10
A New women's Movement

In October 1966, three years to the month after the President's Commission on the Status of Women presented its report to John Kennedy, the first avowedly feminist organization to emerge since suffrage held its inaugural conference. With the appearance of the National Organization for Women, women leaders outside of government, building upon the president's Commission's report, took over the creation of the policy agenda for women from those in government who had served as "midwives of the Women's Movement."^[1] The new movement adopted the objectives of the activists who had laid the groundwork, but it went beyond their work in a signal way. The women's movement of the 1960s forged a new, coherent, feminist philosophy that would enable women finally to make a claim for complete equality both in and outside the home.

The Creation of the National Organization for Women

Martha Griffiths was not alone in her indignation at the behavior of the EEOC. Although initially disturbed by the threat to protective labor laws Title VII represented, by 1966 virtually every women's organization protested the EEOC's cavalier attitude toward sex discrimination. By June, a "proto-feminist" nucleus in Washington (Peterson, Catherine East, Mary Eastwood, and EEOC commissioner Richard Graham) had come to believe that the EEOC would not improve unless outside pressure from organized women served to heighten the commissioners' interest in enforcing the sex provision of Title VII. This cadre had begun to work toward the formation of a new outside

group devoted exclusively to sex discrimination, starting with the traditional women's associations of the Women's Bureau coalition.^[2] These groups were reluctant, however, to establish an activist group that would fight exclusively for women's rights;^[3] as council member Viola Hymes had earlier explained, women's organizations hesitated to take the lead in the fight "for fear it would be interpreted that they were favoring women instead of looking upon everyone as having equal opportunity."^[4]

But other, less familiar, avenues were being explored. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminist Mystique, who had begun work on a book concerning the new law on sex discrimination, was now in close touch with Catherine East, Sonia Pressman, Pauli Murray, and Martha Griffiths—part of what Friedan later described as the "feminist underground" in Washington. Pressman, an attorney at the EEOC, told Friedan that only she could start a national organization to fight for women as the civil rights movement had for blacks. Richard Graham, too, urged Friedan on, telling her that he had asked the mainstream women's associations, such as the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women, to develop such an organization, but they had declined. Friedan nevertheless delayed. Although East and Eastwood supplied her with lists of women likely to be sympathetic, Friedan suggested that the state commissions on the status of women take the lead. East protested that women on the state commissions were too dependent on the state governors and had too little power of their own. Over Mary Keyserling's objections, East invited Friedan to attend the Washington gathering of the state commissions in June.^[5]

Friedan took the opportunity the conference provided to probe the sentiments of the state commission members. Shortly before the meeting Friedan, to her dismay, had learned through her Washington friends that Lyndon Johnson did not intend to reappoint Richard Graham to the EEOC after his initial term expired in July. (Ironically, Graham himself had no sense that he was being "dismissed" from the commission, although he was aware that Roosevelt, Holcomb and Edelsberg preferred that he not be reappointed. Graham's term on the EEOC had ended; he

welcomed the White House offer of the post of director of the National Teacher Corps as a chance to work effectively for civil rights free of the energy-draining backbiting of the EEOC. He left the EEOC unaware of the controversy swirling around his departure.)^[6] Mindful of East's words, Friedan invited a group of interested women participating in the state commission conference to come to her hotel room and discuss what could be done about Graham's reappointment and about the recent EEOC ruling regarding sex-segregated advertising. The women who caucused in Friedan's room agreed that a civil rights organization for women was not necessary but proposed that a resolution be offered at the conference supporting Graham and insisting on better enforcement efforts by the EEOC. Kathryn Clarenbach, chairman of the Wisconsin commission on women and known for her close working relationship with the CACSW, volunteered to speak to Peterson, Keyserling, and Hickey about the proposal.^[7]

Administration officials had anticipated some expression of irritation at the conference. Esther Peterson confided to John Macy that "95 percent" of the delegates believed that the EEOC was lax about enforcing the sex provision of Title VII. Moreover, she said, a grapevine made up of "women active in women's groups, unions, civil rights groups and political parties" was communicating dissatisfaction because Lyndon Johnson's campaign to bring more women into government had lapsed.^[8]

