The National Organization for Women

The National Organization for Women was born of frustration. When the federal agency charged with enforcing the ban on sex discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act refused to take it seriously, a group of activists led by the writer Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique had helped ignite a new feminism, decided women needed a civil rights organization of their own. Founded in 1966, NOW became the largest and most visible feminist group in the country and the engine of the movement often called the second wave.

NOW fought on many fronts at once. It pressed employers and the government to end discrimination in hiring and pay, campaigned relentlessly for the Equal Rights Amendment, defended access to contraception and abortion, and pushed for the equal treatment of girls and women in education that Title IX would help secure. Its statement of purpose demanded that women take a full and equal partnership with men in every corner of American life.

The organization was not without its internal struggles. It wrestled painfully over the place of lesbian members, whom Friedan once dismissed as a lavender menace before the organization came to embrace gay rights, and its members argued over how far and how fast to push on issues like abortion. These debates mirrored the wider tensions of a movement trying to speak for all women at once.

From mass marches to courtrooms to statehouses, NOW helped transform American law and culture over the following decades, even as its signature goal, the Equal Rights Amendment, fell short of ratification. It remains the country's largest organization of feminist activists, a durable institutional voice in a struggle over women's rights that reaches back to Seneca Falls and forward into the present.