The History of the National Organization for Women (NOW)

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

On this week's episode, we're looking at the history of the National Organization for Women, NOW. On December 14, 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10980, establishing the President's Commission on the Status of Women. The Commission had been proposed by the highest ranking woman in the Kennedy administration, Esther Peterson, the Assistant Secretary of Labor, and director of the United States Women's Bureau. Chaired by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the Commission culminated in an October, 1963 report that recommended policies that would help women achieve equality in education and employment. Many states instituted their own commissions on women, and the state commissions began to meet annually. The third of these conferences of state commissions was held in Washington, DC on June 28 to 30th, 1966. A group of representatives there was frustrated that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, EEOC, wasn't enforcing the Title Seven prohibition on employment discrimination on the basis of sex. That group met in writer Betty Friedan's hotel room to determine a strategy to make progress. At the impromptu meeting, Friedan and organizer and attorney Pauli Murray, argued that what they needed was an independent national civil rights organization for women. Not everyone in the room agreed. But by the next day, June 30, when they learned that the conference had no authority to pass even advisory resolutions, or to offer critiques of the EEOC, 28 of the women at the conference, were convinced that they needed their own organization, and the National Organization for Women was founded, with each member paying $5 in dues. A few months later, in October, 1966, NOW held its organizing conference, again in Washington, DC. Although only 30 of the by then 300 charter members attended the conference, the event was productive. They elected a slate of officers, including Friedan as president, and EEOC Commissioner Aileen Hernandez as executive vice president. Hernandez was elected in absentia and against her wishes. At the conference, they also adopted a Statement of Purpose written by Friedan, that read in part, "We organize to initiate or support action, nationally or in any part of this nation, by individuals or organizations to break through the silken curtain of prejudice and discrimination against women, in government, industry, the professions, the churches, the political parties, the judiciary, the labor unions, in education, science, medicine, law, religion, and every other field of importance in American society." In the statement, NOW also pledged to hold itself independent of any political party,  "in order to mobilize the political power of all women and men intent on our goals." By 1967, NOW had adopted bylaws that allowed chapters to form under the umbrella of the national governing body. At their 1967 convention, NOW adopted a bill of rights for women, that included among its objectives, the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and the establishment of publicly funded childcare. And it was the first national organization to advocate for the legalization of abortion. NOW went to work all over the country, demonstrating and boycotting. One of its first major actions was the organization of a women's strike for equality on August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage in the United States. Friedan had called for the action as she stepped down from the presidency of NOW in March of that year, but it was up to the chapters to plan the events. The Women's Strike for Equality was a huge success, as women demonstrated in 40 US cities, and even picketed at US embassies in other countries. In New York City, the NOW chapter organized a massive march of 10,000 people on Fifth Avenue, reminiscent of the suffrage marches decades earlier. Far more women participated in the day's actions than were members of NOW, and within weeks of the event, NOW membership swelled, growing by 50%. By 1974, NOW boasted 40,000 members in over 700 chapters. As early as its Bill of Rights, now had supported the Equal Rights Amendment or ERA, which had first been introduced in Congress in 1923. Finally, the US House approved the amendment in 1971, followed by the US Senate in 1972. 35 of the necessary 38 states ratified it by January,1977. Eleanor Smeal, who was elected president of NOW, by a 526 to 66 vote at the national convention in 1977, focused NOW's attention on ratification of the ERA, using all of the tactics in their arsenal, including letter writing campaigns to lawmakers, protesting, and phone banking. But with steep opposition from conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, and her "Stop ERA" campaign, they were quickly approaching the five year time limit on ratification without any additional states coming on board. In 1978, NOW organized a massive march on Washington, held on July 9, as temperatures soared into the mid 90s. With over 400 chartered buses bringing in participants, the march drew an estimated 100,000 people, many of them dressed in all white in a nod to the suffragists. They were marching to demand an extension of the ERA deadline. It worked, and by October, Congress had passed a joint resolution extending the deadline to 1982. However, as we've discussed previously on this podcast, no new states ratified the ERA before the second deadline. It wasn't until 2017, that another state, Nevada, would ratify. NOW is still active, and reports on its website that it has, "hundreds of chapters and hundreds of 1000s of members and activists, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia." Still a nonpartisan organization, NOW's six priority issues, are reproductive rights and justice, ending violence against women, economic justice, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, and the constitutional guarantee of equality for women. Joining me to discuss the history of NOW is Dr. Katherine Turk, Associate Professor of History, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of, "The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America."

