The Women of NOW
How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Publisher Description
"A clear blueprint for change . . . A must-read." —Clara Bingham, The Guardian
The history of NOW—its organization, trials, and revolutionary mission—told through the work of three members.
In the summer of 1966, crammed into a D.C. hotel suite, twenty-eight women devised a revolutionary plan. Betty Friedan, the well-known author of The Feminine Mystique, and Pauli Murray, a lawyer at the front lines of the civil rights movement, had called this renegade meeting from attendees at the annual conference of state women’s commissions. Fed up with waiting for government action and trying to work with a broken system, they laid out a vision for an organization to unite all women and fight for their rights. Alternately skeptical and energized, they debated the idea late into the night. In less than twenty-four hours, the National Organization for Women was born.
In The Women of NOW, the historian Katherine Turk chronicles the growth and enduring influence of this foundational group through three lesser-known members who became leaders: Aileen Hernandez, a federal official of Jamaican American heritage; Mary Jean Collins, a working-class union organizer and Chicago Catholic; and Patricia Hill Burnett, a Michigan Republican, artist, and former beauty queen. From its bold inception through the tumultuous training ground of the 1970s, NOW’s feminism flooded the nation, permanently shifted American culture and politics, and clashed with conservative forces, presaging our fractured national landscape. These women built an organization that was radical in its time but flexible and expansive enough to become a mainstream fixture. This is the story of how they built it—and built it to last.
Includes 16 pages of black-and-white images
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This smart, clear-eyed history of the National Organization for Women's most tumultuous years spotlights three women who were "loyal yet critical" members of the advocacy group. According to University of North Carolina historian Turk (Equality on Trial), these women were instrumental in stretching the organization's "core belief—a centrally organized feminism for all women and their male supporters—in different directions as far as they could." Aileen Hernandez, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, who worked as a union organizer before joining the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1965, saw feminism at the heart of every social justice movement. Serving as NOW's second president, she pushed the organization to address all problems women faced—including racism, classism, and homophobia—and not just gender-specific ones. Former beauty queen Patricia Hill Burnett, a wealthy white Republican, was a Michigan housewife and mother of four who envisioned NOW in the vanguard of an international feminist movement. As a member of the national board through 1975, she was tasked with setting up NOW chapters around the world. Meanwhile, Mary Jean Collins, who was raised Catholic in a lower-class white Wisconsin community, focused on securing male allies for NOW and was appointed the organization's Midwest regional director in 1970. Detailing how failed initiatives, such as the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, led to internal divisions among NOW's leadership and members, Turk expertly unpacks a complex institutional legacy. The result is a timely addition to the history of "second wave" feminism that illuminates today's debates about women's rights.