WOMEN GETTING ORGANIZED...NOW

It is called NOW, and that’s no coincidence. Clearly, its members have long been tired of being told to wait, to be patient, that their day will come. NOW stands for National Organization for Women, and it is the largest organization of feminist grassroots activists in the United States today.

The activists in NOW weren’t “born yesterday”. The organization was founded half a century ago, at the height of the sixties protest era by civil rights firebrands Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray.

Friedan (1921-2006) would gain a well-deserved reputation as a leading US writer, activist and feminist, whose book, The Feminine Mystique, was considered by many to have sparked the second big wave of feminist activism in the turbulent 20^th century. She would continue to be a major voice for women’s rights throughout her life, although she would step down as the president of NOW in 1970, after serving at the head of the organization for a four-year term. She would go on to help establish the National Women’s Political Caucus, and would become a leading proponent of an Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. She also later founded the National Association for the Appeal of Abortion Laws.

Betty Friedan

The author of six books on women’s issues and despite remaining a salient figure in the feminist and equal rights movements throughout her life, however, Friedan would eventually be seen as a moderate in the view of the most radical sectors of feminism, due to her insistence  that attacking men in general and non-working women was counterproductive and wrong. She considered those who did so to be radical or extremist elements that were not helping the feminist cause.

Born in Baltimore and raised in Durham, North Carolina, Pauli (Anna Pauline) Murray (1910-1985) moved to New York City while still a teen. She studied English at Hunter College, receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1933. She first drew attention to herself in the civil rights movement in 1940, when she was arrested for defying racist segregation laws in the state of Virginia, where she sat in the section of a public transport bus reserved exclusively for white people.

It was after that arrest that Murray decided to delve deeper into anti-discrimination activities by joining the socialist-leaning Workers Defense League. Driven to do more in defense of civil rights, she decided to become an attorney. She enrolled in Law School at Howard University—an historically black college.

Pauli Murray

It was there that she would draw a parallel between racism and sexism, protesting what she saw as the school’s male bias against female students enrolled there. In an effort to typify this kind of discriminatory behavior on the part of the university, she referred to it as “Jane Crow” inequality. The term was a word play on the infamous “Jim Crow” laws long imposed in the US South as a means of ensuring racial segregation between whites and blacks.

Ironically, despite graduating at the top of her class at Howard, Murray would be denied her request to do post-graduate work at famed Harvard University. The denial was based, also ironically, on gender discrimination. Undeterred, Murray went on to receive a master’s in law from the University of California, Berkeley. She would later receive her doctorate in law from the prestigious Yale Law School in 1965, making her the first African American (male or female) to receive such a degree from that Ivy League university.

Even before earning that honor, Murray had served on US President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women. And long before the Kennedy administration appointment, she had also received praise from Thurgood Marshall (at the time Chief Counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and later Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court) for a study she authored entitled States' Laws on Race and Color. Marshall referred to the work as “the bible” of the civil rights movement.

Today, NOW has some 550 chapters throughout the 50 US states and in Washington DC. In its early years, the group’s work was inspired by the ineffectiveness of the so-called Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, created to enforce employment discrimination clauses contained in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Friedan and Murray were very swiftly joined by 29 other founding members, many of them familiar faces from the civil and women’s rights movements.

The frustration that led to the founding of NOW was over the fact that while there was new anti-discrimination legislation in place after the hard-fought civil rights battles of the 1950s and ‘60s, and thanks to the commitments of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to that cause, it was clearly not being broadly enforced. This was particularly true in the case of women, since employers were still hiring women for jobs equal to men’s but at lower pay and with lesser benefits, in clear violation of the terms of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination by covered employers (those with 15 or more workers on their payroll) on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

NOW’s mission statement of 1966 said that “the time has come to confront, with concrete action, the conditions that now prevent women from enjoying the equality of opportunity and freedom of choice which is their right, as individual Americans, and as human beings.” And their underlying aim was to create an organization like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) but to defend all women’s rights. And as such, NOW ended up being one of the first advocacy groups in the US to specifically target the problems of African American women.