Hi, Katie, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Dr. Katherine Turk  10:59  
Thanks so much, Kelly. It's a pleasure to be here with you on Unsung History.

Kelly  11:02  
Yes, I am so excited to talk about the history of NOW. So I want to hear a little bit about how you got interested in this topic, how you came to write this book?

Dr. Katherine Turk  11:13  
Absolutely. So, you know, my interest in women's history goes back a long way, probably all the way to childhood, where I was really close with older relatives, my grandmothers and even great grandmothers, and saw an arc of change across my family, for the women whom I knew, where the possibilities for their lives, the opportunities for education and careers and more egalitarian marriages were increasing over time. And I grew up in outside of Chicago with a mother who was an attorney for decades there and saw how she was able to really advance in a career that she would not have had much of a chance to, to do that in if she was just one or two generations older. And for my sisters and me there was I saw nothing but opportunity and potential for our futures. And so just sort of thinking about, you know, how did those changes happen, at least in my family, but also for many other families across the nation, and what could explain it. I got to Northwestern University as an undergraduate in the early 2000s, and was really interested in women's history in Chicago, in especially the 1960s and 70s, which just seemed like a time that was a little bit far away, but also familiar and got interested in feminist activism in Chicago. And quickly gravitated towards the NOW chapter, National Organization for Women chapter in the city, which was doing a lot of work around employment, opening up employment opportunities for women and making work, feminized work, work associated with women more fair and better valued and better paid. And as a college student, thinking about a career, thinking about what I would want to do with my life after my education, those kinds of questions seemed especially important to me. And I also know reading histories of feminism, I noticed that the coasts, especially the East Coast, got a lot more attention than the Midwest, which is my my home and the place I think about a lot. And so got to graduate school, after writing a senior thesis about the Chicago chapter of NOW, and continued thinking about those same questions about how feminists of the 1960s and 70s understood work and used various mechanisms at their disposal to try to make work more fair. And  the dissertation that I wrote as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, became the kernel of my first book, which is about Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and specifically, the sex discrimination provision of that law, which was the first federal law to create gender discrimination as a legal harm and promote gender equality in the workplace. And I looked at how different groups of women, but also men, organized around expansive ideas of equality beyond just treating men and women the same in a race to the bottom in a neoliberal workplace, which is ultimately what happened. But there were a lot of folks who, who were trying to make things turn out differently. And I, as I worked on that book, I thought a lot about the National Organization for Women, which was a really key force in getting Title Seven enforced for women. And just wish there was a broader history of NOW that I could consult. But I realized that in writing "Equality on Trial" and sort of dipping into one piece of NOW's archive, I was doing what other scholars had had done for decades, which was to dip into one piece of NOW's massive archives, and then generalize from there about what the organization did and what its significance was. And so, as I was thinking about a second book project, I thought, "Well, why don't I write that book? Why don't I write that history of NOW?" Because I had a lot of burning questions about this organization. What was it? Why did so many different kinds of women, but also men decide that they not only that they could work together across their differences towards a common agenda, but actually, that they needed to? This was a fascinating question to me. And I wanted to understand what that organization meant to so many different people over the long arc of its life. So from 1966, when it was founded, up to the present, NOW is still quite active, especially at the state and local level.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:48  
This is a massive project, right? You said that voluminous archives, this is a fairly long stretch of time, and covers the entire country. We'll talk a little bit about the structure of NOW. But how do you approach a project like that, and figuring out, you know, how you're going to write this into a volume, a comprehensible, readable, and it is beautifully readable, book?

