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This chapter focuses on the rise of feminism in the 1960s and the downfall of single-sex protective laws. Protection's downfall rested not on the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), but rather on the courts—on women employees who sued for equal rights in federal courts under Title VII and the lawyers who represented them; on pressure from feminist organizations, notably the National Organization for Women (NOW), that supported the plaintiffs; on a series of court decisions that upset protective laws; and on a mounting consensus among judges in favor of equal rights. Also important was feminist resurgence, which swayed conviction; shifts in public opinion culminated in the passage in Congress of an ERA in 1972. Single-sex protective laws were thus the first casualties of the new feminism. Once central to the women's movement, they became obstacles on the path to equal rights.

Eric Fenrich studies the efforts of Black activists and NASA to increase minority educational access that would lead to greater participation in the space program. According to Fenrich, the concurrence of the civil rights movement and the American space program reveal the two primary methods by which the advocates in the modern era have sought to advance the interests of African Americans. First, a negative project: the removal of formal barriers to the exercise of rights, more specifically, ending discriminatory practices in Equal Employment Opportunity and education. Second, more positive efforts, such as equal employment opportunities or affirmative action, that place opportunities within the reach of historically disadvantaged people. Fenrich also examines the fallout over James C. Fletcher’s firing of Ruth Bates Harris.

Brian Odom surveys the implementation of Equal Employment Opportunity at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Odom contends that Marshall’s strategy focused on recruiting qualified African American engineering students outside Alabama and developing a partnership with the Association of Huntsville Area Contractors (AHAC) locally. By serving as both a catalyst for technical educational programs in the Huntsville community and clearinghouse for job opportunities and racial dialogue, AHAC facilitated a modicum of progress toward minority gains. During the civil rights movement, local activists such as Dr. Sonnie Hereford III and aerospace executives, including Brown Engineering Company’s Milton K. Cummings, brokered “backroom” agreements meant to improve Alabama’s “image” problem.

Despite his frustration at being second in command, Johnson's vice presidency enabled him to develop his civil rights credentials. His role as chair of the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity allowed him to work directly with civil rights leaders, and he developed closer relationships with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Campaign (SCLC). During this period he increased his knowledge of the injustices suffered by African Americans, developed his understanding of the growing demands of an activist civil rights movement, and emerged as a strong supporter of immediate change. Civil rights crises in St. Augustine, Florida, and Birmingham, Alabama, convinced Johnson that the nation must end racial segregation, and by mid-1963 he took a firmer pro-civil rights stance than President John F. Kennedy.

Christina Roberts explores the perception that NASA performed poorly in hiring women during the long civil rights era, arguing that that argument is based on low recruitment numbers by comparison with many other federal agencies. Others blame NASA’s poor recruitment efforts on an entrenched white male corporate culture that resisted hiring women and minorities into the early 1970s. While not denying NASA difficulties in the area, Roberts argues that what is missing from the historiography is a discussion of gender including NASA’s actual public outreach efforts for equal employment opportunity for women scientists and engineers. Roberts contends that during the late 1950s to mid-1960s NASA sought to transmit a message that women such as Nancy Grace Roman were welcome to apply and would attain professional science and engineering careers at NASA.

The book concludes with an examination of the relocation of department stores to suburban shopping centers and the Sears, Roebuck, and Company affirmative action cases. Mass suburbanization, the rise of discount retailers such as Kmart and Wal-Mart, and urban decay transformed department stores. Black workers found that the gains they had made in downtown department stores had virtually disappeared as department stores followed their preferred clientele—the white middle class—to the suburbs. Here, stores were able to return to their former racial practices in spaces that were inaccessible via public transportation, deemed private property, and prohibited civil rights demonstrations. The Sears cases thus reveal the ways that the department store movement modified its tactics, approaches, and strategies. These cases also exposed the industry’s ongoing transformations, ones that revolutionized, or rather diminished, the status of retail work and department stores, and facilitated the reconsolidation of racial discrimination.

