05/18/2026
A woman who fought for equality.
We are still fighting for an end to s*x discrimination.
Tell your members of Congress to affirm and publish the Equal Rights Amendment.
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In 1965, the men running the new federal equality commission were throwing the s*x discrimination complaints in the trash.
Aileen Hernandez watched them do it.
Former union organizer.
Labor relations expert.
The only female commissioner in the building.
Appointed by the President of the United States.
Completely outnumbered.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a massive, sweeping piece of legislation. At the last minute, the word "s*x" had been added to Title VII, the section outlawing workplace discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was constructed in Washington D.C. to enforce these new rules.
The agency opened its doors on July 2, 1965. It was given a budget, a building, and a mandate to investigate violations. Hernandez arrived expecting to do the work she had done for years in the California labor movement. She knew how to audit a payroll. She knew how to spot a rigged contract.
But the letters arriving in the mailroom weren't from factory floors or garment districts. They were coming from airports.
By the end of 1965, nearly a third of all complaints filed with the federal government were from female flight attendants.
Airlines in the 1960s enforced brutal, highly specific regulations on their female employees. The manuals were precise. A woman was required to step on a scale before every single flight. If a supervisor determined she was two pounds over her assigned weight limit, she was grounded without pay.
The corporate grooming handbooks dictated the exact shade of lipstick. They mandated the height of the heel.
If a woman started wearing glasses, she was fired.
If she got married, she was fired.
If she reached her thirty-second birthday, she was immediately terminated.
The airlines argued that youth and availability were essential to the job. The male flight attendants, called pursers, operated under a completely different set of rules. The men had no weight limits. They could wear glasses. They could marry. They could work until they retired at sixty-five.
The women filled out the federal paperwork. They mailed it to the only agency built to help them.
The first stack of complaints arrived. The male commissioners read them and laughed. They called the grievances a joke.
The second stack arrived. The men debated whether the airlines were justified in wanting attractive, single women to serve drinks to businessmen. They took no formal action.
The third stack arrived. The men ignored them entirely.
At the time, federal civil rights enforcement was viewed strictly through the lens of race, which dominated the national consciousness. The inclusion of s*x in the Civil Rights Act had actually been introduced as a legislative tactic by opponents hoping it would make the bill so ridiculous that it would fail. When the law passed anyway, the men running the regulatory agencies treated the women's provision as a clerical error. It was on the books, but they felt no obligation to enforce it.
Hernandez sat in the executive meetings. She listened to her male colleagues joke about the "bunny problem." She watched federal officials—men mandated by law to protect American workers—publicly dismiss the women as frivolous.
The New York Times published an article quoting a government official asking what would happen if a man applied to be a Pl***oy bunny. This was the level of seriousness the commission applied to women losing their livelihoods.
Hernandez realized the system was functioning exactly as the men intended.
She had a choice. She could stay in the corner office. She could collect the federal salary. She could be the decorative woman at the executive table, writing polite memos of dissent that would be filed away in carbon-copy triplicate and ignored.
Or she could leave the table.
The decision was not simple. Walking away meant giving up the only lever of federal power women possessed at the time. She had a staff. She had a title. She had the ear of the administration. But staying meant endorsing the inaction. It meant putting her name on a process that existed only to protect the airlines.
She did not write another internal memo. She stopped trying to convince the men beside her that the law actually meant what it said.
On October 10, 1966, Hernandez drafted a letter of resignation. She typed it out in her office. She handed it to the administration.
She did not leak it to the press immediately, allowing the bureaucratic silence to stretch. The government expected her to exit quietly. They assumed she would return to California and fade into the background.
She didn't.
She timed her official departure for the following month. She walked out of the federal building and immediately joined a small, unfunded group of women meeting in a Washington hotel room. The group included a writer named Betty Friedan and a handful of organizers.
They were forming a new organization. If the government refused to do the work, they would do it from the outside.
She gave up the presidential appointment. She abandoned the secure federal salary and the prestige of the capital. She lost her inside access. The government closed ranks behind her. Her former colleagues continued to hold their meetings, collect their paychecks, and ignore the stacks of paper piling up in the mailroom. She traded a corner office for a grassroots fight with no funding.
They expected her to be a symbol. They didn't expect her to read the mail.
She became the executive vice president, and later the second president, of the National Organization for Women. The airlines were eventually taken to federal court and forced to drop the marriage bans, the weight limits, and the age restrictions. The women kept their jobs.
The EEOC building still stands in Washington. Today, the agency processes tens of thousands of s*x discrimination claims every year. The initial complaints from the flight attendants are boxed away in the federal archives. The paper is yellowing.
Aileen Hernandez: the commissioner who refused to be complicit.
Source: Aileen C. Hernandez.
Verified via: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 archives, National Organization for Women historical records.
(Some details summarized for brevity.)
