The National Organization for Women is the largest
organization of feminist activists in the United States. NOW has 500,000
contributing members and 550 chapters
in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Since its founding in 1966,
NOW's goal has been "to take action" to bring about equality for all women.
Both the actions NOW takes and its position on the issues are often unorthodox,
uncompromising and ahead of their time.
NOW activists use both traditional and non-traditional means to push
for social change. NOW activists do extensive electoral and lobbying work
and bring lawsuits. They also organize mass marches, rallies, pickets,
non-violent civil disobedience and immediate, responsive "zap" actions.
NOW re-instituted mass marches for women's rights in the face of conventional
wisdom that marches were a technique that went out with the 1960s. A march
in support of the Equal Rights
Amendment drew more than 100,000 people to Washington, D.C. in 1978.
NOW's March for Women's Lives drew
750,000 supporters to Washington, D.C. in 1992, for the largest abortion
rights demonstration ever. In 1995, NOW organized the first mass demonstration
to focus on the issue of violence against
women -- and drew a quarter million people to the Mall. The 1996 March
to Fight the Right in San Francisco drew more than 50,000 activists
to kick off an electoral season focused on efforts to defend affirmative
action.
These ongoing efforts established NOW as a major force in the sweeping
changes that put more women in political posts; increased educational,
employment and business opportunities for women; and enacted tougher laws
against violence, harassment and discrimination. NOW's official priorities
are winning economic equality and securing it with an amendment
to the U.S.
Constitution that will guarantee equal rights for women; championing
abortion
rights, reproductive freedom and other women's health issues; opposing
racism and fighting bigotry against lesbians
and gays; and ending violence against
women.
Women's
Work
One of NOW's strongest concerns is gaining recognition of the value
of women's work, both in the home and the paid labor market. NOW first
popularized the slogan, "Every Mother is a Working Mother" and the phrase,
"women who work outside the home." In the 1970s NOW's lobbying and pickets
of newspapers and the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission forced newspapers to eliminate sex-segregated "Help Wanted"
ads, opening up more diverse and high-paying jobs to women. NOW also pressed
landmark lawsuits against sex discrimination in employment, winning millions
in back pay for women. For example, in the 1969 case Weeks v. Southern
Bell, attorney Sylvia Roberts, NOW's Southern Regional Director, won
a U.S. Fifth Circuit
ruling that it was a violation of Title
VII of the Civil Rights Act to bar women from jobs that involved lifting
more than 30 pounds. This landmark decision was the first to apply Title
VII to sex discrimination. NOW continues to expose and address both the
glass ceiling and sexual harassment employed
women face and the dire situation of poor women in this country.
See http://www.now.org/issues/wfw/ for
information about current campaigns against sexual harassment.
Equal
Rights Amendment
In order to pursue economic equality
and other rights for women, NOW launched a nationwide campaign in the 1970s
to pass an Equal Rights Amendment
(ERA) to the U.S.
Constitution. As part of the campaign, NOW leaders distributed buttons
reading "59¢" to draw attention to the wage
gap; that figure represented the median wage then paid to women for
every dollar paid to men. When the ERA was not ratified by the original
deadline Congress set, NOW succeeded in its campaign to extend the time
limit for ratification by more than three years.
In the course of its high-profile ERA work, NOW became a huge network
of more than 200,000 grassroots activists and began operating with multi-million
dollar annual budgets. Leaders organized two political action committees,
NOW/PAC
and NOW Equality PAC, that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for
pro-ERA candidates.
The work toward constitutional equality for women continues. Part of
NOW's strategy is to build support for a comprehensive amendment for the
next campaign.
For more information, type the words "Constitutional Equality Amendment"
into the search engine on our web
site or connect to http://www.now.org/issues/economic/cea/.
Elected
Feminists
Although NOW activists did not win their first campaign to secure a
constitutional
equality amendment, they established the political structures and strategies
that live on to this day. Most significantly, they began to focus less
on trying to influence men in power and more on electing feminists to replace
them. The seeds sown during the Equal Rights Amendment campaigns gave root
to the current -- and expanding -- crop of women elected officials.
NOW's independent Elect Women
for a Change campaign in the 1992 elections sent an unprecedented number
of feminist women and men to the U.S. Congress and state capitals. NOW
contends that in addition to its strong get-out-the-vote efforts, two major
factors contributed to those electoral victories: the threat to abortion
rights and women's anger over the U.S.
Senate's treatment of law professor Anita
Hill and its confirmation of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
NOW's record-breaking abortion rights march
kicked off its 1992 electoral work.
