little training and stayed home to raise children should be eligible, no matter how young she was at the time.^{Footnote 68} Throughout this hearing, too, displaced homemakers were praised for their choices to make homemaking their full-time occupation. Representative Burke argued that the option to stay home was an important one to maintain for women: “We don’t want to ever get to a point where we tell women they shouldn’t stay at home. We should tell women that they should have a choice.”^{Footnote 69} Displaced homemaker programs were intended to make that choice a bit less risky for the women who pursued homemaking as a full-time occupation.

By 1977, a slightly revised version of Representative Burke’s bill had garnered seventy-two cosponsors.^{Footnote 70} That same year, Senator Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) introduced a companion bill in the Senate with eighteen cosponsors at the time of its introduction.^{Footnote 71} These bills both embraced the “multipurpose service center” approach that had proven so popular in California and around the country. That same year, hearings were held in subcommittees situated within both the House and the Senate. In addition to witness testimony and prepared statements, the records of these committee hearings also feature supportive materials from a wide range of groups, including both individual letter writers and national organizations.

The most remarkable shift in this pair of hearings was not only the robust record but also the new focus on the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) as the best location for the displaced homemaker program. CETA was a wide-ranging employment program that included both public-service employment and job training. In these 1977 hearings, the suggestion was made to incorporate displaced homemakers as a “special target group” within Title III of CETA, which set aside a minimum amount of funding for particularly disadvantaged groups like youth, criminal offenders, and individuals with limited English proficiency. These suggestions were reflected—albeit somewhat obliquely—in letters from the secretary of the Department of Labor and the secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, neither of whom supported passage of the bills in their current form and both of whom expressed concern that the bills were duplicating existing programs, including those in CETA.^{Footnote 72}

In December 1977, Representative Burke, along with 110 cosponsors, introduced an amended version of H.R. 10270 that she said “follows the conclusion of House and Senate hearings on H.R. 28 and S. 418” in its suggestion to “amend the Comprehensive Training and Employment Act (CETA) to include a program of assistance for displaced homemakers” in the government program scheduled for reauthorization the following year.^{Footnote 73} Representative Burke told her colleagues that this change would still enable successful execution of most of the goals in the initial bill, including the “50 multipurpose service centers,” and that the move to CETA reflected her realization that “government resources are limited and that they must be deployed as efficiently as possible.”^{Footnote 74} Representative Burke’s bill was followed a month later by the reintroduction of an identically amended S. 418 by Senator Bayh (and 19 cosponsors).^{Footnote 75}

Throughout all of these years of hearings, displaced homemakers were cast as unwitting victims of larger social forces that had changed the rules midway through the game and also as women who worked hard for years and deserved economic security. In its simplest terms, the idea that housework is labor and that it deserved some recognition by society and the government remained at the core of the displaced homemaker narrative. In a speech expressing support for the legislation, Senator Bayh referred to the group’s “unpaid labor in the home” and explained that “while homemakers make an invaluable contribution to the welfare and economic stability of this country, there is no unemployment insurance for a homemaker who is ‘laid off.’”^{Footnote 76} The phrase “unpaid jobs” or similar locutions appear in many of the discussions—both legislative and journalistic—of the phenomenon.

Displaced homemakers were part of a larger conversation about the value of housework that was being driven by the growing feminist movement of the 1970s. The news of the 1970s is scattered with efforts to calculate the economic contribution of the homemaker or link household labor to the marketplace in other ways. Most notable was the attempt of the Social Security Administration to calculate the “housewife’s average economic value,” which in 1976 it calculated to be $4,7605 a year.^{Footnote 77} Indeed, by the end of the decade, congressional hearings and governmental reports would produce some reforms to Social Security that attempted to acknowledge the economic contribution of housework, even if the changes were not as dramatic as feminist activists would have preferred.^{Footnote 78} All of these approaches to discussing the issue and remedying the problem acknowledged the reality that American society did not recognize homemaking as “work” in the typical sense of the word and, in different ways, sought to refute that widespread assumption. For displaced homemakers and their advocates, the challenge remained: What kind of legislation could recognize that housework is labor and reward the women who performed it for years and were now “displaced” from their occupations?

“Special Assistance” for Displaced Homemakers

The final version of the initiative came in the form of an amendment to S. 2570, the Carter administration’s legislation reauthorizing CETA. Amendment 1716 sought to supplement S. 2570 by explicitly calling for the establishment of “multipurpose service projects” within existing “prime sponsors, public agencies, and private nonprofit organizations.” The amendment thus retained the center-oriented approach to the issue of the displaced homemaker. The Carter administration had already included “displaced homemakers” within the Title III designation of groups targeted for “special assistance.” Other than adding them to the list of targeted groups, however, there was no additional provision for the group—including no mention of the “multipurpose service centers,” which had been the hallmarks of state programs and federal legislation up to this point—and this amendment sought to change that lacuna in the proposed legislation. Senator Bayh spoke in favor of the bill, noting that some members of the subcommittee had been concerned about the concept of funding “centers” while acknowledging that the administration’s legislation did not provide for them. That oversight was, he argued, a “mistake” because experience on the state level had shown how much women were helped by these centers, which would provide unique services and not overlap with other service providers.^{Footnote 79}