But despite Peterson's obvious sympathy with the grievances, the action she and the other conference hosts took to address them brought the annoyance to a head. When Clarenbach conferred with Hickey, Keyserling, and Peterson about offering resolutions on the subject, all three told her it could not be done because the conference participants were not official delegates and because conference organizers did not want resolutions critical of the administration emerging from a federally supported gathering. Angered by the ruling, Clarenbach reported back to Friedan and the others. Having had their request for action denied, the fifteen women who had met in Friedan's room the night before took over two tables at the conference luncheon. Within sight of the conference directors, Friedan, Clarenbach, and their colleagues planned an inaugural meeting

for a new women's association. Friedan scribbled the name on a paper napkin: NOW—the National Organization for Women.^[9]

In addition, disregarding the official decree, eighty representatives in the Title VII workshop voted for a resolution asking Lyndon Johnson to reappoint Richard Graham. Olya Margolin of the National Council of Jewish Women reported to AFLCIO lobbyist Andrew Biemiller that "the most unfortunate part of these proceedings" was that some labor women joined conference participants ("equal-righters") in an attack on protective labor legislation, which "created the impression that labor is either divided or no longer concerned about these labor standards." Mary Keyserling ignored the disputes and the ire of conference participants. She reported to Secretary Wirtz that the conference had been "very successful," mentioning no disagreement of any kind.^[10]

Keyserling tried to pretend that nothing had happened, but the June conference constituted a crucial point in the history of women in the 1960s. Until then, either influential individuals or official government bodies had created a federal agenda for women and moved with caution and deference to traditional views about women, carefully couching requests for specific improvements in the language of liberal ideals and obeisance to women's "natural" roles as wife and mother. The formation of NOW indicated that many women were no longer satisfied working within the constraints imposed by being official members of governments. From that time forward, the federal government would no longer control or restrain the agenda of the women's movement; NOW could take action, as official groups could not, without executive sanction. At the conclusion of the June conference, NOW officers sent telegrams to Lyndon Johnson asking him to reappoint Richard Graham to the commission and requesting the EEOC to revise its ruling on sex-segregated want ads.^[11]

The target of NOW's original animus, the EEOC, was in extremis as the new group got underway. The Chicago Tribune alleged that Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., when he resigned in May 1966, had been "driven" from the commission over the issue of enforcing the sex provision of the civil rights law. In June commissioner Aileen Hernandez complained to the White House

about the slowness in naming commission replacements and about the high staff turnover. Johnson did not fill Graham's post promptly; thus, in July the commission, with only three members, was at 60 percent of its total strength. The White House, concerned about the controversy over the commission and its personnel, decided to take no note of the July anniversary of the enactment of the civil rights statute.^[12]

The situation continued to decline. In August the EEOC issued a new ruling backing away from a position in support of protective labor laws, saying that it would not make decisions in cases of alleged conflict but would wait for court interpretations. In doing so, the commission now drew the wrath of labor women as well as ERA advocates. In September Hernandez sent a memorandum to the commission and its staff expressing her dismay at the long time lag in responding to complaints and at the neglect of sex discrimination. This grievance had no effect, however, and in October Hernandez submitted her resignation in disgust, effective November 10. Stephen Shulman, whom Johnson appointed to head the commission in September, was not in an enviable position. The National Organization for Women intended to make sure he took his new job seriously.^[13]

An Outside Pressure Group

The new women's rights organization convened its inaugural conference in October 1966, the first formal expression of the new wave of feminism. At the meeting, the membership elected Friedan president and Clarenbach, in absentia, chairman of the board; former EEOC commissioners Aileen Hernandez and Richard Graham both became vice-presidents. The composition of the board of directors disclosed NOW's origins in the discontent of elite women and their male supporters. The board included seven university professors or administrators, five state or national labor union officials, four federal or local government officials, four business executives, four members with some affiliation to a state commission on women, one physician, and three members of religious orders. Thanks to the media experience of the professionals in the organization, the October conference elicited a surprising

amount of press attention, which greatly enhanced NOW's impact from its birth.^[14]