This chapter explores the dynamics of job segregation by gender as well as the social and cultural construction of boundaries between “male” and “female” work in the retail sector. More specifically, it analyzes the role of employers and their hiring policies in shaping the sexual division of paid labor by focusing on the controversy stemming from the legal battle between Sears Roebuck & Co. and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). After discussing the political context of the EEOC's class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit against Sears, the chapter considers the historical evidence presented by both parties through the expert testimonies of two historians: Rosalind Rosenberg for Sears and Alice Kessler-Harris for the EEOC. It examines how women's history and the issue of difference figured in Sears's defense, along with the EEOC's argument that Sears's policies systematically excluded women from its most highly paid sales jobs.

This chapter examines how the law protects employees from acts of employer retaliation when they are engaged in exercising the rights granted them by Title VII. Employers have a tendency to react negatively to charges of employment discrimination—whether religious, race, sex, national origin, age, or disability. Charges alleging retaliation in violation of Title VII precepts, filed annually with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, steadily increased between 1997 and 2009. Title VII makes it unlawful for an employer to retaliate against a worker who charges it with a discriminatory policy or practice or who participates in a legal or administrative proceeding relating to the company's employment policies or practices. This chapter provides an overview of Title VII proscriptions against retaliation as well as the major components of retaliation. It also considers court cases that center on issues that normally arise in religious discrimination cases when workers also charge their employers with retaliatory conduct.

This chapter examines acts of religious discrimination at various stages of the employment relationship. A worker who intends to pursue a religious discrimination claim against his or her employer may turn to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). When a worker files a charge, the EEOC investigates the allegations of discrimination. That investigation typically leads either to a “for cause” finding (there is reason to believe that the worker was subjected to discriminatory conduct) or a “no cause” finding (there is no reason to believe that the employer engaged in discriminatory conduct). This chapter discusses religious discrimination claims asserted during the employment relationship, focusing on the following areas: hiring and promotions; dress codes, general attire, and personal appearance; work assignments; discipline; wages and benefits; transfers; and layoffs. It also considers a number of court cases that illustrate the problems typically encountered by workers as they pursue their religious discrimination claims before the EEOC and the courts.

This chapter reflects on issues arising from the practice of religion in the workplace and how to resolve them. Employers and employees will confront complex issues that typically occur in the struggle to protect the rights of those who wish to exercise their religious beliefs while also securing the rights of those who elect not to participate in workplace religious activities. Title VII and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have been the primary avenues for resolving religious disputes in the workplace. This chapter considers whether Title VII and the EEOC offer the best ways of resolving religious disputes by focusing on the case of Home Depot, which failed to accommodate the Sabbath observance of one of its workers, Bradley Baker. It argues that dealing with religious matters in the workplace requires common sense, good business practices, and a continuing attitude of respect for all parties involved. It also contends that litigation is not the ideal way for an employer or an employee to cope with offensive or hostile work environment problems.

This chapter examines out-of-the-ordinary circumstances in which accommodation arises as an issue. It first considers the case of Kimberly Cloutier, who sued Costco over dress code before turning to Charan Singh Kalsi's religious discrimination lawsuit against the New York City Transit Authority. It then discusses two other court cases involving George Daniels and Robert Roesser, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's guidelines on accommodation. It also assesses the relevant provisions of the National Labor Relations Act regarding the payment of union dues by workers holding religious convictions that oppose union activities. It suggests that a solution for workers with religious convictions that oppose labor unions is to pay to charitable institutions what other workers pay to their union as dues.

This chapter focuses on the lives of female full-time workers of the bubble generation (baburu sedai) in their forties and fifties who, like most of their peers, have never resigned from their jobs for marriage or child rearing. The Equal Employment Opportunity Law (EEOL), introduced in 1986, officially opened up professional opportunities for Japanese women, but the society continues to pressure married women to quit their jobs when they have children. Drawing on the experiences of three working women, this chapter considers the impact of macrostructural forces on the lives of female corporate workers and how they have negotiated their professional and personal paths through these decades of socioeconomic turmoil. More specifically, it discusses the ways in which long-term female workers have developed and coped with the persistent male dominance in the corporate world. It shows that a new form of differentiation is emerging among girls and women in contemporary Japan based on the availability of familial educational support.

Chapter 4 examines how plaintiff Celio Diaz successfully used Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to reverse the airlines’ female-only hiring practices. Diaz’s legacy affirms that queer Americans were deeply invested in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, even if they were often unwelcome. The chapter traces the entanglements of male flight attendants with civil rights law from the dawn of Title VII to the final decision in Diaz v. Pan Am. In this light, I treat the Diaz case as an important precursor to future queer equality victories, as it limited social conservatives’ use of homophobia to block gender-based civil rights and prevent the inclusion of gays and lesbians in mainstream society.