By 1971, the group had also become a major proponent of lesbian rights, stating that “a woman’s right to her own person includes the right to define and express her own sexuality and to choose her own lifestyle.” Later, NOW passed a resolution stating that forcing lesbian mothers to stay in unhappy marriages or to live a secret existence in an effort to keep from having their children taken from them was clearly an injustice. The organization offered legal and other types of support to lesbian mothers in custody disputes and later created a Task Force on Sexuality and Lesbianism to spearhead action on these issues.

NOW should also be recognized for its major role in seeking to secure ratification by 38 out of the 50 states of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the US Constitution with passage by both houses of Congress. It was instrumental in that amendment’s receiving mutual backing from other major civil, labor and feminist rights organizations including the League of Women Voters, the national headquarters of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), the Unitarian Universalist Association, the powerful United Auto Workers (UAW) trade union, the National Education Association and the National Committee of the Democratic Party (DNC), among others.

Despite all of the hard work that has gone into this process, however, NOW has yet to see the amendment passed into law. The ERA remains today a “proposed amendment”, despite having first been introduced into the US legislature in 1923, by the hand of renowned suffragettes Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman, long before the existence of NOW and during the first wave of the feminist rights movement. The version re-introduced into Congress nearly a half-century later by Democratic Congresswoman Martha Griffiths was indeed passed by both houses. But in order for it to effectively become law, it required 38-state ratification.

By 1978, the ERA had garnered ratification by 35 of the required 38 states. But opposition from a conservative women’s movement—famously led by staunch conservative political activist and attorney Phyllis Schlafly—managed to not only stymy, but also revert the ratification process by four states, that withdrew their original approval, despite overwhelming support for the amendment in Congress and from successive presidents, Ford and Carter. A new deadline was set in 1982 but drew no further ratifications. Last year, however, the state of Nevada became the first to ignore expiration of the 35-year-old deadline and to ratify the ERA, on the 45^th anniversary of its original submission to the consideration of the individual states.

The ERA thus remains a major issue on the NOW agenda. Indeed, it is one without which, despite stunning advances since the sixties, the US cannot be considered to entirely support equal rights for men and women.

In the years since its founding, NOW has been led by some major figures in the civil and feminist rights movements: union, civil rights and women’s rights firebrand Aileen Clarke Hernandez; feminist author and social activist Wilma Scott Heide; Karen DeCrow, a US attorney, writer, feminist activist, and even-handed equal rights supporter, who famously threw her support behind equal rights for men in child custody disputes; Eleanor Cutri Smeal, a leading feminist, known for her work as a grassroots political organizer and activist who was a founder of the  Feminist Majority Foundation and served three terms as president of NOW; Molly Yard, who initiated her support for feminist issues while serving as an assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt—wife of the longest serving US President Franklin Roosevelt—who served as NOW’s eighth president and, as such, provided a nexus between first and second-wave feminism in the United States; Patricia Ireland, a former flight attendant who famously questioned gender-based discrimination in insurance coverage for the spouses of Pan American Airlines and successfully fought her case before the US government before going on to study law and become a major advocate for the rights of poor white and African-American women as well and those of gays and lesbians; Kim Gandy, a former Resident Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who served eight years at the head of NOW before taking charge of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, and current NOW President Terry O’Neill, well-known for her work as a civil rights lawyer and activist, and who has also served at the head of the NOW Foundation and of the organization’s Political Action Committees.

In recent years, NOW has received criticism from the left and right alike. Pro-life supporters, for instance, have been critical of the organization for not lending the same support to anti-abortion feminists as it does to pro-choice activists. And feminists on the left have accused it of being more interested in pushing a liberal political agenda than in approaching the more practical rights issues facing women today.

Be that as it may, NOW remains the largest women’s rights advocacy group in the United States—and, perhaps, the world. And it is hard to imagine many of the social and civil conquests that American women have achieved over the course of the past half-century without the existence and hard work of this organization. It has clearly provided a prime example of women getting organized in their own defense and an inspiration for the formation of similar organizations around the world.