Although NOW appeared because its founders grew impatient with the timid posture of ICSW and CACSW officials in relation to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the formation of NOW did not imply a renunciation of the President's Commission on the Status of Women or of the ongoing groups created at the commission's request to implement its recommendations. Rather, the originators of the new organization were motivated by an understanding of the intrinsic limitations of federal bodies. In the invitation to join the new organization, the creators paid respects to the president's commission, the governors' commissions, the CACSW, and the ICSW as part of the "basis" laid "for realizing the democratic goal of full participation and equal partnership for all citizens." And in the statement of purpose, adopted at the October meeting, they stated: "The excellent reports of the President's Commission on the Status of Women and of the State Commissions have not been fully implemented. . . . They have no power to enforce their recommendations. . . . The reports of these Commissions have, however, created a basis upon which it is now possible to build." The architects of NOW established the organization in order to commence "a civil rights movement for women" that would confront law and custom "to win for women the final right to be fully free and equal human beings."^[15] Although upset by the decision of Peterson, Keyserling, and Hickey not to permit a resolution at the conference, NOW's founders held no grudge against the administration officials concerned with women. Friedan later referred to Esther Peterson and Eleanor Roosevelt as the "two towering figures of recent history," who had first brought together many of the new organizations' founders in the President's Commission on the Status of Women.^[16]

Likewise, Peterson bore no ill will toward the organization that was preparing to wrest control of women's policy from the administration groups. In a memorandum to Civil Service Commission chairman John Macy, she described the membership list of the new organization as "very distinguished," although she found its positions "rather militant." Their governing principle, she wrote, was that sex and race discrimination were inter-

twined (many had been active in the civil rights movement) and that the EEOC had proved consistently inadequate in righting these injustices. Moreover, the particular incidents leading to the group's formation were irrelevant; it was "inevitable" that some such organization would appear. "The society," Peterson said, "simply is not going to take women and their needs seriously until women take themselves and their needs seriously enough to fight for them. . . . An organization is needed to focus the underlying resentment and frustration into constructive channels. If NOW does not succeed, some other organization will take its place."^[17]

Although Peterson characterized NOW's positions as "militant," in its first months NOW's program closely paralleled the program of the president's commission. In subsequent years NOW continued to owe to the president's commission its penchant for seeking federal action to ameliorate women's problems, its emphasis on employment issues, and its attractiveness for middle-class women who had first been sensitized to women's issues by the reports of the national and state commissions. As "targets for action" in the first year, NOW highlighted equal employment opportunity and the actions the federal government could take toward that end, including amendment of Executive Order 11246, which prohibited federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race. It also focused on full deductability of childcare expenses, greater enforcement powers for the EEOC, the appointment of the full number of commissioners, revision of the regulations concerning advertising, and equal attention to the needs of minority women in federal poverty programs. The agenda was very broad and included economic rights for homemakers, training programs for mothers reentering the labor force, projects to address discrimination in educational institutions, prohibition of distinctions based on sex in jury service, and equal protection for women under the Constitution. The people who founded NOW were friends or colleagues of members of the presidential commission, or members themselves, and they agreed generally with the commission on many of the most pressing problems and their solutions.^[18]

As with the president's commission, NOW's founders did not

raise questions concerning sexual freedom. In 1966 NOW did not mention homosexuality, and a statement that women should control their own reproduction was excised from the statement of purpose as being "too controversial." NOW's creators assumed that women would continue to live in traditional families, and they did not envision or endorse a radical restructuring of most institutions.^[19]

Similarly, in its founding year NOW approved the presidential commission's proposal regarding constitutional equality. Upon hearing of NOW's formation, the National Woman's party, hoping for an ally, wrote immediately asking for the organization's statement in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. Mary Eastwood, who had been technical secretary of the PCSW Committee on Civil and Political Rights, which had formulated the commission's stance, wrote on NOW's behalf to the NWP that the ERA amendment was superfluous because the Constitution, properly interpreted, would guarantee equality without disturbing state labor laws.^[20]

