- Person
- Betty Friedan
- Lived
- 1921–2006
- Field
- Women’s rights
- From
- American
The story
In the 1960s newspapers routinely divided job advertisements into separate columns for men and for women, steering women toward a narrow range of lower-paid work. Women were generally channelled into secretarial work, nursing or teaching, and even a top law graduate might be offered only secretarial jobs. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had banned sex discrimination in employment, but the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with enforcing it, was slow to act on women's complaints.
That failure was one of the main reasons Betty Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. With Friedan as its first president, NOW made enforcement its priority. It lobbied for enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first two major legislative victories of the movement, and pushed the commission to stop ignoring sex discrimination claims and to treat them with dignity and urgency.
The campaign produced concrete results. NOW successfully campaigned for a 1967 executive order extending to women the same affirmative action already granted to Black Americans. It also won a 1968 EEOC decision ruling sex-segregated help-wanted ads illegal, a principle later upheld by the Supreme Court. NOW's lawyers also brought the first lawsuit on behalf of airline flight attendants claiming sex discrimination.
NOW's 1967 Bill of Rights set out a wider agenda: the Equal Rights Amendment, enforcement of the ban on sex discrimination in employment, maternity leave rights, tax deductions for child care costs, child day care centres, equal and non-segregated education and equal job training. Under Friedan the organization also lobbied for national day care and paid maternity leave.
Ending separate job listings for men and women may seem a small change, but it opened the whole job market to women applicants and made clear that employers could no longer reserve the best positions for men. Together with the other gains of those years, it helped lay the legal foundations of equal employment that millions of working women rely on today.
Why it matters
Ending separate job listings for men and women opened countless occupations to women applicants and gave teeth to equal employment law.
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.
More about Betty Friedan
- The Feminine Mystique sold over three million copiesBetty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique became an immediate best-seller in 1963, sold well over three million copies and was translated into a dozen languages.
- Betty Friedan scribbled NOW on a paper napkinIn 1966 Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women, writing its name on a napkin in her hotel room, and served as its first president.
- Betty Friedan took on the age mystiqueIn The Fountain of Age (1993), Betty Friedan challenged the view of old age as only decline, arguing that later life can be a time of growth.
- Betty Friedan's survey of classmates changed historyIn 1957 Betty Friedan surveyed 200 of her Smith College classmates and found many suffering from what she called the problem that has no name.
- Betty Friedan led the Women's Strike for EqualityOn August 26, 1970, the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage, Betty Friedan organized a nationwide Women's Strike for Equality and led tens of thousands down Fifth Avenue.
Sources
- Betty Friedan Wikipedia
- Betty Friedan Jewish Women's Archive Encyclopedia
- National Organization for Women Wikipedia
- Women's Strike for Equality Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.