by Ruth Rosen
In 1966, the radicalism of this challenge to American political culture was not yet fully grasped by Betty Friedan, by young feminists in the women’s liberation movement, nor even by their opponents. Although feminists would long debate whether to emphasize women’s difference from or similarity to men, neither choice fully embraced the reality of women’s lives. Women were both like and unlike men. Any society that didn’t honor women’s ability to bear and raise children was clearly violating their rights to fully participate in society. Any society that equated equality with women living as men could not be viewed as a genuine democracy. A true “gender democracy” would have to honor the life of the family as much as it honored the life of work. Men would no longer be the frame of reference. But nor would women. The revolutionary thrust of feminism required an extensive expansion of democracy at work, in the home, in public, in private. Nothing less would do.
On October 29, 1966, NOW convened its official founding conference in Washington, D.C. Of the three hundred women who became charter members, 120 came from the Midwest, which once again highlighted the indigenous female activism in this region of the nation. Of these three hundred members, only thirty could be present to adopt the “Statement of Purpose” and new bylaws. This small convocation elected Friedan its first president and former EEOC commissioners Aileen Hernandez and Richard Graham its vice presidents. NOW’s “Statement of Purpose” declared that women’s demands for equality were “part of the world-wide revolution of human rights now taking place within and beyond our national borders.” The writers were determined to avoid the kind of separatism just then emerging in black activist organizations, so the first sentence of the “Statement” began, “We men and women,” and called for “a fully equal partnership of the sexes. . . .” It also enumerated the dramatic changes that had created the basis for a new surge of demands for women’s rights: an extended life span of seventy-five years and the development of technology that reduced the importance of muscular strength.37
NOW’s statement challenged American society to heed women’s grievances. One of those issues was that despite the optimistic social programs of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society, the economic status of women had actually declined. By 1966, the wages of full-time year-round women workers averaged only 60 percent of those of men, a drop of 3.6 percent in a decade. Black women, burdened by the double discrimination of sex and race, earned even less. In addition, although 46.4 percent of American adult women now worked, 75 percent of them labored in routine clerical, sales, or factory jobs or as household workers, cleaning women, and hospital attendants.38
In all the professions, women were also losing ground. Though they constituted 53 percent of the population, they represented less than 1 percent of federal judges, less than 4 percent of lawyers, and only 7 percent of doctors. In addition, since World War II, men had been replacing women in professions once considered “women’s fields”—as administrators of secondary and elementary schools, librarians, and social workers. This hidden and “dangerous decline,” NOW’s “Statement” declared, had to be “recognized and reversed by ‘the power of American law’ [and the] protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to the civil rights of all individuals.” Token appointments were unacceptable; the government would have to stop discriminating against women in all areas of public life.39
The “Statement” pointedly criticized the United States for lagging behind other industrialized countries in providing the kinds of social welfare—health care, child care, and pregnancy leave—that supported women’s domestic and work needs. Women “should not have to choose between family life and participation in industry or the professions.” Nor should “all normal women . . . retire from jobs or professions for ten or fifteen years, to devote their full time to raising children, only to reenter the job market at a relatively minor level.” The “Statement” questioned the “assumption that these problems are the unique responsibility of each individual woman, rather than a basic social dilemma which society must solve.”
Contrary to later accusations that feminists ignored the issue of child-rearing and denied women the choice of remaining full-time mothers, NOW’s “Statement” called for a nationwide network of child care centers, as well as national programs to provide retraining, after their children grew up, “for women who have chosen to care for their own children full-time.” The “Statement” also urged recasting traditional gender roles within marriage, proposing that “a true partnership between the sexes demands a different concept of marriage, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities of home and children and of the economic burden of their support.”40
During NOW’s first few years, the press gave the new organization only slightly more respect—and far less attention—than the sexier young women’s liberation movement that sprang to life in 1967. To report NOW’s first convention, the New York Times placed an article headlined “They Meet in Victorian Parlor to Demand ‘True Equality’” right beneath exciting new recipes for turkeys and stuffing. The Washington Post headlined its report “Neo-Suffragettes on the March: Mrs. Friedan Is Fighting for Women’s Equality NOW” and ran it next to an ad for a “fashion clearance” and below photographs of diplomatic wives greeting each another.41
NOW also suffered from meager resources. For three years, the organization lacked an office of its own. Nevertheless, NOW members made do, much as those in the civil rights and students’ movements had, by borrowing any resources to which they had access. The new secretary-treasurer, Caroline Davis of the United Auto Workers, gave NOW a valuable “free ride” by allowing it to use the UAW’s facilities—especially its precious WATS phone line,* as well as copy and mimeograph machines. Betty Friedan’s apartment in New York City served as the center of policy-making and organization. Fearful of centralization, NOW quickly developed local chapters to counterbalance the power of a national headquarters. Local leadership identified their own priorities and projects, while the national leadership made policy and coordinated national actions.