Dr. Katherine Turk  16:13  
Thank you. Well, I can tell you how I started out, and quickly realized that I would never finish a project, if I just started from the beginning, a project like this, started from the beginning and went to the present. I went to NOW's main archive, which is at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and just started looking at some of the records from NOW's founding, which were very interesting. But as I looked at the finding aids, just at this one library, the finding aids which describe the the collections related to NOW, just at this one library, I mean, just one of the finding aids was like 400 pages. And that's just a list of all of the boxes of stuff related to NOW. And there were many collections related to NOW at the Schlesinger Library. But there are also collections of NOW chapters, activists, officers all over the country, and probably many that are still sitting in people's basements and attics. And if you're listening, and that's you, please donate those papers to an archive so that researchers can understand all of your important work. So quickly realized that there was just way too much material for me to turn every page across the country and finish finish a book in my lifetime that would be something you know, anybody wanted to read. That would you know, an encyclopedic volume of the hundreds of NOW chapters and the arc of its life from beginning to present would be, I mean, would would not fit in one volume. It would be huge, huge undertaking. So instead, I started thinking about, you know, what could what could make this project manageable, and what could make it readable. And one of the points I wanted to make in this project was that women's activism was part and parcel with their lives, and that their, their identities as feminists, their engagement as as feminists, it really, it all stemmed from what happened in their personal lives. And that engaging in feminist activism together, transformed their perspective, and then shifted their personal lives. So I wanted to really highlight the connection between public and private, which for many years, and women's historians sort of analyzed separately or thought about women's private lives and their public lives as distinct spheres. And so that got me thinking about telling the books through characters. So choosing through, I end up choosing three figures who exemplified different ideas for what NOW could be, different reasons for coming to organized feminism. And I also wanted to choose characters who were not founders of the organization. Those 49 men and women who founded NOW in 1966, are all fascinating figures. They all deserve their own biographies and studies, a few of them have gotten that kind of attention, but more should. I was more interested in this and that the next generation of activists who tested whether the idea of NOW, the idea of a civil rights organization that could speak for all women, could actually work. And I wanted to showcase the broad range of people who came from all different backgrounds, but who ended up at NOW, in NOW, together at the same time and tested really different ideas for what feminism could be. So the first person I knew I wanted to write about was Mary Jean Collins, who, whose activism in in NOW against Sears Roebuck and Company, which was one of the largest employers of women in the 1970s and one of the most prominent retailers in the nation and also a notoriously sexist corporation. Mary Jean really spearheaded NOW's campaign against Sears. And she comes from a working class Catholic family. She was contending with her lesbian identity in the years that she was very active in NOW, and she worked really hard to make the organization more streamlined in targeting specific employers and argued that organizing women across their class and race differences against common enemies such as Sears Roebuck and Company could help build a united