Gender Pay Gap and Media Research Paper

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Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co.

Leading up to the Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. case of 1970, women had been primarily viewed as being part of the domestic sphere. Their traditional role in society was to take care of the house and kids while the man went to work and supported the family by earning the paycheck. Following WWII, when the women were pushed out of the home by the necessity of the war effort needed at the home front to keep the soldiers supplied abroad, a change in society was effected. Woman began to feel less and less restricted to the domestic sphere. Betty Friedan let slip the bugle cry to women in 1963 with her book The Feminine Mystique, which argued that women were being treated like slaves of their husbands and of the patriarchal order—that their place was not to be confined to the kitchen as they wore heels and tried to do their best Mary Tyler Moore impression. Rather, they had a right to self-actualize and work alongside men: they should not be expected to reproduce babies and care for them—that was the essence of Friedan’s argument, which helped to prompt the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Another Feminist, Gloria Steinem, led the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s by founding Ms. Magazine and promoting abortion as a fundamental women’s right and as an empowering practice over the male patriarchy. This was the climate into which the case of Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co was thrust: Schultz was a woman who wanted equal pay for equal work. The Wheaton Glass Co. had given her a title that was different from her male peers’ though she was doing the same work as they. Because she had a different title, though, she was not paid the same. She sued and won with the Court ruling that Wheaton Glass was violating the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Woody).

The Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. case helped to reinforce the changing ideas about gender that were kicking about at the time. Thanks to Friedan’s book, Steinem’s magazine, and countless other issues, activists, and stories all promoting women’s rights and women’s equality, the Schultz case was a legal example of how perceptions of gender were changing in America. The old pre-1960s traditional gender norms and traditional gender roles, in which women were expected to play a supporting role to men were directly challenged by the outcome of the Schultz case. The Court held that women who did the same work as men had the right to expect the same pay, regardless of the title the company chose to give them.

This was just the first in a series of battles between the Women’s Movement and the Patriarchy of the West that resulted in the refining of gender to such a degree that now it is now longer a question of “Him” and “Her” but also of whatever pronoun the LGBTQ+ community prefers. The media played a significant role in this development. For instance, the story of Bruce Jenner switching genders to become Caitlyn Jenner was one of the biggest news stories in recent years (Robinson)—and it never would have been possible had the foundation for challenging traditional gender norms not been laid by the leaders of the Women’s Movement and Women’s Liberation—and court cases like Schultz v. Wheaten Glass Co., which legitimized the women’s march for equal rights from a legal standpoint.

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The Schultz case came three years before Roe v. Wade, when Feminists won another enormous legal challenge, which gave them the right to abort their babies. Future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would say that the Roe v. Wade was one of the most decisive moments for women in history: “Better bitch than mouse,” Ginsburg said (Rosen). She also asserted that “government has no business making that choice for a woman,” referring to the lawfulness of abortion as a fundamental women’s right (Bazelon). Thus, one can see that media played a huge role, here, too—by focusing more on abortions rights activists than on the equal pay problem. The 1970s were thus a monumental decade for women’s rights activists and helped to shift the way in which gender was considered as a norm, but media was not focusing on the gender pay gap as much as it was on gender and sexuality. By the 2000s, traditional gender norms were so far gone from the mainstream that a former male Olympian would become a public hero/heroine for coming out as a woman. This would have been unheard of in the 1950s or even in the 1960s. The 1970s was the transformation era, and Schultz v. Wheaton Glass Co. was a kind stress-test to see how far the establishment was willing to yield to the women’s rights movement. When Schultz won the case, it was shown that the patriarchy was not as formidable as once thought and that room for reimagining the way people thought about gender could be a real possibility.

In a way, Schultz capitalized on the chaos that was swarming at the time too—but it was not sensational enough for the media to really be a story that had legs. The 1960s had truly been a revolutionary decade, for instance, and the media wanted more stories full of human drama. A President had been assassinated in 1963. His brother, a presidential candidate, was assassinated five years later in 1968. Two African American activists—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X—were assassinated the same decade. The Civil Rights Movement had grown into a force to be reckoned with in the earlier part of the decade, and by the latter part of the decade a foreign war abroad (Vietnam) was leading to social unrest at home. The Kent State shootings at the Ohio college campus in May 1970, the same year as the Schultz case, showed (as reported by CBS News at the time) that the culture of America was becoming completely fraught with tension: things were so bad that everyone was snapping and the order of society was seemingly coming apart at the seams, as the new generation….....

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