SEX SEGREGATION, ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY, AND ROBERTS V. U.S. JAYCEES

.514 Introduction Thirty-five years ago, the Supreme Court confronted the issue of sex segregation in membership organizations.3 The U.S. Jaycees-a national organization with roughly 300,000 members-defended its freedom to associate as a men's organization against the state of Minnesota and the Minneapolis and St. Paul Jaycee chapters which had admitted women.4 The U.S. Jaycees policy dictated that women be granted an inferior class of membership without opportunities for leadership positions or awards. What was dynamic and synergistic in Roberts was not the Jaycees' constitutional interests, but rather women's statutory rights to economic opportunity and to equal membership.12 The landmark employment protections in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had become entrenched in legal and popular culture.13 Title VII intersected with and fueled ordinary women's entry into civic membership organizations.14 The public, social movement actors, and eventually the judiciary understood public accommodations equality as congruent with and central to women's economic opportunity and career prospects.15 The link to employment led decision makers to see the Jaycees as analogous to unions and firms, whose rights to choose their associates went unprotected by the First Amendment.16 As Part I describes, within a decade, the public discourse and, governmental and judicial perspectives shifted from pervasive and unexamined acceptance of a sexsegregated public to the integration of clubs like the U.S. Jaycees.17 As Part II argues, a social movement of working women, local Jaycee chapters, and feminist groups connected full membership in civic and commercial organizations to rights to employment equality.18 Through litigation, media, and advocacy, the link between landmark employment law protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and membership in Jaycees was cemented.19 As Part III contends, the litigation campaign asserted dual harms in the U.S. Jaycees' treatment of women. [...]women's second-class membership maintained their subordination, creating a gender hierarchy within the organization and contributing to society-wide hierarchies.20 Justice О ' Connor's noted concurrence and Justice Brennan's majority opinion respectively adopt these frames.21 Justice O'Connor's concurrence best reflects the mainstream understanding of public accommodations equality as essential to economic opportunity and fair play in the labor force and of the U.S. Jaycees as primarily commercial.22 W