National Organization for Women

The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966 at a conference of the State Commissions on the Status of Women, with Betty Friedan as its first president. NOW was built on the conviction that women's equality was not merely desirable but constitutionally required — and that achieving it demanded organized, assertive political action rather than polite lobbying. The organization pushed simultaneously on multiple fronts: ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion access, equal pay, workplace discrimination, and legal equality in marriage and family law. NOW's ERA campaign was its most publicly visible project. After Congress passed the ERA in 1972, NOW organized the ratification push state by state. The campaign came agonizingly close — 35 of the required 38 states ratified — before Phyllis Schlafly's Stop ERA campaign successfully blocked it. The ERA's defeat in 1982 was, in significant part, the Religious Right's first major legislative victory at the mass-mobilization level. The Religious Right's relationship to NOW was not simply oppositional — it was constitutive. Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America in 1979 explicitly naming NOW as the enemy: her organization existed to provide Christian women an alternative to NOW's feminism and to counter NOW's political influence. Jerry Falwell Sr. repeatedly named NOW as representative of the 'secular humanist' agenda he had founded the Moral Majority to defeat. Phyllis Schlafly's entire post-1972 career was structured as a direct counter to NOW's agenda. This dynamic — where the Religious Right defined its mission partly by naming NOW as a threat — gave NOW an outsized influence on the movement's development. Every NOW campaign for abortion rights, LGBTQ equality, or pay equity produced a corresponding Religious Right counter-campaign. NOW's persistence as an active organization meant the Religious Right always had a named institutional enemy to rally against, which proved organizationally useful for fundraising and voter mobilization for decades.

Documented themes

• Opposition / Resistance
• Gender & Patriarchy

Connections from National Organization for Women

• influenced → ERA Defeated (1982) — NOW was the primary organizational force behind the ERA ratification campaign from 1972 through its defeat in 1982. NOW organized state-by-state ratification efforts, lobbied legislators, staged demonstrations, and provided the institutional infrastructure for the pro-ERA coalition. The ERA's defeat in 1982 — the 'era-defeat' event — was the direct outcome of a decade-long contest between NOW's ratification campaign and Phyllis Schlafly's Stop ERA counter-campaign.

Connections to National Organization for Women

• Concerned Women for America opposed (1979) — Beverly LaHaye founded Concerned Women for America in 1979 with an explicit stated purpose: to provide Christian women an alternative to NOW. LaHaye named NOW directly in CWA's founding communications, framing her organization as the answer to what she called NOW's radical feminist agenda. CWA's policy positions — against the ERA, against abortion rights, against LGBTQ equality — were constructed point-by-point in opposition to NOW's platform.
• Betty Friedan founded (1966) — Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966 at a conference of the State Commissions on the Status of Women, becoming its first president. NOW was the direct institutional expression of the political vision she had articulated in The Feminine Mystique (1963): women were full human beings entitled to equal participation in public life, and achieving that equality required organized, assertive political action. Friedan led NOW through its foundational years, establishing it as the primary vehicle for second-wave feminist advocacy on the ERA, reproductive rights, equal pay, and workplace discrimination.
• Phyllis Schlafly opposed (1972) — Schlafly's Stop ERA campaign was an institutional counter to NOW's ERA ratification campaign. Where NOW organized state-by-state for ratification, Schlafly organized state-by-state against it. Her Eagle Forum was built specifically to match and defeat NOW's political infrastructure. Schlafly named NOW repeatedly in her writing and speaking as the embodiment of radical feminism she was fighting to defeat.

Sources

• Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics — Marjorie Spruill (2017)