Caroline Davis was an activist union leader who became one of the first officers of the National Organization for Women (NOW). She was elected NOW’s first Secretary-Treasurer at the organizing conference in October 1966.
Labor Background
Caroline Dawson Davis was born in 1911 and raised in a pro-union family. She lived in Kentucky and Indiana, where she began working in the auto parts plant that also employed her father during the 1930s. By the 1940s, Caroline Davis had helped organize the plant, and in 1943 she was elected vice-president of her local union in Elkhart, Indiana.
Caroline Davis became the president of the union a year later, in 1944, when the male president was drafted to fight in World War II. She was one of many women to hold union leadership positions during the 1930s and 1940s. Other union activists of that era include Mildred Jeffrey, Myra Wolfgang and another NOW co-founder, Dorothy Haener.
A Leader in the Days “Before” Feminism
As president of Local 764 in Elkhart, Caroline Davis was even featured in a Life magazine profile in June 1947, although the article introduced her and continually referred to her as “Mrs. Herschel Davis.” She and her husband were both active in their unions, although they sometimes disagreed about union politics. According to Life, he was more radical than she was.
Caroline Davis eventually led the Women’s Department of the United Auto Workers (UAW), working there from 1948–1973. She fought against mass layoffs of women during the 1950s. She also sought to eliminate the separate male and female seniority lists, which inevitably led to either men getting all the highest paying jobs or women losing their jobs to men who had less seniority.
Although some people remember the 1950s as a time when women in the U.S. were relegated to becoming suburban housewives, there were many working women, and women had been union activists for decades. Leaders such as Caroline Davis were already fighting for a workplace free of sex discrimination and making progress for women’s job security.
Understanding People Through Psychology
Caroline Davis was an avid reader, although she had to interrupt her education to work full time. She was interested in Sigmund Freud and psychiatry, and she told Life magazine that she used psychology in her work as a union leader. She also said that she could sometimes get what she wanted, when all arguments failed, by acting “like a woman.”
However, Caroline Davis was a powerful negotiator who achieved a great deal for her union, working on multiple contracts, retirement and health insurance benefits, wage increases and the elimination of piece work.
Labor in Conflict With NOW
As the first Secretary-Treasurer of NOW, Caroline Davis remained a part of the UAW. The union did not always see eye to eye with NOW on employment equality issues. Some labor activists opposed the Equal Pay Act and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). They did not want to eliminate the protective labor laws for which previous generations of feminists had fought, such as laws that limited the number of hours women could work.
Caroline Davis was on the side of NOW. She had been arguing for more than a decade that protective legislation worked against women in a union, for example by denying them lucrative overtime work. Caroline Davis said that protective labor laws violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The courts eventually agreed with this labor leader, who spent many decades working for equality.