The Heart Breakers Strike: Esther Peterson, A Driving Force Behind the Equal-Pay Movement

US Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez will induct the late Esther Eggertsen Peterson into the Labor Hall of Honor at  the Department of Labor headquarters in Washington Tuesday, Dec. 10 at 9:15 a.m. EST.

As the director of the department’s Women’s Bureau, Peterson was the highest ranking woman in the Kennedy administration. In inducting Peterson, Secretary Perez will highlight the progress we’ve made and the challenges we still face to create opportunity for women in the workplace.

Following the Secretary Perez’s remarks, the Council of Economic Advisors’ Betsey Stevenson will moderate a panel on the status of women in the 21st century workforce. A live webcast of the induction and the panel will be available at http://www.dol.gov/dol/media/webcast/live/.

Both events are occurring as part of an event recognizing the 50th anniversary of the American Women report produced by President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, of which Peterson was Executive Vice Chairman.

Editor’s Note: The biography of Esther Peterson (below) first appeared in the May/June 2009 issue of The American Postal Work Magazine.

Throughout her life, Esther Eggersten Peterson was “a powerful and effective catalyst for change,” notes a tribute to her in the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Among other achievements, she helped launch the women’s movement in the 1960s and was considered by many to be the driving force behind the equal-pay movement.

Unusual Evolution

Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson (far left) watches as President Kennedy signs the Equal Pay Act into law. As the JFK administration’s highest ranking female official, she led the fight to pass legislation establishing the principle of equal pay for equal work.

Peterson’s life as a workers’ advocate had an unlikely beginning. Raised in a conservative Mormon household in Provo, UT, Esther Eggersten had been led to believe that unions were evil, as those around her strongly opposed a railway workers strike in 1918, when she was 12. But she was also raised to try to help others, she recalled in a 1995 interview, and to “Do what is right; let the consequences follow,” as her church taught.

Peterson graduated from Brigham Young University in 1927, then moved to New York City, where she earned an advanced teaching degree at Columbia University and met Oliver Peterson. They married and moved to Boston, and in 1932 she was teaching at a prep school for well-to-do girls. She also had a second job, as a volunteer at a YWCA, where she taught classes for garment workers.

One evening, most of her YWCA students failed to show up. Wondering why, Peterson discovered that they were staging a job action, and had gone on strike after their employer changed the style of a women’s pocket from square to heart-shaped. The new design took much longer to sew, but the company refused to increase the “piece rate.”

At first, Peterson though the strike was a terrible idea. “I was raised thinking that [strikers] had bombs in their pockets and were communists.”

But Peterson cared deeply for her students. Her visit to the home of one young woman revealed that it was basically a sweatshop, with her student’s family, including young children, gathered under a single dim light, doing garment work. “The women had been making housedresses, a dollar- thirty-two-cents a dozen,” she told Common Cause magazine in 1995. “They couldn’t live on what they were making… It made me furious.”