movement. So Mary Jean really brings the focus on class, the Midwestern perspective, that I found really compelling and missing from histories of feminism that I had read. And I also wanted to showcase the women of color who were present in NOW from the beginning, although we can talk about some of NOW's struggles to fully incorporate women of color and their specific agenda items into the center of NOW's feminism. And from it from that second generation of NOW members, there was the right person to select was was apparent right away as I started looking at who was doing what in the organization in the 1970s. And that was Aileen Hernandez, who comes from a working class African American family in Brooklyn, went to Howard University, and becomes a labor organizer on the west coast before she is tapped as one of the first five commissioners on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was the new federal agency created by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to interpret and police Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act, which is the workplace rights piece of the Civil Rights Act. And Hernandez accepts this appointment, moves to DC, and quickly realizes that most of the other commissioners are much less interested in pursuing and understanding the slew of women's complaints of discrimination that are coming into the agency. She finds herself really frustrated that the most of the men on the commission are just, you know, they seem to be apologizing for the sexist employers. They're not taking their mandates seriously when it comes to making the workplace more fair for women. So she leaves the EEOC, and eventually becomes NOW's second president from 1970 to 1971. And she remains in the organization up almost until the end of the decade, and she's really concerned about about making NOW a more welcoming and inviting home for women of color, for lesbians, and she's she's often trying to bring women of color into NOW and convince them that they should be part of NOW, while also trying to educate the white women in NOW about why they need to perhaps shift their perspectives. And rather than pursuing kind of gender first feminism, they need to place the concerns of women of color and lesbians and other working class women, other sort of marginalized groups among women, place all of those concerns on an equal playing field at the center of NOW's agenda, as opposed to at the end of a long laundry list of concerns, that NOW has to be a racial justice organization, just as much as it's an organization that's about gender justice, that these two causes are completely linked. And the third character that I decided to focus on is quite different from the other two. Her name is Patricia Hill Burnett, and she was a housewife and portrait artist living in a posh neighborhood of Detroit. And she was a former beauty queen, and thought a lot about her aesthetics and appearances. And she was also a Republican. So she worked really hard to make NOW continue to be a nonpartisan organization, that she wanted NOW to be a home for more, you know, sort of wealthier women like her, whose politics were a little bit more moderate, and also make NOW a home for Republicans. So the idea being that neither party was that great for women. And that NOW should be a kind of independent force that pressured both parties to take women's concerns seriously. So the book looks at how each of these three women try and seek to shape NOW in terms of her specific vision for what it should be, and what a feminism for all women could be. And for a while NOW is open ended enough and flexible enough and grassroots driven enough that it can accommodate all of these visions, but the book also shows how, by the by the mid 1980s, all three of these women have left NOW and don't see a home for them themselves in that organization anymore, and see that the that the organization has really become something else.