But if NOW considered the PCSW a model in many ways, it also differed from the governmental bodies that preceded it in two significant respects. First, unlike the presidential commission, NOW was independent of traditional political structures and owed no allegiance to a party or politician. Rather than seeking to praise members of the administration, NOW warned that "official pronouncements of the advance in the status of women hide not only the reality of [a] dangerous decline, but the fact that nothing is being done to stop it." NOW pledged to prevent the election of any public official "who betrays or ignores the principle of full equality between the sexes" by mobilizing the votes of feminist men and women. Since membership in NOW did not depend on the good favor of president or governor, NOW's freedom of action had few limits. It could afford to be, to use Peterson's term, "militant."^[21]

Second, and more important, NOW declined to share the presidential commission's view that sex roles were immutable. In its statement of purpose, the organization's founders declared: "We reject the current assumptions that a man must carry the sole burden of supporting himself, his wife and family . . . or that marriage, home and family are primarily woman's world and

responsibility—hers, to dominate—his to support. We believe that a true partnership between the sexes demands a different concept of marriage, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities of home and children and of the economic burdens of their support."^[22]

This renunciation of biological destiny ultimately permitted NOW to demand a kind of equality for women that neither the president's commission nor any other women's group preceding NOW could have claimed. For the first time, women seeking equal rights for women could offer a coherent and logical program, founded on an internally consistent philosophy. Women could insist on equal treatment in the workplace because fathers, too, had the responsibility to take care of children. With this theoretical leap of great consequence, the feminists in NOW anticipated, rather than reflected, the prevailing viewpoint.

Still, despite its assertion of independence, in its initial overtures to federal officials NOW assumed a very respectful attitude. Soon after the organizing conference, letters went out to the president, the attorney general, the chairman of the Civil Service Commission, and the EEOC commissioners, courteously introducing the organization.^[23] Emphasizing NOW's interest in the administration of Title VII, the officers told the president: "Our greatest concern today is that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission should be able and willing to fulfill its legal mandate to enforce the prohibitions against discrimination in employment based upon sex." But NOW also asserted the need for the appointment of women to government posts, affirmative action programs for women, and the inclusion of women in legislation and executive orders respecting racial discrimination. The officers expressed to the president their gratitude for his "past efforts."^[24]

Administration officials recognized immediately the significance of a new organization dedicated to fighting for women's rights. In November, Civil Service Commission chief John Macy and three EEOC commissioners met with NOW officials to discuss the points NOW raised in its letter. EEOC chair Stephen Shulman indicated to correspondents that he was aware of NOW's position on the matters under discussion.^[25] The Department of Labor, also the recipient of a letter from NOW, con-

gratulated the officers on NOW's objectives, which the secretary said the ICSW shared. Willard Wirtz wrote: "It is my hope that many of the advances you point to as needed can be effected."^[26] Esther Peterson promised her support: "Your organization will be very useful at this moment and I am sure you know I am following it with great interest and will be helpful in any way I can."^[27]

The White House reacted more guardedly. The letter to the president went to Peterson with a request that she handle it, and Shulman counseled the president not to meet with NOW's officers, advising him that the EEOC commissioners had already done so. He suggested that the president wait a year to see "whether or not they have achieved a status worthy of Presidential attention."^[28]

NOW did not anticipate immediate results from the president. The group's founders recognized that the elimination of entrenched sex discrimination required a long-term educational and activist effort. "Our first order of business," Betty Friedan explained, "was to make clear to Washington, to employers, to unions and to the nation that someone was watching, someone cared about ending sex discrimination." The first goal of the organization was publicity. Many NOW actions, such as picketing newspapers and integrating men's bars, had as their rationale simply the desire for media attention to make their presence known. This goal was easily achieved: from the moment of its birth, Washington politicians knew NOW was there.^[29]

Presidential acknowledgment came quickly, in fact. In March 1967 an aide advised the organization's officers that the president found their recommendations "most welcome" and that in keeping with one of their proposals he was willing to amend the executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in federal employment and contractors to include sex discrimination.^[30]

