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.

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.