With these slim resources, NOW plunged into action. Predictably, its first official act was to pressure the EEOC to prohibit segregated “help wanted” advertising. Such a division of ads, NOW argued, ensured that women would not be able to enter the higher-paid and more skilled occupations reserved for men. To dramatize the issue, NOW members picketed the New York Times in August 1967. In December, NOW declared a National Day of Demonstration against the EEOC, mobilizing women to picket local EEOC offices. After tipping off the television networks, small groups of NOW members, in an attempt to demonstrate the worthlessness of sex-segregated want ads, dumped bundles of newspapers in front of EEOC local offices. In August 1968, after years of protracted struggles with the government and the newspaper industry, the EEOC finally barred segregated want ads.42
Contrary to conventional wisdom, NOW members—although mostly white and middle class—targeted the problems of ordinary working women, not those of professional women. The assault on segregated classified ads, for instance, benefited working women who wanted to enter the skilled blue collar jobs formerly designated as men’s work. NOW also waged a successful campaign against airlines that forced stewardesses to resign once they married or turned thirty-two. This requirement had produced windfall profits for the airlines that fired wave after wave of stewardesses, without having to give them raises, pensions, or Social Security payments. “Sex discrimination,” observed Friedan, “was big business.”43
NOW next pressed the government, as well as federal contractors and subcontractors, to ban sex discrimination—again, something that did not particularly benefit professional women. In the fall of 1965, President Johnson had signed an Executive Order banning racial (but not sexual) discrimination in businesses and institutions that received funds from the government. Two years later, NOW leaders began lobbying President Johnson for similar treatment. He responded by adding “sex” to the new Executive Order. The results were far-reaching: any unive
rsity or company that received federal contracts now had to ensure fair employment to women as well as to racial minorities.
During its first year, NOW also pushed for enforcement of Title VII by the EEOC, so that minority women in federal poverty programs would get equal attention and so that child care expenses would be deductible. In its first court action, for which it established its Legal Defense Fund, NOW supported southern factory women who sued Colgate-Palmolive and Southern Bell Telephone for denying women jobs—an action that had been prohibited by state laws. All these campaigns were aimed at improving the lives of ordinary working women.
EARLY RIFTS
NOW certainly experienced squabbles and factions among its members. Tensions between local chapters and national headquarters sometimes erupted into public fights. Political disagreements frequently hid personality clashes. But such tensions were inevitable. How could one organization represent the political and social needs of all women? At its 1967 convention, when NOW proposed a new Bill of Rights, the young organization faced the fragility of feminist solidarity. The Bill of Rights, presented to members for ratification, called for dramatic changes in American society. Although labor still opposed it, NOW members embraced the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. To improve working women’s lives, the Bill of Rights included enforcement of laws banning sex discrimination in employment, maternity leave, equality in Social Security benefits, tax deductions for home and child care expenses for working parents, and child care centers. In addition, it also included the demand for equal and unsegregated education, equal job training opportunities and allowances for women in poverty, and the right of women to control their reproductive lives.44
Unanimous approval proved impossible. The Equal Rights Amendment immediately faced opposition from trade union women who wanted to extend protective legislation to men before they ended it for women. Their opponents argued that industry and business routinely used state protective laws to deny women workers promotions or overtime pay. Fighting sex discrimination case by case, state by state, could take another fifty years, whereas a constitutional amendment could wipe out institutional sex discrimination with one law. To women who enjoyed or aspired to professional status, the ERA seemed perfectly logical and necessary. In Betty Friedan’s words, “It was a guarantee that would take precedence over those state laws now ‘protecting’ women from good jobs and pay, that could not be rescinded at a mere whim of Congress or state legislature. With it, the courts low and high, state or federal, could no longer rule that women were not ‘persons’ under the U.S. Constitution as they have done so frequently over the years.”45
But that was not the view of labor. When the 1967 convention voted to endorse the ERA, Caroline Davis, respecting the UAW’s wishes, resigned as NOW’s secretary-treasurer, which caused the organization to lose its precious union mailing and printing resources. But just one year later, the UAW reversed its position and came out in favor of the ERA. Soon after, the entire American Federation of Labor—Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO), recognizing the wisdom of extending protection to all workers, changed its position and also supported the amendment. Many feminists breathed a sigh of relief. NOW and labor unions, part of the same political base, would not be locked in a political battle over the ERA.
