2010/09/01 by Katherine Turk · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #American History and Culture #Race, History, and American Society #Labor Movements and Unions
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/97.2.399
openalex publication_date 2010/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
At the May 1975 Sears, Roebuck, and Company stockholder meeting, the brewing tension between the National Organization for Women (now) and the retail giant came to a head. Years of Chicago-based grassroots activism against Sears, the nation's second-largest employer of women, had created a highly organized and rapidly expanding national antidiscrimination campaign. Chicago now members turned Sears's annual stockholder gathering into a media event. On the sidewalk below the massive Sears Tower, feminists held an impassioned rally and gave interviews to sympathetic journalists. Inside, stockholders and Sears workers witnessed the now board member Mary Jean Collins direct critical questions to the Sears chief executive officer, Arthur Wood. Armed with supporting statistics and surrounded by fellow now activists, Collins accused Sears of systematically excluding female employees from all but the lowest-paid retail and clerical jobs. She told meeting attendees that their failure to meet now demands could result in a financially crippling lawsuit against their corporation. “I think we've managed to put equal opportunity on Sears's agenda,” Collins triumphantly told the Chicago Tribune.1