Kelly  24:38  
Well, I want to talk about this flexibility in the beginning. And so you mentioned earlier that there's a ton of chapters of NOW. It's a membership based organization. And I found that flexibility of what the chapters were doing very interesting. I, in my mind connected it a lot to the beginnings of Indivisible, because that's something that I saw grow, you know, in real time. So could you talk a little bit about that, the the way as it's growing that, that it really does allow people in different places to focus on the things that are important to them.

Dr. Katherine Turk  25:13  
Yeah, so NOW's founders, NOW is founded initially at the Third Annual Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women. And so women, it's mostly women, who have been our delegates from their states, who come to Washington, DC in June, 1966, as part of the same conference, and it's at that conference, that they decide that they need to withdraw from that, that gathering and form this independent group of women. But by virtue of who is there at that conference, the founders of NOW are primarily more more middle class, they're mostly white, they're relatively elite. They're older, because they they're established in their professions, whether in the labor movement or in advocacy, or in education, journalism, health care. So they're diverse in terms of their interests. But they're they're a more uniform group in terms of demographics, although there are some very important exceptions to what I just said. And their their vision is for a relatively elite pressure group of well positioned women around the nation to push government officials to enforce and expand upon women's civil rights. And that's all well and good, but very quickly, NOW surpasses that vision. And as soon as it's Betty Friedan who asks public relations executive Muriel Fox to start the first chapter of NOW in New York City, the first local chapter, that very quickly, local chapters sprang up all over the country, and the national officers have to figure out how to accommodate and incorporate these chapters, and they want dues to be low, so that the cost of participating is not prohibitive, although it is very expensive to be an officer of NOW, because there's not a lot of money coming in. So the folks who can actually serve as officers come from a more relatively elite background, at least at first. But joining NOW is very easy. You can you just need to find nine other people where you live, who can pay, I think it's $5. And then it's $10. And that's your, that's your chapter. And you can work on pretty much anything you want. One of the challenges that NOW faces as an organization is that they don't have a lot of money, they know they don't want to be reaching out to the government or foundations, or corporations to bring in grants. They're going to be independent, and so they're completely reliant at the beginning upon membership dues, which they also want to keep low. And so the national officers are all doing other things, too. They have careers, they have families, they can't work on NOW full time. And so the chapters are really driving the metaphorical car for the first close to the first decade. So that's kind of for the for grassroots, or feminists at the grassroots, who want to express their specific vision of feminism, through NOW, the lack of national coordination, which was not intended at the beginning, but just becomes a fact of the organization that the officers are quite, you know, busy with other things, the local chapters are really kind of at the forefront of defining what NOW feminism is. NOW is a home for a quite variable and flexible and an even  incoherent vision of feminism. So you have chapters working on, I mean, really any feminist issue they could think of and chapter officers will recount that, you know, someone finds a NOW meeting, they come to the meeting, and often NOW, the NOW chapter, the first thing they would do is put a number in the local telephone book so that they're easy to find. So you call the number you figure out where the meeting is, if you have a specific concern, you can bring it to that meeting. And most likely, the leader of your chapter will say, "All right, great, let's do that. You can work on it. You're the taskforce leader, and maybe find a couple other folks to help you. And this will be a priority of our chapter." And so the kind of brilliance of NOW in those early years, was that many women found it. Well for many women, especially outside of the big cities, that didn't have really dense feminist communities already, NOW was kind of the only game in town. So you could make it what you wanted to make it, make it an advocacy group that worked for your community. So you could do that locally. But you also benefited from the prominence and the name of a national organization that was increasingly winning results for women, especially in the law and policy and getting coverage in national media outlets that especially after the women's strike for equality in 1970, which kind of puts NOW on the map, as far as a mass movement, that coverage was less derisive and dismissive and more serious. I do want to make sure to say at this point when we're talking about the kind of openness of the the sort of late 60s to mid 70s years, that who got to define NOW's agenda was always an open question. And one of the biggest challenges for the organization was making sure trying to make sure that the same social hierarchies that structured American life outside of NOW were not replicated inside of the organization. And while there were always women of color there, and successive generations of women of color came to NOW and demanded that their concerns be at the top of the agenda along with the others, they were not always heard and not always taken seriously. And the book the book talks about NOW's successive struggles to, to become to live up to its own stated goal to be an advocacy group for all women. And the same there's there's a similar story for lesbians in NOW who, win a lesbians or lesbian rights revolution in 1971, and many of the more like homophobic leaders of NOW either leave or they they start to shift their perspectives. But for lesbians, too, it is an ongoing struggle to have lesbian rights and lesbian concerns placed at the top of the agenda along with the other things that NOW is doing. So I don't want to leave listeners with the impression that everything was perfect. Until the mid 1970s, there were there were big struggles.

Kelly  31:39  
So then let's talk about where it goes from this place where it's this flexible organization, and especially as it increasingly is focused on the Equal Rights Amendment and sort of going all in on that. So can you talk a little bit about that, that transformation, and there's some serious political infighting that goes into a lot of fighting? We won't be able to talk about all of it, I'm sure. But you know, Can you can you talk a little bit about the the shape of that struggle?

