Women's History Month

 Two years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made sex discrimination in the workplace illegal, American women were discovering a frustrating truth:

Having a law on the books and having that law enforced are two completely different things.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the federal agency created specifically to investigate and act on discrimination complaints — was systematically ignoring the thousands of sex discrimination cases being filed by working women across the country. The EEOC treated gender discrimination as a footnote. A nuisance. Something to be quietly set aside while the real work of civil rights proceeded without them.

The women watching this happen decided that if the government wouldn't act, they would build something that would.

On June 30, 1966, at a women's conference in Washington D.C., 28 women and men came together to found the National Organization for Women. Among them was Betty Friedan — whose 1963 book The Feminine Mystique had already ignited a national conversation about women's equality — and Pauli Murray, a towering Black civil rights attorney and activist who co-wrote NOW's founding statement with Friedan, and whose brilliance and moral clarity shaped the organization's foundational identity from its very first words.

The name they chose was deliberate. Not the National Organization for Women — women waiting passively to be helped. The National Organization of Women — women acting, organizing, and leading on their own terms.

Their founding statement was unambiguous: NOW would take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof, in truly equal partnership with men.

Not eventually. Not gradually. Now.

The organization grew rapidly — building the kind of grassroots infrastructure that turns conviction into legislation, and legislation into lived reality. NOW fought for reproductive rights, equal employment, educational opportunity, and an end to discrimination in every corner of American life. It lobbied for the Equal Rights Amendment. It took employers to court. It organized, marched, and refused — in the great tradition of the women who came before them — to be told to wait.

More than 500,000 members and activists later, NOW remains one of the largest and most influential feminist organizations in American history — still fighting, more than 58 years after that June day in Washington, for the same fundamental principle its founders wrote into existence in 1966:

That women's rights are not a special interest.

They are a human one.