National Organization for Women (NOW)

I

Introduction

National Organization for Women (NOW), largest feminist organization in the United States. NOW’s key objectives are to increase educational, political, and employment opportunities for women; secure abortion and reproductive rights for women; end all violence against women; and abolish discrimination based on sex, race, and sexual orientation. NOW campaigns for equality among women and men by engaging in grassroots organizing, demonstrations and protests, litigation, lobbying, and nonviolent civil disobedience. Since the 1970s, the organization has been the most vocal advocate of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would guarantee the same rights for both sexes under the Constitution of the United States. Based in Washington, D.C., NOW has more than 550 chapters throughout the 50 states and in the District of Columbia.

II

Early Years

NOW was founded in June 1966 by a group of 28 women at the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women, a committee established by President John F. Kennedy to evaluate women’s rights in the United States. Among the founders of NOW was Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), a book often regarded as a catalyst for the women’s liberation movement. Friedan became the organization’s first president.

NOW was formed as the women’s rights movement and other political and social movements of the 1960s reached their peak in number and intensity. It quickly became involved in a wide range of issues of special concern to women. The organization’s original mission statement read: “The purpose of NOW is to take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.”

The organization’s first priority was to increase employment opportunities for women and to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination based on sex, race, color, religion, and national origin. NOW successfully lobbied against protective labor legislation (laws that prohibited the employment of women in certain occupations) and sex-segregated advertising (newspaper employment advertisements that showed preference for one sex, thus excluding women from some higher-paying jobs). In 1969 NOW helped win a U.S. Fifth Circuit Court ruling that women could not be barred from jobs that involved heavy lifting, such as those in the construction industry. The ruling was the first to prohibit sex discrimination in employment based on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

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In addition to focusing on employment opportunities for women, NOW members started to campaign for abortion rights in the 1960s. In 1967 NOW became the first national organization to call for the legalization of abortion. Four years later, it became the first national women’s organization to support equal rights for lesbians and gay men. NOW also started a campaign in the early 1970s to recognize the value of all women’s work, both in the home and in the workplace, in response to criticism that NOW focused only on the rights of professional middle- and upper-class white women.

III

Equal Rights Amendment

To ensure economic equality and other rights for women, NOW launched a major campaign in the 1970s to pass an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution. The ERA would provide equality for both sexes under the law, making unconstitutional any laws that grant one sex different rights. Although the Congress of the United States approved the amendment in 1972, it failed to become part of the U.S. Constitution when only 35 of the necessary 38 states voted by 1982 to ratify it. However, NOW’s high-profile effort in the ERA made it one of the country’s most influential women’s rights groups. NOW’s membership increased from about 3,000 people in 1970 to 100,000 people in 1979, and the organization began operating with multimillion-dollar annual budgets. NOW continued to lobby for the ERA throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In the mid-1990s, the organization added new provisions to the proposed amendment to guarantee reproductive rights for women and equal rights for lesbians and gay men.

IV

Electoral Politics

After the ERA failed to pass in 1982, NOW’s leaders implemented a new political strategy. Instead of working to politically influence people already in government positions, NOW would work to elect more women’s rights advocates to political offices. In the early 1980s, NOW’s leaders created two political action committees. The National Organization for Women’s Political Action Committee (NOW/PAC) was created to support candidates for federal offices, and the National Organization for Women’s Equality Political Action Committee (NOW Equality PAC, or NEP) was formed to back candidates vying for state and local offices, ranging from school boards to governorships. The committees are not affiliated with any political party. NOW also worked to register more women to vote during the 1980s. In 1984, in part because of NOW’s efforts, more women voted during an election than men (61 percent to 59 percent) for the first time in U.S. history.