1. Geoffrey Parsons, "Royal Commission," Punch , 24 August 1955, quoted in Harold Seidman, Politics, Position, and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 23.

2. Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975).

3. Wolanin in fact underestimated the impact of commissions because he looked at the responses only to recommendations made in final reports and not to those made during the life of the body (Thomas R. Wolanin, Presidential Advisory Commissions [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975], chap. 7).

4. Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation (New York: McKay, 1975), chap. 2.

5. Ibid., chap. 7.

6. Ibid.

7. Evans goes on: "The existence of the commission and in subsequent years of state commissions on the status of women provided a rallying cry for professional women. Such commissions constituted a tacit admission that there was indeed a 'problem' regarding women's position in American society, that the democratic vision of equal opportunity had somehow left them out. Furthermore, they furnished a platform from which inequities could be publicized and the need for women's rights put forth. The President's Commission's report . . . was moderate in tone. Yet despite obeisance to the primacy of women's roles within the family, it catalogued in great detail the inequities in the lives of women, the discrimination women faced in employment, and the need for proper child-care centers" (Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left [New York: Knopf, 1979], (16-17).

8. Frances Kolb, "The National Organization for Women: The First Ten Years," 16, (unpublished manuscript).

9. Freeman, Politics of Women's Liberation, 6, 151.

10. James Q. Wilson, Political Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 344.

11. Ethel Klein, Gender Politics: From Consciousness to Mass Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 39, 55, 73.

12. New York Times, 14 December 1967.