By Staff Reporter, Miranda Owen.
Gender issues have always been fascinating to historian and professor Amy French. When she was taking law classes, she came across the Supreme Court case Goesaert v. Cleary. Her textbook did not discuss the case thoroughly, which led her to research the issue on her own and discover what is considered one of the most extreme cases of gender discrimination in American history.
The Michigan law prohibited women in the state from being licensed bartenders inside cities with a population of 50,000 or more people. The only way around the law was if a woman’s father or husband owned the bar. This inspired French to teach her own students about it the case during the Humanities Division’s monthly “Brown Bag” discussion.
“History is a lot like a treasure hunt,” says French, “But there is no map.” French’s treasure hunt lead her to Anne Davidow Seger, the daughter of an early 20th-century barmaid Anne Davidow.
Seger’s mother was a firm believer that “worker’s rights are women’s rights”. During this period, legislation was passed that prohibited women from bartending in cities with a population over 50,000 people. This greatly diminished women’s ability to support themselves and their families, and made bars less profitable for female bar owners, because they were forced to hire men.
Davidow saw this as a way for men to monopolize bars and enact class discrimination. She believed that the 14th Amendment should apply to women as well as men.
However, judges from both the Michigan Court and the Supreme Court saw female bartenders as a “grave social problem”. They believed that allowing women to work in bars would corrupt them. Davidow’s responded to this by stating, “I cannot imagine a woman being less careful of the morals of her daughter than her father would be”.
Although Davidow lost her case, bartender’s unions eventually allowed women to join, and in 1976, the Supreme Court admitted that had made the wrong decision. Although the decision was repealed quite late, it was still a step in the long journey toward equality for women.