Centers were not, in the end, included in the reauthorization of CETA and “displaced homemakers” remained an additional “target group” within Title III of the program. Other federal recognition of the group, however, had already occurred and would recur in the coming years. In 1976, “amendments to the Federal Vocational Education Act allowed states to use grant money” to help the group, but advocates demurred from full support, concerned that displaced homemakers were being lumped into existing programs without recognition of their unique circumstances.^{Footnote 80} Vocational education continued to serve as the policy location for displaced homemakers in 1984, when the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Education Act allotted funds to states that were designated for both “single parents and homemakers.” The goal of establishing pilot programs through CETA was finally accomplished in 1980, when Congress allotted $5 million for forty-seven centers around the nation. The initiative ended up being a one-time expenditure, however, and vocational education would remain the source of funds for this targeted group.^{Footnote 81}

In 1986, the Office of Technology Assessment conducted a wide-ranging study on “Displaced Workers,” and devoted one chapter to the displaced homemaker. The study found that the replacement of CETA with the Reagan administration’s Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) greatly weakened federal support for the program, which was only partially ameliorated by the influx of funds from the Perkins Act a few years later. In its place, states seemed to have stepped into the void, providing the impetus for increased spending for these growing programs. By 1984, the Displaced Homemakers Network counted 425 local centers serving a growing population of more than 2 million women.^{Footnote 82} Yet by 1985 federal government support for this population through JTPA was relatively minor.^{Footnote 83} In other words, the federal government continued—and indeed continues to the present day—to fund programs targeted at displaced homemakers, but its primary vehicles for doing so came to reside in vocational education, rather than the employment program in which it first appeared.

In either case—whether the program was funded through vocational education or targeted employment assistance—the rationale for government support was largely the same. Governor Brown’s assessment of the initial bill in California—that the displaced homemakers bill “represented another attempt to help a special group of people seek employment”—turned out to be an accurate description of the final federal programs as well. Rather than a program that was premised upon an understanding of housework as work—and a support system for displaced homemakers that reflected their entitlement to that support—the program embodied nearly the opposite rationale. Namely, that the work of these women in the home made them fully unprepared for the paid labor market and in need of special services to help them compete for the first time in the working world.

CETA and vocational education also make sense for displaced homemakers when the programs are thought of as responses to employment discrimination, rather than reflective of structural failures of the capitalist labor market. By the mid-1970s, employment discrimination was a familiar concept within the U.S. legal and political arenas. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) protected against sex and age discrimination, respectively, and provided a legal remedy against employers who improperly discriminated on the basis of sex or age.^{Footnote 84} The language of employment discrimination was thus familiar to politicians and the public and was deployed by advocates on behalf of displaced homemakers. In her 1975 reintroduction of H.R. 7003 (Equal Opportunity for Displaced Homemakers Act), Representative Burke noted that “displaced homemakers often are subject to discrimination in employment because of age, sex, and lack of any recent paid work experience.”^{Footnote 85} Her prepared statement in a 1975 congressional committee hearing similarly argued that “prevailing cultural attitudes, sexism, and ageism all work against [the displaced homemaker].”^{Footnote 86} The Women’s Bureau of the Labor Department wrote a statement of support for the bill, which called attention to the fact that “these women may be subjected to discrimination in employment because of their age, because they are women, and if they are members of minority groups because of their race or ethnic background.”^{Footnote 87} A Washington Post articled observed that, among other things, a displaced homemaker must “face sex and age discrimination” when reentering the job market.^{Footnote 88} A witness in a 1976 congressional committee hearing on the bill phrased it most plainly when she described displaced homemakers as “another of our forgotten minorities.”^{Footnote 89}

While both forms of discrimination were thought to play a key role in the phenomenon, Sommers and Shields repeatedly emphasized the age discrimination at work in the employment difficulties faced by displaced homemakers. In her prepared statement before a House committee considering Representative Burke’s bill, Laurie Shields argued that the success of the rapid popularization of the term “displaced homemaker” had been a mixed blessing:

Tish Sommers similarly emphasized the age component of the displaced homemaker in her understanding of the issue and most of her organizing work during this time centered on age. Age discrimination was the central target of Sommers and Shields—as well as the drafter of both initial pieces of legislation, Barbara Dudley, who recounts that they “fought to hold on to the age” restriction in the California legislation, but lost. As Dudley explains, “In . . . Tish’s whole conceptualization, it was about age.”^{Footnote 91} Indeed, the first congressional committee to hold a hearing on the legislation was the House Select Committee on Aging.^{Footnote 92}

Despite the gender-neutral language of the legislation, sex was always an additional primary component of the campaign. Sommers saw the two as inextricably linked and later explained that “when you talk about . . . all those aging problems, you are talking primarily about women.”^{Footnote 93} Yet the age focus of the original activists gave way to a rhetorical and policy focus on sex discrimination. Though men were not excluded from the services afforded displaced homemakers in the CETA program, it was clear that the overwhelming majority of program participants would be women, as had been the case at the state level. Further, discussion of the need for displaced homemakers to be explicitly included under Title III of CETA often included recognition of CETA’s historic failure to serve women on an equal basis with men.^{Footnote 94} Most notably, the “left behind” frame of the movement—that these women were “caught between the cracks” of an older, traditional generation and the younger, feminist generation—was a frame specifically concerned with gender roles.

Discrimination—whether regarding age or sex—provided a more immediately graspable vocabulary and set of policy prescriptions for displaced homemakers. The other form of discrimination driving this activism—social, governmental, and market discrimination against housework—was far more difficult to address within the framework of U.S. social policy.