This chapter examines the general principles that underlie an employer's duty to reasonably accommodate the religious beliefs and practices of its employees. Title VII originally did not provide for accommodation, but in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) first promulgated guidelines, employers were required to accommodate the “reasonable religious needs” of their employees “where such accommodation can be made without serious inconvenience to the conduct of [their] business.” The EEOC later revised its guidelines to provide that accommodation is required whenever it “can be made without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer's business.” In 1972, Congress added a provision for accommodation to Title VII itself that reflected the EEOC guidelines. This chapter considers how “reasonable accommodation” and “undue hardship” were addressed by the Supreme Court in the 1977 case of Trans World Airlines, Inc. (TWA) v. Hardison. It also discusses the the EEOC's revised guidelines concerning reasonable accommodation, undue hardship, and de minimis cost.

Chapter 4 (keyword: time-shifting) outlines industrial users’ contributions to the development of videocassettes before “the” format wars between VHS and Betamax. It argues that the key terms for cassettes were not simply “Whatever. Whenever,” but “Whenever. Whomever. Wherever.” Rather than promise freedom from the broadcast schedule, this triadic promise of flexibility responded to industrial concerns with employee management in an era when the temporal demands on worker time were becoming more complex (whenever), when workforces were becoming more diverse (whomever), and when companies were growing more expansive (wherever). Tracing the pursuit of whenever-whomever-wherever as a management strategy through a series of three case studies—8mm cartridge projectors (1961–1970s), CBS’s EVR (1960–1971), and Sony’s U-matic (1961–1980s)—this chapter also reveals how businesses drew on workers’ pleasurable associations with domestic television and transformed the home into an exhibition site for corporate communications—in both instances, intensifying claims to employees’ nonworking time.

We begin with a snapshot of the world we hope to leave behind. While it may not be necessary to reiterate the reasons why transformation is needed for most readers—who, as we noted in the Introduction, may be only too familiar with the challenges presented by our current systems of care—we think it useful nonetheless to establish a point of departure. We also strive throughout this volume to make our ideas concrete through the use of stories derived from our own experiences, putting a human face on what might frequently appear to be abstract or idealistic concepts. In our experience, and in our previous publications (e.g., Davidson, Stayner, et al., 2001), there has been very little about mental health concepts of recovery that are either abstract or idealistic. In fact, we have consistently stressed the everyday nature of recovery (Borg & Davidson, 2007), fi nding it embodied and exemplifi ed in such mundane activities as washing one’s own dishes, playing with a child, or walking a dog. We strive to continue this concrete focus in what follows, alternating our exposition of principles and practices with descriptions of real-life examples from our practice. This not only is our own preference in teaching and training but was strongly encouraged by the reviewers of an earlier draft of this book. We are happy to oblige. Passage of legislation such as the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 held great promise for individuals with disabilities, especially in relation to their opportunity to participate fully in all aspects of community life. Unfortunately, it is now widely recognized that the implementation of these acts for persons with serious mental illness lags far behind parallel efforts in the broader disability community, with expectations for expanded access and opportunity largely still to be realized (Chirikos, 1999; Fabian, 1999; Hernandez, 2000; Wylonis, 1999). In response to this national tragedy, several recent calls have been made for radical reforms to the mental health system. The Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health, for example, called for mental health services to be “consumer oriented and focused on promoting recovery” (DHHS, 1999, p. 455).

This chapter recounts the successful effort by a multi-racial group of 19,000 men and women at the Newport News shipyard to form a union with the steelworkers union in 1978, and a brutal strike in 1979 in which the workers fought for a union contract. The civil and women’s rights movements clearly fed the union fire in this organizing campaign.

The conclusion argues for the radical mutability of gender, but also offers a criticism of identity politics focused on difference. Identity politics, the author argues, presents a set of assumptions based on available notions of significant difference that tend to reinforce the hierarchical and binary structures of oppression that they claim to resist. Such a politics, defined by the co-mingling of binary and oppositional identities, tends to distract from real structures of disparity in the name of promoting difference.