Betty Friedan scribbled NOW on a paper napkin

Person: Betty Friedan
Lived: 1921–2006
Field: Women’s rights
From: American

The story

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned sex discrimination in employment under Title VII, and a new federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was supposed to enforce it. In practice the commission paid little attention to women's complaints, and employers went on discriminating in hiring and pay. Women's rights advocates worried that without a pressure group of their own, something like an NAACP for women, the new law would mean little.

In June 1966 women attending the Third National Conference of State Commissions on the Status of Women in Washington, D.C., tried to pass a resolution urging the commission to carry out its legal mandate. When they were barred even from doing that, a group gathered in Betty Friedan's hotel room to form a new organization. Friedan, already famous as the author of The Feminine Mystique, scribbled the acronym NOW, for National Organization for Women, on a paper napkin.

Twenty-eight women became founders that June, among them Friedan, the lawyer and activist Pauli Murray and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Another 21 women and men joined as founders at an organizing conference in October 1966. With Murray, Friedan wrote NOW's statement of purpose, adopted on October 29, 1966. It rejected the assumption that a woman must choose between marriage and motherhood on the one hand and serious participation in work or the professions on the other, and called for concrete action to secure equal opportunity.

NOW began as a gathering of about three hundred women and men, mainly professionals. Friedan served as its first president, and under her the organization fiercely advocated the legal equality of women and men. It pressed for enforcement of laws against job discrimination, campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, child care and paid maternity leave, and in 1969 Friedan and other members staged a protest that helped end men-only weekday lunches at New York's Oak Room.

From a napkin in a hotel room, NOW grew into the largest feminist organization in the United States. Today it has around 500,000 members and 550 chapters in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and it continues to campaign for women's equality through law, politics and public advocacy.

Why it matters

NOW became the largest and one of the most effective advocacy groups for women's equality in the United States.

About Betty Friedan

Author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), which named ‘the problem that has no name’, and co-founder and first president of the National Organization for Women.

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Betty Friedan

1921–2006 · Women’s rights

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