What Was the President’s Commission on the Status of Women?

The President’s Commission on the Status of Women was a federal body created by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to investigate how laws, workplace practices, and social expectations disadvantaged women in the United States. Chaired by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, its 26 members spent nearly two years gathering evidence and delivered a landmark report, “American Women,” in October 1963. Its findings fed directly into the Equal Pay Act, shaped the political ground for sex discrimination protections in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and produced a network of state commissions that helped launch the modern women’s rights movement.

Why Kennedy Created It

Kennedy signed Executive Order 10980 on December 14, 1961, directing the commission to examine discrimination in government and private employment, evaluate federal policies affecting women, and recommend ways for women to participate more fully in national life.¹ The order set a hard end date: the commission would terminate no later than October 1, 1963.

The order called for twenty presidential appointees drawn from public affairs and women’s organizations, plus six government officials serving by virtue of their positions, including the Secretary of Labor, the Attorney General, and the Chairman of the Civil Service Commission.¹ The final 26-person roster included educators, labor union leaders, writers, and members of both houses of Congress.²

Who Led It

Kennedy appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as chair. At 77, Roosevelt brought decades of credibility from her work on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and her long public advocacy for civil liberties.² Her presence signaled that the administration viewed women’s status as a serious policy concern rather than a symbolic gesture.

Esther Peterson, Director of the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor, served as Executive Vice Chair and ran the commission’s day-to-day work.³ Peterson had pushed for the commission’s creation and kept the research agenda focused on concrete recommendations.

Roosevelt died on November 7, 1962, with the work still underway. Kennedy chose not to appoint a replacement, asking Vice Chairman Dr. Richard Lester and Peterson to guide the commission along the course Roosevelt had set.⁴

What It Investigated

The commission split its work across seven technical committees, each assigned a distinct area of American life:²

Education, including whether schools prepared women for professional careers.
Federal employment policies and practices.
Private employment, including hiring, pay, and advancement.
Protective labor legislation, meaning state laws that restricted women’s hours or job assignments.
Social insurance and taxes, including how Social Security and the tax code treated widowed, divorced, or dual-income households.
Political and civil rights, including jury service exclusions and property ownership restrictions.
Home and community, including the availability of childcare.

The committees held hearings, gathered testimony, and analyzed data from government agencies and private industry. Working in parallel, they built an evidence base that cut across employment, law, education, and family life at once.

What It Found

The commission transmitted “American Women” to President Kennedy on October 11, 1963.² The report documented inequality across nearly every area the committees had studied. Women earned roughly 59 cents for every dollar paid to men for comparable work, a gap that could not be explained by qualifications or effort.

Legal barriers were equally stark. Many states still excluded women from jury service, barred them from owning property or a business independently, or denied them legal control of their own earnings.² The report also described a double burden: women were expected to manage full domestic responsibilities while also contributing income, in a country where affordable childcare was scarce, social insurance often failed widowed and divorced women, and the tax code penalized dual-income households.

“American Women” was the first official federal acknowledgment that gender-based discrimination was a systemic national problem rather than a collection of isolated complaints.

What Came Out of It

The Equal Pay Act of 1963

The most immediate legislative result was the Equal Pay Act, signed by Kennedy on June 10, 1963, while the commission was still finishing its work. Codified at 29 U.S.C. § 206(d), the law made it illegal for employers to pay women less than men for equal work on jobs requiring equal skill, effort, and responsibility performed under similar working conditions.⁵ It carved out exceptions for pay differences based on seniority, merit, production quantity or quality, and factors other than sex.

The Act was limited: it covered wage discrimination only for substantially identical jobs, so employers who simply kept women out of higher-paying positions were beyond its reach. But it established in federal law that sex-based pay discrimination was prohibited.

Sex Discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964

The commission also shaped the ground for Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which added sex to the list of protected categories in employment. During House debate, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, a longtime opponent of civil rights legislation, offered an amendment adding “sex” to the bill, likely to make it too controversial to pass.⁶ Representatives like Martha Griffiths, who had long pushed for sex discrimination protections, rallied support instead, and the amendment passed.

The resulting statute made it an unlawful employment practice for an employer to discriminate against an individual in hiring, firing, compensation, or conditions of employment because of sex.⁷ Title VII reached far beyond the Equal Pay Act, covering hiring, promotion, job assignments, and termination. The commission’s two years of documented evidence gave supporters a factual foundation they had not previously had.

Federal Follow-Up Bodies

Three weeks after the commission delivered its report, Kennedy signed Executive Order 11126 on November 1, 1963, creating two new entities to continue the work: the Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women, which coordinated policy across federal agencies, and the Citizens’ Advisory Council on the Status of Women, composed of 17 presidential appointees who provided outside feedback.⁸

State Commissions and NOW

The federal model spread. Within a few years, every state had established its own commission on the status of women to audit local laws and labor practices.² Those state commissions created something the women’s movement had lacked: a formal, government-sponsored network of people documenting sex discrimination and talking to one another about it.

That network became a launchpad. At the third annual meeting of state commissions in June 1966, a group of attendees grew frustrated that the conference was better at studying problems than solving them. Several dozen delegates met in the hotel room of Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique” had already reshaped public conversation about women’s roles. When they could not persuade conference organizers to adopt a more activist agenda, they founded the National Organization for Women over lunch that day. Twenty-eight women paid the first dues.

What It Did Not Endorse: The ERA

One notable absence from the report was a full endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA had been proposed in every session of Congress since 1923, and women’s organizations were divided over it. Labor unions and some women’s groups worried the ERA would invalidate state labor protections that specifically shielded women workers. The commission sidestepped the debate, recommending instead that litigation under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ equal protection principles could achieve the same goals. That position frustrated ERA supporters but reflected the political reality of 1963: the coalition backing the commission’s work included labor interests that would have fractured over a pro-ERA stance.

The commission was designed to produce a report and dissolve, and it did both. The institutional infrastructure it left behind, along with the network of women who met through its work, proved more consequential than any single recommendation.

1
The American Presidency Project. Executive Order 10980 – Establishing the President’s Commission on the Status of Women
2
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. United States President’s Commission on the Status of Women Records
3
U.S. Department of Labor. Esther Peterson
4
The American Presidency Project. Statement by the President on the Death of Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt
5
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Equal Pay Act of 1963
6
National Archives. Women’s Rights and the Civil Rights Act of 1964
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 42 USC 2000e-2 – Unlawful Employment Practices
8
The American Presidency Project. Executive Order 11126 – Establishing a Committee and a Council Relating to the Status of Women