Videotape collection of the National Organization for Women, 1977-1988

The largest feminist organization in the United States, NOW began when a group of representatives attending the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women (June 28-30, 1966) became angered by their unsuccessful attempts to force the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce federal regulations ending sex discrimination. Meeting with Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique and a guest speaker at the conference, the invited group of 28 women and men decided to establish a civil rights organization for women. The group included Gene Boyer, Kathryn Clarenbach, Mary Eastwood, Dorothy Haener, Anna Roosevelt Halsted, Esther Johnson, Pauli Murray, Inka O'Hanrahan, and Caroline Ware. On the last day of the conference, they drafted their statement of purpose: "to take action to bring women into full participation in the main-stream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men."

A temporary steering committee publicized the group's purpose and recruited members. By the time the organizing conference was held October 29-30, 1966, NOW had more than 300 members. It quickly grew into a group with tens of thousands of members and hundreds of state and local chapters. For the first two years there was no central office; officers performed their NOW-related duties and kept their files at home or in their workplaces. NOW established an office in Washington, D.C., in 1968, and moved it to New York City in 1969, where it operated from two consecutive apartments of NOW Executive Director Dolores Alexander. Subsequently, NOW split the headquarters into three offices, setting up and maintaining operations in New York City (Public Information Office, 1973-1976), Washington (Legislative Office, 1973-1976), and Chicago (National Office, 1973-1976) before centralizing all functions in one national headquarters in Washington, D.C., in January 1976.

From its inception, NOW worked on numerous issues affecting women's lives. The NOW Bill of Rights for 1968 laid out those areas it considered of highest importance:

NOW set up task forces and committees to address these and other issues. In the 1970s, NOW began to devote more and more time to passage and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was finally passed by Congress on March 22, 1972, almost 50 years after it was first introduced. In 1977, NOW declared ratification of the ERA to be their "top national priority," and in February 1978 declared a "State of Emergency...in which [we] turn all [our] resources to the ratification effort and to extension of the deadline for ratification an additional seven years." The United States Congress, however, only approved an extension of three years, three months, and nine days. In spite of a massive national campaign, carried out by NOW organizers and members in states across the country, the ERA expired in 1982, three states short of ratification. NOW has continued to work for passage of a federal amendment, and for enforcement of the various state ERAs.

n the 1980s and 1990s, NOW also devoted its resources to campaigns for reproductive rights; to end violence against women; to eradicate racism, sexism and homophobia; to influence judicial selection; and to promote equality and justice in our society. According to its website (URL: http://www.now.org), NOW "achieves its goals through direct mass actions (including marches, rallies, pickets, counter-demonstrations, non-violent civil disobedience), intensive lobbying, grassroots political organizing and litigation (including class-action lawsuits.)" For additional information on NOW's history, see the Scope and Content notes below, and brief histories in #1.1.