A woman’s right to an abortion created an even greater schism in NOW’s ranks. Nevertheless, after extensive debate and some abstentions from Catholic sisters, this part of the Bill of Rights also passed. A few women, certain that such a controversial issue would offend potential sympathizers, left NOW to found the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL) in 1968. Dr. Elizabeth Boyer, the Ohio lawyer who led WEAL, targeted three areas of sex discrimination—employment, education, and de facto tax inequities. Described as “the far right wing of the women’s Mafia,” WEAL cultivated a ladylike style to attract more conservative women to join the struggle for women’s rights. One of WEAL’s liveliest chapters, for example, blossomed in Iowa, where, according to Boyer, “you couldn’t sell ‘women’s liberation’ if you gold-plated it.”46
The rights of lesbians—not included in the original document—proved to be another divisive issue, though one that only surfaced several years later, after the founding of the gay liberation movement. In 1969 and again in 1970, Betty Friedan had labeled lesbianism a “lavender menace” that threatened to taint the women’s movement. Angry at being “purged” by her assaults, many lesbians left the organization. In 1971, after years of hiding in the organizational closet, the remaining lesbians demanded that NOW pass a resolution recognizing their civil rights. In response, NOW did so, declaring 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; therefore we acknowledge the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism.” In 1973, NOW established a Task Force on Sexuality and Lesbianism, and passed a resolution that, by defining homosexuality as a civil rights issue, repositioned the granting of rights to lesbianism and sexual preference as but another liberal extension of civil rights. It declared that the organization should “actively introduce and support civil rights legislation to end discrimination based on sexual orientation . . . in housing, employment, credit, finance, child custody, and public accommodation.”47
Though NOW waged many of its high-profile battles in the courts, its members also educated, marched, picketed, and protested to publicize feminist issues. A broad range of national task forces publicized the need for more child care centers, the repeal of laws that prohibited abortion, more equitable tax and divorce laws, Social Security reform, nonsexist textbooks, and an end to sexual stereotypes in advertising and television programs. To advertising agencies that created insulting images of women, they presented their “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” award. On Mother’s Day 1967, NOW attempted to organize demonstrations nationwide for “rights, not roses.” At the exact spot where a group of suffragists had chained themselves to a White House fence fifty years earlier, activists ceremoniously dumped a huge pile of aprons. Nothing reflected the rejection of the fifties housewife more starkly than that trash pile of aprons.48
Many of NOW’s public demonstrations targeted sex discrimination in public spaces. After a particularly “tedious lawyerish” discussion at a NOW national board meeting in New York City in 1968, a few members adjourned to the Men’s Bar and Grill at the Hotel Biltmore to calm their nerves. There, the bartender informed them that he could not serve female customers. After alerting the media, twenty women moved to stage a sit-in at the bar. The bar decided to close for twenty-four hours. But NOW members picketed anyway in full view of network cameras. To celebrate Valentine’s Day in 1968, Betty Friedan led an invasion of the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Soon afterward, New York feminists invaded that epitome of the male sanctuary, McSorley’s Old Ale House. Such demonstrations had their cumulative impact. Gradually, individual states began banning sex discrimination in public accommodations.49
A certain wilder spirit of protest began to enter NOW, thanks in part to younger women who by 1967 were creating loosely affiliated small groups collectively known as the women’s liberation movement. Though NOW and women’s liberation groups often joined forces for specific protests, efforts to form coalitions between the two branches of the movement frequently failed. The demons that haunted the daughters of the fifties never fully disappeared. Meredith Tax, an early activist, realized how much the female generation gap influenced the culture of the young women’s liberation movement:
My friends and I thought of NOW as an organization for people our mother’s age. We were movement girls, not career women; NOW’s demands and organizational style weren’t radical enough for us. We wanted to build a just society, not get a bigger slice of the pie. Besides, we were generational sectarians; we didn’t trust anybody over thirty.50
Influenced by the antihierarchical spirit of New Left groups, as well as by the theatrical thrust of the c
ounterculture, the younger women’s liberation movement was not particularly concerned with proving their respectability; on the contrary, they wanted to shake things up as much as possible.
Meanwhile, NOW officials became increasingly worried that the movement would appear too undisciplined or unrespectable. In March 1968, an article by Martha Lear on the new women’s movement appeared in the New York Times Magazine. Its title, “The Second Feminist Wave,” christened the movement with a name that connected it to “first wave” feminism in the suffrage movement.51 Lear’s article also reported that some members were preparing a “black comedy” to dramatize the EEOC’s reluctance to take sex discrimination seriously. Twelve women, dressed for cocktails, planned to crash an EEOC hearing, make a commotion, get thrown out and possibly arrested, and then meet with the press to explain their grievances. One of the large, home-lettered signs was to read, “A Chicken in Every Pot, a Whore in Every Home.” After some deliberation, some NOW members, worried that the press might headline the demonstration as “Prostitutes Picket EEOC,” decided on a different image: two secretaries chained to their typewriters.
The “Valerie Solanas affair” intensified some of the conflicts between older and younger feminists in New York’s NOW, where tensions were already high. In 1968, a disturbed artist in New York’s avant-garde art scene wrote—by herself—a document she called the “SCUM Manifesto,” an acronym for the Society for Cutting Up Men. Her manifesto not only blamed men for every evil in the world, but also argued for their collective annihilation. Shortly afterward, Solanas shot and wounded pop artist Andy Warhol, whom she blamed for her own marginality. She was arraigned for attempted murder and consigned to psychiatric observation.