Dr. Katherine Turk  32:09  
Absolutely. So the the lack of resources, lack of national resources, which did allow the chapters to bubble up and develop in all of these interesting and disparate ways, is also a problem that the national leaders are thinking about and trying to understand what to do about. And they noticed this pattern, that it's very difficult to see a way out of that the more NOW grows at the grassroots, and the more members they get, the more clerical work, the more like administrative work they need. So they need people to do the unglamorous tasks of maintaining membership lists, getting the newsletter out, mimeographing flyers, keeping track of dues, and NOW can't afford to pay for that work, even as one of their stated missions out in the world is to boost the value and pay of feminized work. So it's a real problem that they think about different ways to address, but it feels like an intractable one. And at the same time that NOW is struggling with labor and its own labor, the broader political context in the mid 1970s, is shifting rapidly, that the Equal Rights Amendment, which was a goal of some feminists starting in the 1920s, and now comes out front in 1967, endorsing the Equal Rights Amendment, along with full abortion rights, NOW is working with other feminist organizations to push it through Congress, which happens in 1972. The ERA really sails through both houses of Congress with relatively little opposition. It's a bipartisan affair, and feminists are confident that it will be ratified and added to the Constitution very quickly. But that's not what happens. The ERA advocates win a couple dozen states very quickly, but they need 38. And right around 30 states, it starts to stall. And the other problem that they have is that lawmakers, or members of Congress, saddled the ERA with a time limit, with an expiration date in the states, which is very unusual. Most amendments can take as long as they take to be ratified. But as part of a sort of last minute wrangling in Congress, ERA gets saddled with this deadline. So they have until 1979 to get to 38 states, and the last couple of states that they need are the more conservative states, more moderate states. Many of them are states where feminists are the least sort of densely populated, and the least organized and that's where they had to go. And so it starts to look by 1974-75, like the ERA really might expire. And so the ERA has long been one of NOW's many priorities. It was never the only thing NOW was doing, even in terms of the law, like NOW was for the ERA, but also for other legal provisions that could help make equal rights more broadly beneficial. But the leaders of NOW in 1975-76, realize that they feel themselves to be kind of at a crossroads that they could either, you know, the keep doing all of the creative things that they're doing at the grassroots and remain a kind of multi issue, freewheeling, robust organization with multiple, multiple priorities. Or they could they could buckle down and try to put more energy into one, this one goal, ratifying the ERA to try to get it over the finish line in time. So that's what they do. So they decided to move the organization to DC. They hired salaried officers, and they implemented a new fundraising strategy. And that strategy was borrowed from the right, borrowed from the most conservative among Republican activists, and it's called direct mail. And what direct mail does is it sends targeted letters to, to pre identified and potentially very interested recipients who are identified, but from voter rolls. So folks who vote you know, who voted for this or that candidate who live in a specific area get targeted by direct mail letters under the strategy, which are, by definition focused on a specific issue. And they're designed to rile up their reader about this issue, and then get them to do something. And typically, that is to give money. And NOW very quickly found using direct mail that they could, they could raise unprecedented sums around the ERA that people that there were many, many ERA advocates around the country who wanted to do something about trying to get that passed. And that direct mail was a way to, to get them to open up their checkbooks and give give money around the ERA. So this influx of cash, of millions of dollars, certainly brings a lot of resources into NOW, desperately needed resources. But it also starts to change the character of the organization. And in a couple of ways, one of the ways is that it puts the national leadership in charge of the money that previously chapters would would take in modest dues and remit a portion of those dues to the national office. But direct mail flips that structure on its head, and all the money comes to the national office. And the chapters are sort of trying to get a little piece of it, but they have to ask for it. And it also the direct mail ERA strategy makes NOW much more top down and focused on one issue. So the chapters become more like arms, or, you know, pieces components of the broader ERA strategy. And there are fewer ways that you can participate in an organization that's mostly focused on one issue. So that's lobbying, knocking on doors, writing letters, giving money, and NOW starts to talk about the ERA as like the one right, the one victory that will underscore everything else that it's trying to do, that will make everything else easier. But there are dissenters within the organization, especially women of color, and lesbians, who are, you know, very prominently point out that equal legal rights will benefit some women more than others, and that for, for women who are not straight and white and middle class, full legal equality is necessary, but it's not enough. And in years when the right wing is intensifying its attacks on queer people, when, especially after 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, when women of color are really targeted by some of his budget cuts, these constituencies point out that they need NOW's help on their specific issues, too. And the ERA is not going to solve the problems that are only becoming more pressing for them. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:17  
The subtitle of the book is, "The Organization That Transformed America." So I wonder, you know, we've been talking in some way about the struggles and a little bit about the failures of NOW. But I wonder if you could talk about how, as an organization, it really did help transform the country?

