My father and mother both came from large families, as was common among immigrants in their day, so as I was growing up, I had a grand total of nine aunts. Toss in my mother and my two grandmothers, and I grew up around a lot of women.
What distinguished these women is that every one of them worked for a living. There were schoolteachers, flight attendants, a nurse, an anaesthetist, a telephone company executive, one who worked in the office of a bleach factory. As I went through life I learned that this was statistically unusual in the America of that time, but it seemed normal to me. When the social revolution arrived in the 1970s, which brought millions of women into the workplace, I wondered what the big deal was.
This week, President Obama begins studying the records of possible replacements for the retiring supreme court justice David Souter. The consensus is that he should name a woman, since only one of the current justices is female. The consensus is correct, but it's also a marker of the progress we've made and a good opportunity to reflect on the fact that this didn't just "happen" because of mysterious social forces. People – no, let's be more precise, liberal advocates brave enough to change the status quo – made it happen, against often intense opposition from the other side.
It was 1965 when President Johnson ordered that companies should take "affirmative action" to ensure that black people were given opportunities theretofore denied to them. He extended that commitment to women in 1967. But nothing much happened, and it wasn't until 1972 that such laws, as they applied to women, began to be enforced.
At the same time, there was an effort to add an equal rights amendment to the US constitution. The amendment, which had existed on paper since the 1920s, initially had more support from the Republican party than from Democrats, whose union supporters thought that, in essence, doubling the potential workforce would drive down wages. But the Democrats dropped that stance in the 1970s and became the rights amendment champions. The Republicans, who had supported such an amendment going back decades, changed course as conservatives took control of the party, and by 1980 they opposed it. It narrowly failed to achieve ratification by the required two-thirds of state legislatures.
By this time, though, the idea that women should occupy positions of prominence was becoming conventional wisdom. Ronald Reagan put the first woman on the supreme court, Sandra Day O'Connor, in 1981. That was nice, yet at the same time the Reagan administration was going into court arguing against affirmative action on a number of fronts. But they couldn't kill it off. American universities pressed on with aggressive programmes to ensure that minorities and women received an ample share of entry slots. Professional schools and law firms largely followed suit. Results?
A sea change. When Hillary Clinton was considering law schools in 1969, she was famously told by a Harvard professor that "we don't need any more women" at Harvard. She went to Yale. By the time she graduated, about 15% of law school grads were female. Now, the New York Times reported on Saturday, 48% are. About 45% of associates in US law firms are women (but just 18% of partners; the glass ceiling still exists). There are about 400 female judges on the federal circuit and appeals court benches, or about 25% of the total, meaning that Obama has a larger and more distinguished pool to choose from than his predecessors did.
We can't put these changes entirely down to affirmative action. Forty years on, the social changes it began have become, to some extent, self-perpetuating. But there is no question that it started the ball rolling. And there is no question that since the 1980s conservatives have tried to kill affirmative action off. It's taken lots of difficult and creative and expensive legal work by lots of advocates to sustain it.
Racial and gender preferences aren't without some downsides. There have been instances of reverse discrimination – indeed, one of the first cases Obama's new justice will decide on, if she's seated by June, will involve exactly such an allegation, levelled by white firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut. And I've always felt that these programmes should take some account of class. The interest groups that back affirmative action fear such a change will water it down. I tend to think the opposite – that if poor white families are part of the potential beneficiary pool, they'll be more likely to support it.
But on balance, these programmes have made the United States a far more equitable society than it was without them. And they are still an arena of passionate contention. The court's (mostly) anti-preferences majority consists of four white men who've never had to worry about these things and one black man who was himself a beneficiary of affirmative action but who, for whatever psychological reasons, can't manage to acknowledge it. Obama may have the chance to put three or even four justices on the court, making it a much more diverse body. As he does, the rest of us should remember that all this didn't just happen by accident.
