Jon Weiner Papers regarding Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears Roebuck
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Historical/Biographical Note
In 1979 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed an anti-discrimination action against Sears Roebuck & Company. The complaint covered patterns of sex discrimination between 1973 and 1980. It was the last of the major corporate sex bias cases to be litigated by the Commission, and the only one to not be settled out of court.
Central to Sears' arguments was the expert testimony of Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor of history at Barnard College, and a writer in women's studies. To counter her statements that women didn't want the high-commission sales jobs that were at issue in the case, the EEOC called on Alice Kessler-Harris, a professor of history at Hofstra University, and the author of several books and articles on women's work. Their opposing testimonies reached beyond the courtroom, stirring a vigorous debate throughout the labor history and women's history disciplines, and promoting extensive discourses in academic journals as well as panels at historians' conferences.
A judgment on the case was handed down by District Court Judge John Norberg in January, 1986-a decisive victory for Sears Roebuck.
Scope and Contents
The documents in this collection are the research files of Jon Weiner who wrote The Nation article "Women's History on Trial," September 7, 1985. Aside from a few press clippings 1984-1986, all the documents in this collection are legal records of the EEOC v. Sears case from 1985-1986, when the controversy between historians Rosalind Rosenberg and Alice Kessler-Harris came to the force of the trial.
Included in the collection are trial transcripts, depositions, briefs, and Judge Norberg's opinion and order as well as Sears' extensive billing for the costs of the case. These records constitute only one linear foot and so are arranged in the approximate chronological order as they were received from the donor, Jon Weiner.
The collection is remarkable not only for its documentation of the court proceedings on this landmark case, but also for the expert testimonies of the two historian witnesses. Each provides a valuable historical discussion on the nature of women's work and employment opportunity, and each is carefully argued and thoroughly documented.
This collection is important for researchers into the history of equal employment opportunity as well as for more general readers of women's history. The Rosenberg/Kessler-Harris debate constitutes a significant delineation of theories on working women, and reviews the history of women's work in the USA. It probes patterns of corporate sex bias as well as legitimate corporate programs for equal opportunity. Finally, because the historians' opposition generated such a lively controversy within the discipline, there is some basic material here on the uses of historical research in public policy.
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Conditions Governing Access
Materials are open without restrictions.
Conditions Governing Use
Copyright (or related rights to publicity and privacy) for materials in this collection, created by Jon Wiener was not transferred to New York University. Permission to use materials must be secured from the copyright holder.
Preferred Citation
Identification of item, date; Jon Weiner Papers regarding Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Sears Roebuck; WAG.050; box number; folder number; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Donated by Jon Wiener, 1986. The accession number associated with this gift is 1986.043.