Dr. Katherine Turk  39:34  
Yeah, so NOW, a couple of aspects of NOW really differentiate it from other feminists, individuals and groups that were on the scene in the so called second wave years. And the first thing I would point to is the structures. These women were organized, and they had, they had an organization to, to work together through because that organization was founded by women from the civil rights and labor movements who understood how to set up a democratic organization that was intended to outlive any one generation of members, and to endure the most brutal fights you could imagine. And the book, you know, explores some of those fights that members had through NOW that they were able to work out through NOW, because the organization had had structures in place. The other thing that differentiated NOW is its open ended mission, that NOW was intended to be an organization that would stand up for and advocate for all women and their allies of other genders. And that, that that mission was flexible enough that women who found that their priorities were not being served well by NOW, could come to the organization, come to the leaders and say, "We're women too, and you need to take our priorities seriously too, and include us, too." So think those two things really made NOW different. And I mean, in terms of how NOW transformed America, and then we can look to all the legal changes that happened in the 1970s, the revolutions in reproductive rights, economic rights, rights to education, rights to work, that NOW was, if not at the forefront, then working in coalition with groups and people who, you know, won those victories, or at least advanced them much closer than they had been before. NOW was a productive force on the feminist landscape even for people who disagreed with it, or who you know wanted to form different organizations that worked sometimes in tandem sometimes in tension with NOW. But even NOW's critics benefited from NOW being there. Even conservative women, I think you could argue that there would be no Phyllis Schlafly. There would be no organized sort of mass of political politicized conservative women without NOW to organize against, and the book shows that. I mean, Schlafly arguably set up her network of conservative women in to be kind of NOW's polar opposite. And so I think you, you could confidently say that she would not have become what she was when she did without NOW. NOW also changed countless women's lives. And people who maybe never joined NOW still benefited from having it out there, asserting, you know, asserting women's rights, asserting their dignity. NOW chapters in every US city and town issued press conferences and stood up to employers and public officials who were not used to meeting any resistance at all. And one of the most surprising things actually, about the early years of NOW that I found in researching and writing this book is that they really didn't face that much opposition in the very beginning, because they were pushing up against people and entities that that had never been pushed. And they found that they could actually get a lot done by just offering a different perspective, or pointing out that the law or you know, just sort of human decency required them to do something else. I mean, certainly, though, I mean, NOW helped to produce a feminism, a mainstream feminism that continued to prioritize the concerns of straight white middle class women. And one of the legacies of that era is that inequalities among women have continued to deepen and expand. And the book highlights places in NOW's history where that could have been otherwise, where NOW's leaders and members could have done more to stand up for the full community of women and refuse to accept partial victories or, you know, improvements that helped some while leaving others behind. So that's a piece of the transformation too. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  43:53  
So, there is so much more in this book that we won't get a chance to talk about. Can you tell listeners how they can get a copy?

Dr. Katherine Turk  44:01  
Absolutely. So the book is available at the Ed McMillan's website available at independent bookstores such as Women & Children First in Chicago, Flyleaf Books here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I live. But wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, you name it, you can find it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  44:21  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about? 

Dr. Katherine Turk  44:25  
The book ends with an epilogue that I wrote, after I thought that we were ready to go to press with the Supreme Court's handing down of the Dobbs opinion, which undid 49 years of constitutionally protected abortion rights in this country. And I think one thing we can draw from NOW's story is how important it is to have a mainstream feminist organization that has that has become almost a permanent fixture seemingly a permanent fixture on the feminist landscape, and has endured through times of great promise and potential for feminism, but also through the dark times. And you can look at the the tragic rollback to gender rights in this country and the threats to many more and see feminists organizing at the grassroots oftentimes through their NOW chapters and pushing back. And so while NOW has been an imperfect vehicle, and its history is full of all of the great things that they did, but also all of the mistakes that that they made, it still matters that NOW is here and NOW will continue to be here.

Kelly Therese Pollock  45:40  
Katie, thank you so much for speaking with me. I love the book and I really enjoyed speaking with you.

Dr. Katherine Turk  45:45  
Kelly, thank you so much. It was wonderful to talk with you.

Teddy  46:20  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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