Just as the events preceding the 1982 and 1992 elections helped motivate
women to run for newly open seats, we are busy filling up the pipeline
for the next big opportunity -- 2002 when re-apportionment again hits congressional
and state legislative districts, opening up new seats for women. NOW's
Victory
2000 campaign aims to play a significant role in that effort. The campaign
calls for electing 2000 feminists by 2000.
The NOW PACs web site address is http://www.now.org/pac/.
Sexual
Harassment and Violence
NOW's work on harassment and violence
dates back to its earliest days. NOW activists organized the first Take
Back The Night marches. They founded hot lines and shelters for battered
women and lobbied for government funding of programs aimed at stopping
violence against women, winning passage of a new ground-breaking federal
Violence
Against Women Act in 1994. Sexual harassment was one of the key issues
that motivated students across the country to form high school chapters
of NOW in the early 1990s. In 1998, NOW activists are organizing in support
of new, comprehensive federal legislation focused on prevention, state-level
programs for poor women who face violence and legal recognition of hate
crimes based on sex and sexual orientation.
Promoting
Diversity and Ending Racism
Since its founding in 1966, NOW has worked to oppose racism and support
diversity.
The late Rev. Pauli Murray, an African American woman and Episcopal minister,
was a NOW founder who co-authored its Statement
of Purpose. Aileen Hernandez became the second president of NOW in
1971, and two years later NOW established its first task force on women
of color. In 1980 NOW instituted an affirmative action program, which today
means that women of racial and ethnic diversity make up one-third of the
organization's national board and 19% of staff. NOW has been a co-sponsor
and organizer of three marches commemorating the 1963 civil rights march
when the late Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. gave his "I
Have A Dream" speech.
In February 1998, NOW organized a Women
of Color and Allies Summit, entitled "Linking Arms in Dangerous Times."
More than 600 activists came to the summit to build coalitions and develop
strategies for eliminating racism, classism and sexism.
NOW works closely with other groups on civil rights, affirmative
action, welfare rights, immigration
reform, bilingual education, migrant worker and tribal issues.
At http://www.now.org/issues/diverse/index.html,
there is more information about NOW's work to eliminate racism.
Abortion
Rights and Reproductive Freedom
In 1967 NOW became the first national organization to call for the legalization
of abortion and for the repeal of all anti-abortion laws. Since then NOW
has been fighting for full reproductive rights
for all women, including poor women and young women. NOW won a pivotal
U.S. Supreme Court victory in the 1994 case NOW
v. Scheidler. The ruling affirmed NOW's right to use federal racketeering
laws against anti-abortion extremists who organize campaigns of fear, force
and violence to deny women their right to abortion. In April 1998, a federal
jury returned a unanimous verdict confirming NOW's charges that Joe
Scheidler, Operation Rescue and other
defendants are racketeers. NOW's litigation and lobbying are part of Project
Stand Up for Women, which has trained thousands of abortion rights
supporters to serve as clinic defenders. Find several documents related
to this case at http://www.now.org/issues/abortion/scheidlr.html.
NOW's advocacy efforts to ensure access to abortion for all women include
lobbying against restrictions on Medicaid funding, parental involvement,
elimination of abortion from federal government and military health insurance
coverage and abortion procedure bans.
Likewise, NOW's commitment to full reproductive rights led to work against
child exclusion measures in the 1996 federal welfare repeal and coerced
sterilization.
NOW's web site includes more information about this work. See http://www.now.org/issues/abortion/ .
Lesbian
Rights
In 1971 NOW became the first major national women's organization to
support lesbian rights. It has been one of
the organization's priority issues since 1975 and was the theme of national
conferences in 1984 and 1988. A national summit on this issue is planned
for the coming year. Through the years, NOW activists have challenged anti-lesbian
and gay laws and ballot initiatives in many states. Over 15 years ago,
NOW gave strong support to a landmark 1979 case, Belmont v. Belmont,
that defined lesbian partners as a nurturing family and awarded a lesbian
mother custody of her two children. The plaintiff in that case, Rosemary
Dempsey, served as NOW's Action Vice-President from 1989 to 1997.
The section of the web site with details on NOW's lesbian rights work
is http://www.now.org/issues/lgbi/index.html .
NOW, Inc., was established on June 30, 1966 in Washington,
D.C., by women attending the Third National Conference of the Commission
on the Status of Women. Set up in 1961, the Commission reported in 1963
that despite having won the right to vote, women in the United States still
were discriminated against in virtually every aspect of life. Among NOW's
28 founders was its first president, Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine
Mystique (1963).
-
See also Toni Carabillo's Feminist
Chronicles 1953-1993, which chronicles the recent history of feminism
and of NOW, and includes many NOW documents.