Johnson's letter reflected the culmination of a series of developments. The President had issued EO 11246, which required affirmative action programs to ensure equal opportunity for all races, in September 1965. By that time, Congress had already passed the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited sex discrimination in employment, and Esther Peterson had warned that the omis-

sion of sex in the executive order "might prove embarrassing to the President." Furthermore, she argued, if left out then, it would create serious problems with women's organizations; it would have to be added eventually. Secretary Wirtz had disagreed. He cautioned Peterson that it was not the "moment in history" to press the point and that for her to do so would be "counter-productive."^[31] Peterson, outranked by Wirtz, had no choice but to desist, but the following spring the National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs wrote to the White House to ask that sex discrimination be included in the executive order. In February 1967 the CACSW too asked for the addition of sex to EO 11246, and in March these organizations were joined by the Federal Women's Award Study Group, constituting the thirty-six winners since 1960, whom Johnson had also asked for recommendations. As support for the change grew, Peterson turned out to be right; Johnson asked the ICSW to recommend the form of the new executive order. With relatively little discussion, the ICSW advised the president simply to amend the original order to add the word sex wherever the phrase "race, creed, color or national origin" appeared. This he did in October 1967. The dispute over whether sex discrimination should be treated like racial bias had ended. Because the executive order mandated positive action against discrimination on the part of the government, Civil Service Commission chief John Macy instituted the Federal Women's Program, which was designed to upgrade efforts to improve women's position in the civil service.^[32] NOW president Betty Friedan claimed credit for the new amendment. The discussion of sex discrimination, Friedan declared, was "out in the clear light of day."^[33]

The cordial relationship between the new organization and the federal bodies concerned with women's status quickly became problematical with the continued equivocation of the EEOC on protective labor legislation. Initially, NOW's founders themselves had no unified position. Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood had come to the conclusion, argued in their landmark article, "Jane Crow and the Law," in the December 1965 issue of the George Washington Law Review, that laws for women alone had "waning utility." Kathryn Clarenbach, in contrast,

continued to support the position espoused by Mary Keyserling and the Women's Bureau coalition that the EEOC should not overrule protective labor laws. But when a California woman filed a complaint with the EEOC against a firm that refused to promote her because of the state's maximum hours laws, and the commission declined to rule, NOW offered the woman its assistance in getting the California law nullified. Peterson suggested that the Department of Labor take a public position in favor of the plaintiff, as NOW requested; Keyserling, backed by the National Consumers League and the other members of the Women's Bureau coalition, urged the secretary not to intervene. Secretary Wirtz sided once again with Keyserling.^[34]

But the administration position on the issue of protective labor legislation could no longer be addressed and decided only "in house." NOW's membership grew rapidly—one year after its creation it counted twelve hundred members, with chapters in several states—but its influence continuously outstripped its actual numbers. Access to media and legal services made NOW a force to be reckoned with from the beginning. Thus, in 1967 the EEOC felt enough pressure that it held hearings on several issues pertinent to the women's cause, including protective labor legislation, age discrimination against airline stewardesses, who also customarily lost their jobs on marriage, help-wanted ads, and pension inequality.^[35]

NOW testified at the EEOC hearings against protective labor legislation, in company with Representative Martha Griffiths and representatives of the BPW and the United Automobile Workers, and together they succeeded in bringing about a change unwelcome to die-hard advocates of differential treatment for women. Katherine Ellickson spoke for the National Consumers League asking, along with some state labor officials, that the EEOC safeguard laws for women. But in February 1968, the commission overturned its 1966 decision to leave the judgment entirely to the courts or to states for reconciliation, and it announced it would consider the arguments on a case-by-case basis.^[36] Labor unions objected again; the Amalgamated Clothing Workers called this application of Title VII "a modern version of the effort years ago to use the so-called Equal Rights Amendment . . . to deprive women workers of the protection of

this legislation."^[37] Yet as more and more groups, from NOW to state commissions to labor unions, began to endorse the position that state labor laws applying only to women did more harm than good, the advocates of special treatment became increasingly isolated, outside the mainstream.

