By JANE LATOUR
Palgrave MacMillan
The year was 1977, the Bronx was burning, and the New York City Fire Department, nearly brought to its knees as arson fires and dangerous brownouts tore through the city, was finally given a green light to bring in new recruits after an 11-year hiring freeze.
But there was a catch: for the first time in history, women could apply for jobs with the all-male bastion of the FDNY.
The outcry from unions and the department was immediate and virulent. “Don’t Let a Girl do a Man’s Job,” read some of the protest signs the day the first female firefighters joined the force.
Among them was a young lawyer and marathon runner named Brenda Berkman, who was determined to not to let a little thing like her gender get in the way of what she thought could be a stellar firefighting career. As a young kid growing up in Minnesota, Berkman remembered the “crushing experience” of being kept off the Little League rolls because girls weren’t allowed to play baseball. Decades later, she had a similar reaction when she and 90 other women took the FDNY’s physical fitness test — and failed.
“This was very odd, because I had been training very hard . . . I was in great shape,” Berkman said later. “I thought, ‘This is crazy. You meant to tell me that not one single woman in the entire city of New York is fit to be a firefighter?'”
In fact, the department’s physical test – already a grueling challenge – had been retooled to be even more daunting after the FDNY realized women were coming in droves to apply for jobs. Nearly 500 had taken the written test, and 90 showed up for the physical exam.
Realizing that gender bias was getting in the way of opportunity again, Berkman filed a lawsuit claiming the physical test amounted to discrimination, and her claim, Berkman vs. Koch, polarized an already turbulent city, provoking protests, demonstrations, and for Berkman, multiple death threats.
“Everybody knew my name. My picture had been in the paper. Everyone knew I was a lawyer,” said Berkman. “So that gave them another reason to dislike me. They thought I was Jewish, so that was another reason – another unacceptable group – plus I wasn’t from New York.”
The suit took years to resolve, but the city bowed to the inevitable in 1982 and held 45 spots for women. Berkman’s lawsuit eventually paved the way for subsequent generations of women to join the FDNY. But her four-year-struggle just to get a foot in the door turned out to be the easy part.
Unwanted by many colleagues, disdained by their union and viewed largely as a feminist nuisance by disinterested agency heads, the first female firefighters endured brutal discrimination — and even some physical assaults from male colleagues. When one firefighter was suspended for cutting a female firefighter with a knife, the union found him a job, Berkman relates. Another pioneer, JoAnn Jacobs, among the first black females to join the FDNY, recalled getting “arbitrary” deficiency slips from her male instructors during her six-week probationary period at the training academy. Once she asked an officer to find out why she’d been given a deficiency slip during a ladder scaling class.
“He came back and said ‘No one could remember why they gave it to you so it was torn up,’ ” Jacobs said.
The claustrophobic atmosphere during training was so intense Jacobs took to eating her lunch alone in the locker room rather than risk close contact with firefighters in the cafeteria.
“We were like goldfish in a bowl,” she said.
War stories from Berkman — who rose through the ranks to become a Captain before retiring in 2006 — and Jacobs form the core of this new book, chronicling the legal and social battles fought by women who were shut out of many of the city’s male-dominated and high paying trade and union jobs in the 60s and 70s.
There’s plenty to debate about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — just take a look at last month’s decision from a Brooklyn District judge, who said the FDNY discriminated for years against minorities by using a written hiring exam that “unfairly excluded hundreds of qualified people of color.” The city is expected to appeal that ruling.
Sisters in the Brotherhoods isn’t looking to parse the long-term effects of the Civil Rights movement, but LaTour does offer an eye-opening recounting of how little legal protection women had in the workplace just 40 years ago, and why such legislation was necessary in the first place.