The Law and Issues of Race and Gender
Not much more than a generation ago, legal sanctions limiting discrimination in the workplace, whether against racial minorities, women, or other groups, were nearly unknown and to most people almost unthinkable. The decision of a private employer to hire, promote, or fire an employee was (within narrow constraints set by labor laws) a purely private matter; an employer could make those decisions for good reasons, bad reasons --including race or gender--or for no reason at all.
In many states, racial discrimination was the law of the land, and it was accepted or endured as a fact of social life even in regions that rejected official segregation and other discriminatory laws. As for what is now called gender discrimination, it was so taken for granted that for most people the concept hardly existed. The very presence of a woman in the workplace was regarded as, in a way, temporary, "until she got married," or it was due to some special contingency. Most working women were found in occupations regarded as female, such as secretarial work. Sexual jokes, innuendoes, or pressures were limited only by the goodwill of male coworkers.
All of this began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the progress of the Civil Rights movement. The argument was increasingly made that ending legal discrimination, e.g., segregation, would not end the second-class citizenship of African-Americans if they remained, pervasively, second-class citizens in the work force. Thus the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included prohibitions of workplace discrimination. The following essay discusses the development, problems, and politics of workplace discrimination by race and gender.
In the common-law tradition that formed the basis of American law, the decision to hire or fire was a private matter between employer and employee. Employment was "at will;" an employer could decide to hire or not hire s...