Despite the continuation of this historic controversy among seekers of women's rights, more often than not all the groups proved to be allied on the same side of most issues, continuing in the path of the president's commission by refusing to let the differences occupy center stage. Four members of the CACSW, including Richard Lester who had been vice-chair of the presidential commission, signed NOW's petition to the EEOC to revise the ruling on job advertisements; the ICSW submitted a memorandum in support, as well as one contending that the airline industry's practice of firing stewardesses who married or who had reached the age of thirty-two constituted sex discrimination, a position NOW emphatically shared. The EEOC finally ruled in favor of the stewardesses in June 1968.^[38]

Forcing a change in the want ads position proved more difficult. In December 1967 the EEOC became the target of the first feminist demonstration in five decades when NOW set up picket lines in front of EEOC offices in five cities. Still, the commission remained obdurate. In February, Marguerite Rawalt, a member of the President's Commission on the Status of Women and the Citizens' Advisory Council on the Status of Women, and now general counsel for the National Organization for Women, filed a mandamus suit in U.S. district court against the commission; the court agreed to dismiss the case only after the commission promised to improve its performance on behalf of women. Finally, in August, the EEOC promulgated the sought-after regulation that barred employers from advertising in sex-segregated newspaper columns.^[39] Fortas's prediction not withstanding, the Supreme Court upheld the regulation in a 1973 decision, ruling that the First Amendment does not extend fully to commercial speech.

The issues raised by the EEOC's enforcement of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act dominated NOW's earliest days but did not consume them entirely. Once a clear position on protective labor legislation had been arrived at within the organiza-

tion, NOW's endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment followed quickly. The effort to find a good court case to test the Fourteenth Amendment strategy had come to nothing, done in partly by the decisions on protective labor laws and partly by disinterest. Many who had been persuaded by the argument that women were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment now reconsidered. Although the National Woman's party had been bitterly disappointed by NOW's initial reluctance, an NWP member organized the D.C. branch of the new group and soon won the chapter's approval of the amendment. At the 1967 national conference, NOW decided to back the ERA by a vote of eighty-two to three, with twelve abstentions. The vote cost NOW the clerical services provided by NOW members who were affiliated with the Women's Division of the UAW, which at the time still opposed the ERA (the union reversed its stand two years later). Following the vote, NOW turned immediately to the NWP. One member wrote to ask Alice Paul for a list of congressional supporters and expressed her thanks "for your patient years of striving while most of the nation's women were asleep." Carl Hayden and Emanuel Celler, unimpressed by the new movement, continued to stymie congressional action. Feminists did not succeed in freeing the ERA from the House Judiciary Committee until 1970.^[40]

Despite its conversion to the amendment, NOW's insistence on a broad program of women's rights distinguished its method of operation from the one-issue approach of the National Women's party. Alice Paul's pleasure with NOW's advocacy of the ERA was therefore restrained. She took particular exception to NOW's 1967 endorsement of the movement to repeal abortion laws in recognition of women's right to control their own bodies.^[41] Paul contended that taking positions on such issues as abortion "gets the men all mixed up."^[42] NOW, interested in achieving equality and autonomy for women in every area of American life, as well as in drawing large numbers of women and men into the movement, saw no purpose to narrowing its focus. Still, it considered the ERA to be of major importance.

The growing interest in the Equal Rights Amendment, as evidenced by the support of NOW and a renewed commitment by the EPW and the General Federation of Women's Clubs, did

not sway the CACSW. Member Marguerite Rawalt, the one PCSW member in favor of the ERA, asked that the council reconsider its position, but it declined. Catherine East told Esther Peterson that the delay in the Supreme Court case the president's commission had recommended and the negative attitude of the courts with respect to decisions under Title VII accounted for at least part of the new interest in the amendment. Rather than champion the ERA, Peterson urged the Justice Department to find a good test case. The administration maintained this position to the end, but it was soon to be in the minority on the issue.^[43]

The 1968 presidential campaign took place in the midst of turmoil over racism, urban riots, the war in Vietnam, and paralyzing student demonstrations. The assassinations that year of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April and Robert Kennedy in June, the "Poor People's Campaign" in Washington in the spring, and the violent clashes between peace marchers and the police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago all highlighted and focused the impulse toward social reform. The just-emerging women's movement was a small part of that tableau, but even so, women's issues were achieving a new salience.

In the 1968 campaign, both NOW and the National Woman's party urged all the candidates to speak on behalf of the ERA, and most did. During the New Hampshire primary Eugene McCarthy, the amendment's chief sponsor and challenger of Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic party's nomination, highlighted his support for the amendment in his campaign literature and in a special mailing to the New Hampshire Federation of Women's Clubs. Hubert Humphrey, calling the ERA a "vital issue," reminded amendment advocates of his allegiance while in the Senate. American party candidate George Wallace favored the ERA, as many conservatives always had, and held up his wife, Lurleen, as one who contributed to women's advancement in her role as governor of Alabama. Richard Nixon again affirmed his long-standing approval. Senator Robert Kennedy was less enthusiastic; he promised support only if other measures proved inadequate. Unlike the National Woman's party, however, the National Organization for Women asked the candidates to express themselves as well on a whole variety of wom-

en's issues.^[44] For the first time in four decades, a genuine national women's movement was bringing a wide array of issues to the attention of a national audience.

A chain of events accounted for the appearance of the first new feminist organization of the 1960s. The civil rights movement served as the vanguard, its philosophy, tactics, and successes priming the political and social environment and providing models for action. The changing configuration of women's work lives and their now-established place in the workforce produced a disjuncture between women's lives as they were living them and the social setting that offered few supports, either ideological or material. the formation of the President's Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, in recognition of this disjuncture, had resulted in the creation of a national network of knowledgeable women concerned about their status. In 1964, the proponents of the ERA accomplished a legislative coup with the enactment of a federal law that barred sex discrimination in employment. The statute had problematical implications for the Women's Bureau coalition, but the derision exhibited by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing the law, angered the national network of women newly sensitized to inequities confronting women. Indeed, the commission's behavior spurred the women into establishing a new association committed to fighting for women's rights. Inaugurated by women affiliated with the president's commission and the resulting state commissions, the National Organization for Women reflected both the commission's successes in bringing the status of women to the fore and their limitations in taking effective action to improve it. NOW's creation bespoke as well the short reach of the narrowly focused, ingrown movement for the Equal Rights Amendment and expressed the frustration of politically sensitive women relegated to token appointments.

After the formation of NOW, federal policy makers had to start responding to demands sustained by a high degree of public awareness rather than initiating moderate actions in the relative calm of general disinterest. The recommendations of the president's commission and the citizens' advisory council,

the existence of the state commissions on women, the efforts of mainstream women's organizations, the activity of the National Woman's party, the inclusion in Title VII of sex as a prohibited basis for employment discrimination, the work of women representatives to Congress and of women within the executive branch, and NOW's overt feminist agenda became intermingled as influences on the development of federal policy, with synergistic effect. Unquestionably, by the end of Lyndon Johnson's term the federal government faced demands and expectations concerning women undreamt of at the time of John Kennedy's inauguration.

Moreover, yet another strain of active feminism emerged at the end of the decade, with the appearance of women's groups on the community level growing out of the antiwar struggle and the movement for social justice. In the fall of 1967 local women's liberation groups began to appear in several cities, as radical women recognized the futility of reform within New Left civil rights and community action organizations. Younger than the women who had formed NOW and committed to local, rather than national, activity, these small, autonomous groups developed a technique of uncovering the political nature of the oppression of women through candid discussion of women's personal lives.^[45]

"Consciousness raising" became the initiation rite of the women's movement; locally focused groups went from there to organizing day-care centers, rape crisis committees, women's health collectives, and a plethora of movement publications.^[46] By the mid seventies, women involved in these groups had begun to seek state and federal support for local programs, forming coalitions with staid feminist organizations such as NOW. And NOW, which had started life as a top-heavy lobbying group, itself encouraged the emergence of local chapters. The branches of the women's movement, in their essential parts, had merged. With forty thousand members in 1974, NOW offered a highly visible and respectable link to a national movement, but the diversity of smaller groups provided comfortable alternatives for almost any woman to join.^[47]

The women's movement ultimately forced federal policy makers to consider action to ameliorate the disadvantages

women suffered in virtually every part of their lives. But the federal initiatives taken before the movement's rebirth played a crucial role in forming that movement; they broke a critical stalemate among women's organizations, set much of the early agenda, legitimated the idea of women fighting for their rights, provided legislative tools, and helped to establish a network of women nationwide who could be easily mobilized for the cause of women.^[48]